The following is a lightly edited version of remarks given at the Grounded Solutions Network conference on May 29, for a panel on “The Power of Storytelling: Delivering an Effective Message in the Age of Disinformation.”
To prepare for this panel, I turned back to Shelterforce’s coverage of a study conducted for the Housing Justice Narrative Initiative in 2019 that directly tested how different groups of people responded to various housing messages. I think given the time of its release—early in the pandemic—it didn’t get enough attention. And I’ll include us in that—even though we covered it, I don’t think that I even assimilated all its messages all that well.
I can’t do it full justice here; I just want to pull out a few highlights that are particularly relevant right now and expand on them with some of my own observations about current housing narratives and messaging. I recommend everyone look up the full study.
Here are the things that jumped out for me when I revisited that research:
First, there’s actually very little opposition to the idea of a governmental role in making sure everyone’s housing needs are met. Housing advocates often go in thinking we need to defeat opposition to this basic idea. But that’s not true. We’ve seen this in poll after poll after poll, and this research reaffirmed that. Americans care about housing, and they think the government should help.
What is lacking is intensity of support. So it’s always in the American electorate’s top 10 issues, but rarely in the top 3—the ones that get debate time and major federal legislative initiatives. Big-bet federal pushes that contain a lot of housing priorities like Build Back Better often don’t make it over the finish line. And part of the reason for the lack of intensity is there are so many actors (government, developers, landlords, investors) and so many aspects of the housing problem, that people don’t know who to blame, or which solution will actually work.
I take from this finding that one of our primary challenges is not just developing a message about why housing is important, but developing a narrative around why we have this problem and putting a clear focus on which solutions work.
Another thing the research found that limits the intensity of support for housing is talking about it in an individualistic, “commodity” way—seeing housing as a consumer good. That tends to make people feel like the crisis is inevitable. The term “public good” and even the word “affordable” apparently trigger the commodity way of thinking.
It’s really hard to let go of these terms. We at Shelterforce certainly haven’t.
So what works better? What generates much stronger support, the housing narrative research found, was framing housing as a basic human need, especially one that supports children, and leads to better health and well-being, and is connected to a healthy economy. These messages counter individualism and tap into people’s existing values.
It is important to note in the current Orwellian and anti-equity environment, that the top-performing messages from this research all centered around fairness and inclusion. For example, the messages included things like “Most of us want to provide for our families, have a safe place to call home, and pursue our dreams, regardless of what we look like or where we come from” and “Everyone should be able to choose where to live when they can afford it. Being denied where to live because of race, family status, or disability is discrimination.” Those did better than messages that didn’t include the nod to fairness.
However, the report also suggested that it doesn’t work very well—outside of our own circles—to lead with the history of racism. Americans just don’t like history very much apparently, of any sort. (Thus, we are currently repeating some really bad parts of it.) That said, the report’s authors are all racial equity champions. The message wasn’t to abandon that lens, but to time it differently—helping people to understand that context better once they were on board with the basics. That’s the difference between messaging and political education, which is a longer-term, more in-depth process. I do think that this piece of their findings was really challenging for many of us who were working really hard on elevating racial equity in our work, and possibly meant that we didn’t pay enough attention to the rest of the project’s findings.
One part of the project that really struck me much harder when I came back to it now was the underlying information about how people make up their minds, which isn’t limited to housing. Folks who study this kind of political messaging break down their audience into the base, the opposition, and the persuadables. The base is the portion of an audience who generally share your values and goals. The opposition fundamentally does not. But the largest group is the persuadables—in this case 61 percent.
As I’ve discussed in our previous reporting on the research, an important thing to understand about people in this group is that they are not necessarily “in the middle” politically, in the sense of having a spot in the center of a spectrum. Instead they hold views that align with both the base and the opposition, often contradictory ones that tend to toggle on and off depending on who they have heard from most recently and how a given message is framed. This is really important, and is why the manner in which messages are presented can make such a difference.
This is also why advocates have been cautioned to be wary of using messaging that their opposition also supports. If someone whose values run directly counter to yours likes your messaging, then that message is probably triggering values and narratives that are actually counterproductive to your goals, and might not be moving persuadables in the right direction.
Now let’s be clear, when you are speaking directly to your Republican representative in Congress about why they should care about funding cuts to your organization, you say what you need to say (as long as you don’t throw anyone else under the bus in the process).
But leaning too hard into broader messaging that reinforces values we don’t agree with could backfire on us if adopted more broadly. For example, for a while now we’ve been seeing a lot of messaging about housing supply being the be-all and end-all of housing affordability, and that regulation, writ large, is bad because it makes housing harder to build. While obviously we need to talk about housing supply and reducing barriers to building affordable housing, when we appear to lend support to the idea that regulation is the only problem here, we can unwittingly add fuel to an extremely deregulatory, small-government narrative that does not have room in it for the kinds of strategies we need to actually achieve housing justice. Tipping persuadables away from supporting a balanced housing policy and toward “just let the developers build more and it’ll work out” will not bode well for the affordable housing movement.
This is also one of the reasons I have long been wary of how much emphasis is put on homeownership as a “wealth-building” strategy—because it directly contradicts the core value that housing should be treated as a basic human need, not a speculative investment.
So what we’re looking for is a narrative that says why we have this housing crisis, and makes it clear it is fixable. When housing advocates use stories we need to use examples of collective success stories, not overcoming the odds stories. Villains are OK, as long as they aren’t made out to be all powerful.
The main challenge for housing champions is to make strong messaging that is easy to grasp, while not oversimplifying the many factors going into why so many people struggle to get and stay in decent housing and what can fix it.
A building-more-will-fix-it-all story is very compelling, but too simplistic and partial to do what we need it to do. It leaves out the economics of land ownership. It ignores the fact that land is finite, and land values are capturing most of the value generated by public investment. It doesn’t address the rapid loss of existing housing. And because it’s obviously insufficient, it doesn’t resonate with a crucial portion of people—the folks on the ground in need of housing, who see empty housing around them, who see new housing being built but rents keep going up, no matter how much is built. “Deregulate zoning and let developers build as much as they want and that will fix everything” is demonstrably false.
Now, “Landlords are all bad and greedy” isn’t the answer either, because that’s also provably false, not to mention it puts nonprofit landlords in a difficult position. (Corporate Wall Street landlords and speculators, on the other hand . . . )
We need a more comprehensive narrative of why people are struggling to get stable, decent homes—one that resonates with everyone’s experiences. I’ve been starting to hear people come around to say the message should be that housing, as a basic human need, shouldn’t be treated as a commodity.
We acknowledge that it still costs money to produce, maintain, and operate. We acknowledge that building and zoning regulations, construction methods, tenant protection policies, and financing approaches all affect how well we can produce and maintain homes to serve people’s housing needs, and that all of that can and must be improved.
However, right now we have a system in which housing is a thing to be primarily speculated on, and its value is completely detached from its role as housing. We must focus on policies that enable us to create and maintain housing that is a home, not an investment. Luckily, this is exactly what everyone at this conference is working on.
We need more refinement on turning that into messaging—I’m a journalist, not a communications expert, but I vote for starting with “Housing for people, not for profit.”
About the Author
Comments