Person: de Benedictis-Kessner, Justin
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de Benedictis-Kessner
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de Benedictis-Kessner, Justin
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Publication How Partisanship in Cities Influences Housing Policy(Harvard Kennedy School, 2022-05) Jones, Daniel; Warshaw, Christopher; de Benedictis-Kessner, JustinHousing policy is one of the most important areas of local politics. Yet little is known about how local legislatures and executives make housing policy decisions and how their elections shape policy in this important realm. We leverage housing policy data and a new data source of 13,602 city council elections and 2,716 mayoral elections in large cities in the United States and a regression discontinuity design to examine partisan divides in housing policy among the mass public as well as the impact of local leaders’ partisanship on housing policy. We provide robust evidence that electing mayors from different political parties shapes cities’ housing stock. Electing a Democrat as mayor leads to increased multi-family housing production. These effects are concentrated in cities where councils have less power over land use changes. Overall, our paper shows that politics influences local housing policy, and it contributes to a larger literature on local political economy.Publication Who Should Make Decisions? Public Perceptions of Democratic Inclusion in Housing Policy(Harvard Kennedy School, 2023-06) de Benedictis-Kessner, Justin; Einstein, Katherine Levine; Palmer, MaxwellWho deserves to participate in local democracy? A wide body of research shows that property owners are deeply overrepresented in local political proceedings, especially those related to housing and land use. We know little, however, about whether such inequities conflict with the public’s norms of democratic equality. This article explores perceptions of democratic inclusion in local housing politics, and whether these views can be altered with more information about political inequalities. Using survey data from 13,619 respondents across 57 cities, we find that: (1) members of the public prefer to hear from homeowners and longtime residents in political proceedings; and (2) disseminating information about local participatory inequalities increases the likelihood of the public wanting to hear from a renter, albeit by a substantively small amount. These results show that public persuasion may not be the most fruitful avenue for reforming these inequitable local political institutions.Publication Can Inclusionary Zoning Be an Effective Housing Policy in Greater Boston? Evidence from Lynn and Revere(Harvard Kennedy School, 2023-01) Mock, Rozalyn; Willis-Jackson, Megan; Wang, Robert; de Benedictis-Kessner, Justin; Bilmes, Linda; Iammartino, BrianHousing costs across the nation and in Greater Boston are rising, and many policymakers have turned to Inclusionary Zoning (IZ) in an attempt to dampen these effects on their lowest-income residents. Yet design and implementation of IZ policy remains haphazard and often is not well-grounded in prospective analyses of its potential effects. We combine evidence from quantitative financial models and qualitative interviews to create guidelines for the design of IZ policy. We apply our analytic framework to two Greater Boston cities’ economic, political, and administrative environments: Revere and Lynn. We identify the potential for various policy levers to create affordable housing, and address the risks and limitations of IZ policy. We find that IZ policies are most effective when targeted at affordable rental units for low to moderate income residents, but IZ alone is unlikely to produce a substantial number of units priced for extremely low income households. Even appropriately-targeted IZ policies are unlikely to be successful without positive incentives, such as eliminating parking requirements and adding density bonuses, and are limited by their reliance on market conditions. Therefore IZ may not be appropriate for every community. Ultimately, we conclude that to realize the potential benefits of IZ, planners and policymakers must carefully tailor IZ policies to their local and regional context and supplement them with other affordable housing production policies.Publication American Local Government Elections Database(Harvard Kennedy School, 2022-09) de Benedictis-Kessner, Justin; Lee, Diana Da In; Velez, Yamil R.; Warshaw, ChristopherThe study of urban and local politics in the United States has long been hindered by a lack of centralized sources of election data. We introduce a new dataset of nearly 55,000 electoral contests that encompasses races for seven distinct local political offices in most medium and large cities and counties in the U.S. over the last three decades. Our data provide partisan and demographic information about candidates in these races as well as electoral outcomes. We demonstrate the utility of these data with three applications: the descriptive representation of women and race/ethnic groups among candidates and office-holders, the partisan nationalization of local contests, and the match between district partisanship and local politicians’ voting records in city councils. Together, our data provide a myriad of opportunities for future research on subnational politics and remove a significant barrier to the study of representation and elections in local governments.