Politics in affordable housing provision: How partisan control of local councils influences planning choices

Investment in publicly subsidised social housing units – designed to ensure long-term access to dwellings for households with low and moderate incomes – is a strategy that cities around the world leverage to increase housing affordability. But the availability of such affordable units varies tremendously between cities, even within the same country. To what degree is this variation the product of local politics expressed through voter or policymaker preferences? To answer this question, I examine the inclusion of social housing in major development projects planned in hundreds of municipalities across the Paris, France, metropolitan region. Through a series of multiple regression analyses, I demonstrate that in cities with left-wing councils, shares of social housing units in new projects are an average of 7–11 percentage points higher than in cities with right-wing or centrist councils, after controlling for the ideologies of local residents, preexisting levels of social housing and community demographics. Though voters’ political preferences are closely associated with city-level social housing shares, elected officials’ partisan affiliations explain variations in the provision of social housing in newly approved projects. I reaffirm these findings by using a series of regression discontinuity tests to examine differences between communities with close elections. These results show how the partisan affiliations of local leaders affect urban planning choices in their communities.