Homeownership and Environmental Attitudes

Abstract

Homeownership is associated with financial stability, middle-class status, and the good life in the United States. On the national level, homeownership has been touted to improve social stability, generate wealth, and foster citizenship and solidarity. If true, expanding homeownership could help to solve the nation’s social, political, and thus environmental challenges. However, despite the popular currency of these ideas, existing research has mixed findings on the political consequences of homeownership. While previous research has linked homeownership to conservative political orientation, there is reason to believe that this may not apply to environmental attitudes. The conservatizing hypothesis is supported primarily by research on homeowners’ attitudes toward macroeconomic or local development policies, not environmental ones. The two mechanisms from the literature — social integration and locally dependent financial investment— can be expected to increase environmental concern among homeowners. Through six semi-structured interviews and a multivariate regression analysis using the General Social Survey 2021 Cross-section Study, this paper finds that homeowners tend to be more concerned about the environment than renters, especially if their neighborhood is highly exposed to environmental risks.