Segregating New Neighborhoods By Political Values

Posted by: Mike Lydon
Thanks to: Tom Petty

17 April 2006 - 10:00am

In suburban Orange County, California, Ladera Ranch is a thriving planned community of more than 16,000 people, where various villages are not customized to practical needs, but to what marketers call different "values subcultures".

"The survey went to thousands of people who'd called a number on highway billboards announcing that Ladera Ranch, a new planned community in Orange County, Calif., was coming soon.

It asked predictable marketing questions, such as whether people wanted ballfields or trails. Then came a section titled 'values.'"

"'We were trying to characterize the lens through which people see the world,' said Brooke Warrick, who heads Ladera's marketing firm, American Lives. 'A community is a collection of symbols and images. And we wanted our symbols and images to be better than the other guy's.'

As the largest building boom since the 1950s continues across the suburban frontier, the story of Ladera Ranch offers an extreme example of how developers are using the kind of sophisticated market research more commonly used to sell Hummers or Cornflakes to build the very places people live, and in a sense, to try to socially engineer community."

Full Story: Redefining Property Values By Design:Status Seekers and Tree-Huggers Do Not Have To Commune

Source: The Washington Post, April 17, 2006

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The Commodification of Political Opinion and Social Preferences

Submitted by Miles on Fri, 04/21/2006 - 19:32.

Geographic sorting of housing consumers by political, religious and
social preferences is being encouraged by housing developers. What
are the national political implications of this trend?

Detailed analysis of "blue state" and "red state" voting trends in
recent election cycles showed us that even within "red" (Republican
leaning) states and "blue" (Democratic leaning) states, individuals
tend to self sort into more Democratic inclined areas and more
Republican inclined areas, with the primary demarcating factor being
urban versus rural locations.

Did life experiences in urban areas lead people to vote Democratic,
or were people with Democratic inclinations choosing urban life? We
don't know. But while that question has not been fully resolved this
article suggests that real estate developers are actively
encouraging geographic sorting through their marketing efforts, with
potentially profound implications for the political sorting in the
future.

This marketing driven geographic sorting is being encouraged even
among closely proximate suburban developments, creating a
potentially even more complex geopolitical patchwork. Marketers are
evaluating the preferences of "Traditionalists" versus "Cultural
Creatives" and "young digerati or money and brains" types versus
others to build houses that they believe will reflect their desires
and generate sales to people in specific sociodemographic categories.

To some extent they are also marketing the opportunity to live in a
neighborhood with like-minded people. At one level this is simply
more sophisticated marketing.

But on a deeper level this phenomenon has the opportunity to deepen
the existing geographic divisions upon which contemporary politics
relies to draw district boundaries in local, state and national
politics. "All politics is local" they say. Does this trend suggest
the deepening of that reality? How will national parties exploit an
increasingly well-characterized pattern of housing, in which choices
reflect the very same marketing ideas that political marketers use to
sell candidates? It will be interesting to watch.

Miles Hochstein

Psychographic profiling in boring subdivisions

Submitted by steve raney on Wed, 04/26/2006 - 21:57.

Envision Utah’s Robert Grow explained how his organization undertook sophisticated values analysis for their regional visioning exercise (the same sort of polling used to win political campaigns). Turns out that, for values, average Democrats and Republicans are more alike than different. (The analysis showed purple, rather than red or blue.) Two-party politics emphasizes the disagreements, rather than the shared values.

Housing market research that emphasizes the few points of difference misses the point. For housing, what is needed is market research that leads to true housing product innovation. In the article, there is very little meaningful innovation in the housing product. Described are large, single-use subdivisions with detached single-family homes varying from $800K to $1MM. The only points of difference listed are architectural style, family room size, and solar panels.

Two comments from Fannie Mae's Housing Policy Debate (Volume 12, Issue 4. 2001) reinforce this complaint about the lack of real-estate innovation: 1) Zimmerman / Volk. "The home industry is now led by a few lumbering giants that provide housing 'value' measured by size and novelty. Genuine housing innovations have been mostly limited to the areas of production efficiency and risk management, rather than any meaningful improvement of the product offered to the consumer." 2) Smart Growth America: "Homes are treated as generic commodities like pork bellies, which are all essentially the same, rather than as consumer products like cars or clothing, which vary greatly according to people's preferences. This tired approach tends to determine how many homes people want, but not what kind of homes or what type of residential neighborhoods people would select if given a choice."

Modern market research should be brought to the real-estate industry, provided the objective is to develop improved housing product choice. Home buyers and renters are often forced to choose the “least-worst” housing option, not something that truly meets their needs.

Steve Raney, Cities21, Palo Alto, CA