The share of Americans who would be hesitant to move to an area where most people have political views different from their own has increased by 31 percent since June.
A new Redfin survey of 3,000 U.S. residents found that 42 percent would be worried to make such a move, up from 32 percent this spring. That’s the highest share since Redfin began posing this question to survey respondents, in 2017.
Redfin conducted the survey between Oct. 7 and Oct. 15. The spring survey was launched on May 21, four days before four days before George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, and ended on June 8, as racial justice protests were underway across the country.
“With political signs lining the front yards of homes across America, house hunters can’t escape the political views of their prospective neighbors,” Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather said in a statement. “While living among like-minded people is important to many homebuyers, key concerns like affordability and space are more likely to be the deciding factors in the homebuying process – especially as remote work gives families the freedom to leave dense, expensive cities in search of bigger homes and better value during the pandemic.”
No political party appears to have a monopoly on wariness of the other. Respondents who planned to vote for President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden in tomorrow’s election were equally likely to express skepticism about moving to a place where they would be in the political minority.
The findings seem to jive with other results in the survey that show a significant minority of Americans – 28 percent in the October survey, 20 percent in the June 2020 survey and 22 percent in the June 2019 survey – would be hesitant to move to a place where most residents are of a different race, ethnicity or religion.
Redfin found, however, that Trump voters were more likely to feel this way than Biden voters. Thirty-six percent of respondents who said they were voting for Trump said they would be reluctant to be in the minority if they moved, while only 23 percent of Biden voters said they felt that way.
Broken down by race, 29 percent of white respondents said they would be hesitant to move to a place where most residents are of a different race, ethnicity or religion. That compares with 26 percent of both Black and Hispanic respondents, and 23 percent of Asian participants, though the differences between races were not statistically significant.
Another Redfin report in October found that more people moved from Democratic-leaning counties to Republican-leaning counties than the reverse. Redfin at the time attributed the shift to “families seeking affordability and space.”
