Fun Online Polls: NIMBYs and 'normal goods'

On a low-ish turnout, the responses to last week's Fun Online Poll as at yesterday lunchtime were fairly evenly split as follows:

What motivates NIMBYs?
They want to live in a nice house - 21 votes
They don't want anybody else to live in a nice house - 25 votes

I then linked to the poll over at Housepricecrash, where opinions are split three-to-one in favour of the latter.
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This week's Fun Online Poll is a basic economics question - is housing a 'normal good'? If you're not sure what that means, I have cut and pasted the following straight from Wiki:

In economics, an Engel curve shows how the quantity demanded of a good or service changes as the consumer's income level changes. It is named after the 19th century German statistician Ernst Engel...

For normal goods, the Engel curve has a positive gradient. That is, as income increases, the quantity demanded increases. Amongst normal goods, there are two possibilities. Although the Engel curve remains upward sloping in both cases, it bends toward the y-axis for necessities and towards the x-axis for luxury goods.

For inferior goods, the Engel curve has a negative gradient. That means that as the consumer has more income, they will buy less of the inferior good because they are able to purchase better goods.

You could argue that housing (i.e. having a roof over your head) is a 'necessity' but conversely, that above that level, housing is a 'luxury'. From everything I have ever observed (and going by what others say), the two cancel each other out, and housing is in fact pretty much the most normal of 'normal goods', in other words the fraction of a household's income that it devotes to housing expenditure (primarily mortgage repayments or rent) is fairly constant at all income levels (and over time); and/or that the value of the home in which you live is a fairly constant multiple of your household income (at any point in time; of course the absolute values and hence the ratios fluctuate a lot).

Of course, pensioner households tend to have lower incomes than working age households and so they skew the picture; I'd guess that in the absence of the state pension this would not be the case. Something else that skews it is the recent house price bubble; older households will probably occupy larger or more expensive homes than younger households with the same income (which is a temporary thing).

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

I could have been a bit more sophisticated about this and asked people what their personal house price-to-income ratio is, with answers ranging between three and ten, but that would involve people sitting down and working it out, and we'd have to agree definitions on what 'income' is (gross or net of income tax? before or after VAT and Council Tax? before or after cash and non-cash benefits). So I guess that relatively few people would respond and that the answers would be rather unreliable anyway