Beyond race, the crucial divide in the politics of housing development isn’t between left and right, but between people who own homes and those who don’t. William Fischel, an economist at Dartmouth, has long argued that homeowners who fear threats to their property values are motivated as voters to protect them.

More recently, Andrew Hall and Jesse Yoder at Stanford compared voter file data with housing deeds for 18 million voters in Ohio and North Carolina. They found that buying a home prompts people to participate much more in local elections, particularly when zoning questions are on the ballot. And the effect of homeownership is far larger — boosting turnout by about four percentage points — than most strategies political campaigns use to drive voters to the polls, like personalized phone calls.

The more expensive the home people buy, Mr. Hall and Mr. Yoder find, the larger the increase in their likelihood of voting. That suggests that homeowners aren’t more likely to vote merely because they become invested in their communities. Their motivation also appears to grow as the value of their asset does.

One possible interpretation: “It’s not that you become more selfish, but you become more likely to translate selfishness into political action,” Mr. Hall said of homeowners. “Renters could be just as selfish, but they’re not getting their act together as a group to vote.”

Generations of American politicians have argued that homeowners make good citizens — and in the early days of the nation, only property owners could vote. It seems reasonable that a financial stake in the community would make people more likely to care for it. But this research suggests that homeownership can also prompt people to oppose what’s good for their communities in a larger sense — at least if you believe, as Mr. Carson does, that many communities need more housing.

It is clear from other research that homeowners’ views on this issue transcend partisan politics. Michael Hankinson, a political scientist at Baruch College, has surveyed Americans about their support for development and found no evidence that conservatives particularly oppose regulation or embrace free markets when it comes to housing.

He found them less likely than liberals to support a 10 percent increase in their city’s housing supply, and more likely to support a ban on new development in their neighborhood. (He also found evidence of renters in high-cost San Francisco behaving a lot like homeowners, opposing new development in their neighborhoods that they might have feared could price them out.)