Mansion on the Hill: Satellite-Derived Building Heights, Inequality Perceptions, and Redistribution Preferences

Inequality shapes elections, protest, and policy debates across democracies. But citizens rarely read official statistics; many judge the economy from what they see. I argue that skylines provide a low-effort signal: when very tall buildings rise next to very short ones, visible contrasts make wealth gaps feel larger. I use satellite rasters to measure five-year change in the dispersion of building heights across thousands of small areas in England and Wales, and link these changes to individual responses in a national panel survey about whether inequality is rising and whether incomes should be equalized. In areas where skylines became more varied, people were more likely to say inequality had grown, and those living amid nearby districts with greater building height contrasts shifted toward stronger support for redistributive policy. This research note makes an attempt to pair remote sensing with survey evidence in political science, and shows that persistent features of place can structure beliefs about inequality and downstream fiscal preferences.