Can America Get Unstuck?

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14-05-2025

How the Privileged and the PropertiedBroke the Engine of American Opportunityby Yoni AppelbaumRandom House, 320 pp., $14.99
THE MAGIC BEHIND AMERICA'S BYGONE period of rapid economic development and strong civic culture wasn't unions or low immigration rates or the after-effects of World War II, but mobility—not just socioeconomic but geographic. And the secret to that mobility was cheap, abundant, and easily available housing in growing, job-rich markets, the basic means to the end of seeking opportunity. Or so argues Yoni Appelbaum in his new book on housing, Stuck.
Housing policy might sound like a wonky, white-paper topic, but anyone who has moved or tried to buy or rent a home recently knows it touches deeply on everyday life. Stuck joins M. Nolan Gray's Arbitrary Lines (against zoning), Derek Thompson's and Ezra Klein's Abundance (against overregulation), and a raft of other recent books addressing the problem of housing affordability, zoning and land-use regulation, and the (lack of) housing supply. Appelbaum's particular contribution is his use of quite a bit of unfamiliar history from the rapidly growing, highly mobile nineteenth century to illustrate how our housing crisis is really a mobility crisis, and why, in his telling, it doesn't have to be this way.
For Appelbaum, the deputy executive editor of the Atlantic, the problems started with the anti-growth turn of the twentieth century, especially the imposition of zoning and the early FHA regulations on lending that severed the housing market from the economy, creating the once-strange notion of 'expensive' cities. Everyone but the very rich was squeezed out of urban housing markets, and the gates of economic opportunity closed. Today, Appelbaum writes, 'too many Americans . . . live where they are able, not where they want; they experience their lives less as the result of their own decisions than as the consequence of vast and impersonal forces. And with that decline in agency has come a deep embitterment.'
Appelbaum reports that half of renters now spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Most of America's pleasant, walkable, amenity- and job-rich urban places, formerly full of middle-class families, have become inaccessible to all but the wealthy. The housing market now dictates settlement patterns, rather than following from them. Americans used to move to affordable housing where they could find economic opportunity. Now they hope to find economic opportunity where they can afford the housing.
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NOW IT ISN'T QUITE THIS SIMPLE. In their earliest years, American settlements inherited the European concept of the village as a communal institution, with the power of exclusion. This town-as-private-club model manifested in different ways in Puritan New England and the Virginia colony, but at a high level, the stuffy European rules applied.
Over time, Americans invented the (unevenly applied) rights to leave a community, to join one, and eventually to truly belong. This, Appelbaum explains, was revolutionary. Once the province of ne'er-do-wells, moving became associated with economic success. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't keep restless, opportunity-seeking Americans bound to the communities of their birth. What is distinct about America, Appelbaum argues, is this right of the individual to choose whatever community he wants as his home.
The modern legal understanding of freedom of movement and residency evolved piecemeal. Appelbaum notes that freedom of movement, per se, is not obviously derived from the Constitution. But over time, we struck down or stopped practicing laws and customs like the New England village's 'warning out' or laws allowing states to essentially means-test new residents, sending those deemed too needy back to 'their own' states to become public charges. As those practices fell away, Americans adopted the understanding that an American could move anywhere, and be a resident, legally speaking, simply by dint of being somewhere. This entailed not just expanding individual rights, but reimagining what a community was: not an actual institution with the power to determine its residents, but merely the sum of the individuals who chose to call it home, for as long as they wanted to.
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The freedom to join new communities fueled economic growth and settlement patterns in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, but it was never entirely uncontested. Concerns about real problems like urban overcrowding—especially in the era before public health—are hard to separate from prejudice and nativism, given that the slums and overcrowding tended to be in immigrant and/or non-white neighborhoods, and that racism could be laundered as social reform. Appelbaum quotes Berkeley professor and apartment skeptic Oliver Miles Washburn as saying in 1914: 'There is no relief except by building closer and higher—by crowding more people into already occupied areas.' That's a pretty handy working definition of a city, from the foundation of Jericho to the present day. It is clear from the history of zoning that many Americans despised immigrants more than they loved freedom and free enterprise.
Not all opponents of free movement were racists or nativists—many of the anti-growthers later in the twentieth century were population-growth alarmists. As for modern NIMBYism, Appelbaum casts it partly as a reemergence of the old 'village as club' model:
Not far to the south [of where Appelbaum lives], two lawn signs sit side by side on a neatly manicured lawn. One proclaims, NO MATTER WHERE YOU ARE FROM, WE'RE GLAD YOU'RE OUR NEIGHBOR, in Spanish, En­glish, and Arabic. Beside it, another reads, SAY NO, urging residents to oppose the construction of an apartment building that would house the new neighbors the other sign welcomes. Ironic, yes. But also instructive. In theory, the drives ­ toward inclusion and exclusion should exist in tension. In practice, though, progressivism has produced a potent strain of NIMBYism, a defense of communities in their current form against those who might wish to join them.
As Appelbaum explains, not being invited into that club means not attending its schools, with all the attendant implications for socio-economic mobility.
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THROUGH THE CHAPTERS OF THE HISTORY of this evolving freedom of movement, Appelbaum illustrates how central moving was and still is to American society. There's a long passage on 'Moving Day,' from the time when leases expired on the same day (typically May 1), and large chunks of many cities would move all at once. This secular holiday, written about frequently in newspapers, was enabled by a much lower share of homeowners relative to renters. In fact, it was not until 1950 that a majority of Americans owned their homes, as renting allowed people frequently to change homes, or neighborhoods, or cities, or states. 'A home,' Appelbaum writes, 'was less an investment than a consumer good.'
Appelbaum also implies that the modern college homecoming celebration descends from the New Hampshire governor's 1899 announcement of 'Old Home Week,' a week of parades and celebrations for former New Hampshirites to come back (and spend money at local businesses). By the turn of the century, in other words, mobility was so widespread that former residents of states were large populations in their own right.
But around that same time, having used the new freedom of movement to build its economy and cities, America nullified that freedom with a flood of land-use regulations and government lending standards. It's not necessary to endorse the proclamation of some progressive housing advocates that anyone has a right to live anywhere they want to observe that the freedom of movement isn't worth much if people can't afford to be where they want to go—namely, growing, job-rich cities. But surely, most Americans would agree we at least possess a right to seek opportunity. And mobility is so closely tied to seeking opportunity that putting affordable homes out of proximity to that opportunity in effect encroaches even on the right to work.
Many of the early zoning advocates saw apartment buildings or tenements not as stepping stones or lower rungs on a ladder, but as buildings that created poverty. The nativist urge to get rid of the housing the immigrants live in worked in tandem with utopianism, in which urban planners imagined that in sawing off the lowest rungs of the ladder, it would be somehow easier to climb. The FHA required localities to impose zoning codes in order for homes to qualify for FHA mortgages, which in effect made suburban stasis national policy. Later on, environmental laws would be arguably misused to tie up development proposals in endless litigation. It simply became much more expensive and frictional to build housing in places where people, infrastructure, and jobs already were.
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WHILE IN MANY WAYS STUCK fits into a body of technocratic, center-left public policy work, it is suffused with a deeply conservative sensibility: the understanding that the past contains a great deal of wisdom, that government bureaucrats cannot centrally plan economic growth or human settlements, and that their hubris eroded a lot of accumulated, informal wisdom by which Americans turned freedom into both wealth and civic engagement. The effect is a little like what George Taylor might have felt upon finding the head of the Statue of Liberty.
Another feature that differentiates Appelbaum from the crowd of proudly urbanite neoliberals with globes in their Bluesky handles (not derogatory) is his attention to civic engagement and participation in religious and associational life. Appelbaum argues, perhaps counterintuitively, that mobility, not localism, is what generates civic participation, sociability, tolerance, and pluralism. 'Left to their own devices, most people will stick to ingrained habits, to familiar circles of friends, to accustomed places,' he writes. 'It's people who remain where they are who tend to end up bowling alone.'
Most of us can think of a period of change and uprootedness in our own lives—moving into college, starting a new job, settling down in a new city—and remember a feeling of adventurousness and hopefulness, a drive to meet people and check out the new surroundings. That acute, nervous loneliness is a kind of social glue.
It's as if American communities used to be long continual welcome parties, which have petered out as newcomers stop arriving. 'With Moving Day, Americans made a habit out of change,' Appelbaum writes. 'The annual ritual of relocation, for all its inconveniences, provided the impetus to overcome inertia.' (This is not even all that long ago; in New York City, at least, Moving Day survived into the 1940s.)
By contrast, the dull, chronic loneliness of feeling stuck somewhere acts as a force of attrition against the willpower to go seek out opportunities and create ties. But, after all, Appelbaum's whole point is that it's not our fault that we're stuck. At least, not the fault of those who inherited the housing market the planners of the twentieth century broke.
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THE BIGGEST FAULT IN STUCK is not in Appelbaum's history but in his use of history, in its implications. Appelbaum's basic observations—Americans used to move more often, housing used to be more affordable and come in more varieties, and housing construction used to keep pace with economic growth in specific cities—appear well supported, but what are the arguments?
What are we to make of this vanished world that was our country in the nineteenth century? The Moving Day churn, the town and city homecoming parades, the civic boosterism and rapid growth, the striking out and reinventing oneself and going bankrupt and reinventing oneself again: Are these arguments and analyses of what is possible today, or are they merely a description of a volatile, passing period in a nation's economic development? Is Appelbaum arguing for, in effect, a kind of national Peter Pan policy, in which the nation never must grow up?
Toward the end of the book, Appelbaum argues briefly that, since he's identified the specific public policies that destroyed American mobility, an alternate path was still possible. But more than that, he argues that it is still possible—that our development is not path-dependent but that all options are still available to us.
Even if mistaken policies can be rescinded, many decades of anti-growth policies have broken the cultural continuity with our old nineteenth-century selves. Governments can restore the conditions in which that period of growth took place, but neither governments nor markets can necessarily restore the culture of growth and boosterism and moving around that was bound up with that old policy regime.
But we should hope that that restoration is possible, because it is clear what its absence is costing us—in GDP, in economic opportunity, in vibrant social ties, and in the welcoming, pluralistic attitude buoyed by the belief that the future will be better than the present.
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