Latest news with #Stuck
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Can America Get Unstuck?
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. Things are getting worse, but we can make them better together. Join our pro-democracy community and help us grow. 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. Join now 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. Share 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. Share 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. Share 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. Share The Bulwark
Evening Standard
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
Breakin' Convention at Sadler's Wells review: a bank holiday bonanza
Head-spinning stunts will always snare attention — but what's arresting about the headline act on opening night was its cool gravity. Stuck, a terrific debut choreography by French dancer Mounia Nassangar, starts slow, with one of the dancers settling into a salon chair and getting her head shaved. Only once the clippings have been swept up do the lights crack a dystopian ruby red and the dancers judder to life.
CNN
07-04-2025
- Business
- CNN
Former German Minster of Economic Affairs on Trump's Tariffs - Fareed Zakaria GPS - Podcast on CNN Audio
Former German Minster of Economic Affairs on Trump's Tariffs Fareed Zakaria GPS 42 mins Today on the show, Fareed speaks with former German Minister of Economic Affairs Peter Altmaier about the impact of President Trump's tariffs in Europe and around the world. Next, Ehud Barak, former Israeli prime minister, joins the show to discuss Israel's renewed war in Gaza where Prime Minister Netanyahu is dividing up and seizing more territory. Barak says this is a death sentence for most of the hostages who are still alive. Then, after France's far-right leader Marine Le Pen was found guilty of embezzlement and banned from running in the 2027 presidential election, Fareed speaks with The Economist's Sophie Pedder about this shake-up in French politics. Finally, The Atlantic's Yoni Appelbaum joins to discuss his new book 'Stuck' in which he writes about the crisis of geographic mobility in America and its impact on politics and economic opportunity in the country. GUESTS: Peter Altmaier (@peteraltmaier), Ehud Barak (@barak_ehud), Sophie Pedder (@PedderSophie), Yoni Appelbaum (@YAppelbaum)
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Gaping Hole in the Center of the Abundance Agenda
America has a housing affordability crisis. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance, Yoni Appelbaum's Stuck, and Mark Dunkelman's Why Nothing Works argue to varying degrees that land-use restrictions, mostly at the local level, are what created this problem and that easing them will solve it. Build more housing and it will become more affordable. Last week I argued that there are sound reasons for local communities to exert some control over their neighborhoods—reasons that the new supply-side liberals are reluctant to acknowledge. Protecting the environment, scaling building size to limit opportunities for crime, and preserving architecture of historical significance are all legitimate goals. People should have some power to make their communities livable, because if your community doesn't do that, it's doubtful outside forces will—either commercial or governmental. I don't disagree that these defensible goals often act a smokescreen for indefensible goals—such as the exclusion of lower-income people, or the elimination of racial or ethnic diversity. It happens often enough that supply-side liberals are right to call for greater regulatory flexibility, mostly at the local level, to make it easier to build stuff, and not just housing. We need to make it easier to build all sorts of things, including (to cite a central example in Abundance) a bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. My main problem with supply-side liberalism isn't what it contains, but what it omits. To address the housing shortage, to build vital infrastructure, and to address all sorts of other problems, judiciously-targeted deregulation will be nowhere near sufficient. We also need to address the demand-side problem of distribution. At the start of the Great Depression John Maynard Keynes published a famous essay titled 'Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren,' in which he argued that their future would be brighter. He was correct: The Depression ended, the global war that followed defeated fascism, and the west prospered. But Keynes overstated his case. In the essay, he wrote that 'the struggle for subsistence' would end and 'the economic problem' would disappear. Keynes predicted correctly the creation of stupendous wealth that he wouldn't live to see. (He died in 1946.) But he was quite wrong to presume that this wealth would be distributed humanely over the long term. Just look around. It isn't. Klein and Thompson almost certainly have read Keynes's essay. If they haven't I presume they've at least seen the 2008 Pixar cartoon Wall-E, which turns Keynes's conceit into a sort of sunny dystopia. Yet they begin their book with a description of a futuristic world that's kind of like—well, Wall-E, minus the grim externalities (a ruined planet, people too fat to walk, etc.). In Keynes's essay and in Wall-E everybody's economic needs are met because the fruits of economic success are shared by all. Will that happen? I hope so. But it won't happen by itself, and we certainly can't get there by tinkering with zoning variances. The government must reverse the past half-century's trend toward ever-growing wealth and income inequality. Abundance alone won't cut it. Boosting wages, increasing worker power, and generally restoring the middle class to meaningful participation in America's economy are much more necessary. Otherwise we'll just make Elon Musk's grandchildren richer. I don't doubt that the authors of all three books favor these liberal goals; just not enough to give them much ink. Granted, it could be worse. The 'It's Too Hard To Build Stuff' argument, which has been around for decades, used to place heavy blame on the cost of union labor. There have been a few instances (for example, the 1975 New York City financial crisis) when that was even true! But in recent memory that hasn't been the case, and I'm pleased to report that these books (mostly) eschew union-bashing. Klein and Thompson point out that it costs twice as much to built a kilometer of rail in the United States as it does in Japan or Canada, and that union density is much higher in the latter two countries. Consequently, they argue, unions can't logically be the problem. (A few pages later they quote an affordable housing consultant griping about having to pay prevailing wage, which usually means union scale, but never mind.) Still, not talking much about unions isn't good enough. The authors of these books ought to consider unions part of the solution to housing affordability. Boost wages and people can buy houses. This blind spot about stagnating wages is pretty glaring. Klein and Thompson cite the economist Ed Glaeser's finding that prior to the 1980s wages in New York City were unusually high compared to the cost of living, meaning people stood to benefit if they moved there. After 2000, though, moving to New York City meant taking 'an effective pay cut. That's not because paychecks have shrunk but because housing costs have risen.' True enough, but another reason housing got less affordable—in New York and elsewhere—was that real wages failed to rise for all but the wealthiest. In a thriving economy, incomes are supposed to rise alongside housing prices, and for everybody, not just the rich. The long-term decline in geographic mobility within the United States is a theme in all three books, and in Appelbaum's Stuck it's the central topic. A thriving economy requires that people move to where economic opportunity is greatest—'Go west, young man,' as Horace Greeley said. Alarmingly, there's far less job-related migration among today's young men and women (unless they're affluent) than in the past. To the limited extent working-class people do migrate, it's away from economic opportunity, because when you have little prospect of increasing your wage significantly you may decide to live someplace where housing is cheaper. I published an article about this problem a dozen years ago ('Stay Put, Young Man,' Washington Monthly), and I reported that, yes, among the reasons for this harmful economic trend was overly restrictive zoning. But the underlying problem was income inequality. Citing pioneering work in this area by Harvard's Daniel Shoag and the University of Chicago's Peter Ganong, I pointed out that working-class people had seen their share of state per capita income growth shrink from 88 percent in 1940 to 36 percent in 2010. Opportunity dried up for America's working-class majority, putting places with brisk economic growth out of reach for all but the professional class, who could afford to pay more for housing. Shoag and Ganong have since concluded that zoning restrictions drive growing economic inequality between regions (which in turn drives the nation's red-state blue-state divide). But ask yourself why red states are able to thrive economically without welcoming in-migration from the working class. It's because the working class has, to an alarming degree, been dealt out of the United States economy. A much-cited recent study by Moody's Analytics found that the top 10 percent in the United States income distribution (i.e., households earning $250,000 or more) now account for 49.7 percent of all consumer spending and about one-third of GDP. The more alarming reality isn't that high housing costs keep the working class out of America's boomtowns; it's these boomtowns don't have to care. They don't require much working-class labor and they don't require much working-class consumer spending. That diminishment of economic power, tantamount to invisibility, isn't a housing problem. It's an inequality problem, and a humanity problem. Reducing zoning restrictions can help, but not enough. Indeed, in the cities where the affluent are most determined to live, building more housing may serve to increase demand, much as Robert Moses's expressways, rather than ease traffic congestion, drew additional motorists onto New York City streets. I've suggested elsewhere that something like this may be happening in Washington, D.C., which during the past quarter century increased the number of its housing units by an astonishing one-third, yet saw median monthly rent rise even faster—by one-half. Housing for low-income people is especially unlikely to become more affordable through market forces. If there's a supply-side liberal paradise, it's Houston, which has no zoning at all (though it does have some land restrictions). Klein and Thompson report that Houston has 'the lowest homelessness rate of any major U.S. city,' and they cite low building costs as the reason. But a 2023 Governing magazine piece by Alan Greenblatt pointed out that Houston also had no zoning back in 2011, when 'Space City' boasted the sixth-largest homeless population in the United States, prompting the department of Housing and Urban Development to place Houston on a watch list. Greenblatt attributed the city's turnaround to collaboration with various government and nonprofit entities (including HUD), a large pile of Covid stimulus cash—and a more than twentyfold increase in police citations issued at homeless encampments. Houston's lack of zoning creates plenty of problems. Between 1930 and 1978, 82 percent of the city's trash got dumped in Black neighborhoods, even though Blacks represented only 25 percent of the population. The neighborhoods had no power to stop it. A 2025 report by the nonprofit newsroom Houston Landing said this problem persists, and that because of Houston's insufficient local housing subsidies affordable housing was more readily available in Boston, which is routinely ranked among the top ten most expensive housing markets in the country. 'There is pressure among liberals,' Klein and Thompson write, 'to focus only on the sins of the MAGA right.' Yes, at the moment that does seem to be kind of an emergency (and not just for liberals). 'But this misses the contributions that liberal governance made to the rise of Trumpism.' Sorry, I'm not buying it. All three of these books were written before the election; their argument would be more compelling had Kamala Harris won. A Harris presidency would have created more space for a conversation about small tweaks to liberal orthodoxies. Trump's victory doesn't leave us that luxury. If Democrats are to win back the working-class majority necessary to regain the White House, they'll need to talk about how a more activist government can address demand-side problems experienced by the proletariat. Back during the 1988 election, Michael Dukakis was judged an out-of-touch technocrat in part because he'd once taken to the beach a book supposedly titled Swedish Land-Use Planning. The supply-side liberals want us to take to the beach a book that might as well be titled American Land-Use Planning. No thank you. I don't can't walk that dark road again.
