Latest news with #YoniAppelbaum
Atlantic
15-04-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
Who's to Blame for America's Housing Crisis?
Stuck In Place In the March 2025 issue, Yoni Appelbaum considered why Americans stopped moving houses—and why that's a very big problem. Yoni Appelbaum's 'Stuck In Place' accurately describes how restrictive land-use policies in America's most economically vibrant cities have choked off opportunity for many Americans. That said, I'm skeptical that homeowners would be as open to new development as Appelbaum thinks. One person's exorbitant expense—money paid for rent or to purchase a home—is another person's income. Increasing the housing supply to deliberately moderate or even lower prices threatens homeowners whose retirement plans include cashing in on the equity stake in their home. Twenty-five years ago, William Fischel named this political economy the 'homevoter hypothesis': Voters lobby the local land-use authorities to protect their vested real-estate interests, thereby excluding newcomers from their communities. Americans have grown accustomed to rapidly rising home values, and our federal, state, and local governments encourage this through zoning, mortgage, and tax policies. It's no wonder people eagerly use the power of the state to privilege themselves, even if they couch it in lofty terms such as opposing 'greedy developers' and 'protecting neighborhood character.' Eric Fidler Washington, D.C. Yoni Appelbaum's article on the ills caused by progressives' neighborhood preservationism is thought-provoking, well researched, and convincing to a point. But it can't serve as a blanket explanation for all of America's current sociopolitical ills—nothing fits that bill. Arguments like these can lead to scapegoating and a backlash that itself goes too far. Zoning laws should certainly be loosened—but do we want to open every last historical landmark to the wrecking ball and allow every last green space in America to be paved over just so someone can make a quick buck? Surely we can strike a new, better balance. Potomac, Md. I read Yoni Appelbaum's lament over decreasing American mobility with bemusement. Some people value establishing and maintaining deep bonds with family, friends, and community over chasing after money. Here in rural northeastern Kansas, I dwell among people who live on the same land that their forebears homesteaded in the mid-19th century. They possess a sense of rootedness and purpose as vital contributors to their local community that cannot be exchanged for cash. They also tend to be thrifty people who save, so other than them tipping off friends about the latest sale at the fabric store, I've never heard them mention or complain about money. Because of the quest for upward mobility, I know many couples whose grown children choose to pursue lives in California or Florida or New York and then cram into airports during the holidays. They would have saved themselves considerable time, money, and stress if they'd never left home in the first place. FaceTime and texting cannot babysit for you, mow your lawn, rescue you if your car breaks down, or run errands for you if you are sick. Mindlessly moving from one place to another in pursuit of the next promotion is not only extremely expensive—it has contributed to the loneliness epidemic. Neighbors no longer know one another; newcomers find themselves surrounded by strangers. And if they are transients who will jump at the next opportunity to relocate, I doubt that they will try to establish any meaningful connections. The pursuit of more money through mobility is a dominant theme in our culture, but not everyone buys into it. I've discovered meaning and fulfillment by staying in one place. Margaret Kramar Lecompton, Kan. Here's another reason fewer Americans are moving far from their hometowns: the increased economic and social power of women. Women do a disproportionate amount of unpaid work in the form of child care and elder care. Women know how difficult it is to raise kids far away from the support of extended family. For the men who were the breadwinners and decision makers of previous generations, caring for children (to say nothing of aging parents) was not their concern. To modern couples who earn money and make decisions more equitably, the demands of child care and elder care are powerful incentives to stay close to home. Emily Murbarger Philadelphia, Pa. Yoni Appelbaum's theory that progressives are to blame for America's housing crisis ignores a far more obvious culprit: greed. The reason no one is building affordable housing is that it simply isn't as profitable as luxury townhouses and condos. Downtown Milwaukee, for instance, teems with new apartment complexes marketed to those who can afford the $2,000 rent. There needs to be an incentive to build housing for the people who clean and service these units, especially as wealthy Americans turn their backs on the public sphere. Otherwise, our cities risk becoming hives of affluence. David Southward Milwaukee, Wis. I wholeheartedly agree with Yoni Appelbaum's three principles for restoring dynamism and mobility to our cities. We need more consistency and less discretion in our land-use rules. We need more tolerance for the messy process of change to the built environment. And we need to embrace growth and abundance. But the correctness of Appelbaum's conclusions only deepened my frustration with the blame he placed on Jane Jacobs. Although she deserves criticism for inspiring a strain of progressive NIMBYism, Jacobs was no evangelist for freezing cities in amber. She famously attacked 'separation of uses'—then a key facet of planning orthodoxy—in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She advocated instead for mixed-use streets where people and businesses would age in and out over time in a constant process of urban self-regeneration. That's exactly the dynamism that Appelbaum wants. True, Jacobs's prescription was not as accurate as her diagnosis. It seems strange that she thought historic-preservation laws could be 'zoning for diversity' rather than zoning for gentrification. But in the '50s and '60s, the government invested enormously in suburbanization, often by leveling neighborhoods to build highways. Americans should be a mobile people because we choose to be, not because Uncle Sam gives us an eviction notice. Jacobs's fight is more understandable in that context. The problem isn't what she did then; it's that some self-described progressives still insist on her approach 70 years later in radically changed circumstances. Fortunately, they are drowned out more and more by a new progressive movement that proclaims, 'Yes in my backyard.' Michael Whelan Ann Arbor, Mich. There are times when moving house makes sense—say, a job change, or a significant change in the size of one's family. But there is also much to be said for simply being satisfied with what one has. I do realize that it is not a typically American attitude, but it is an attitude that can bring about a fair degree of happiness. Perpetual striving leads only to more striving. Allen Murray Mebane, N.C. Behind the Cover This month, our cover spotlights four stories on threats to American democracy. George Packer examines President Donald Trump's Orwellian tendencies. Anne Applebaum reports on the right's dangerous embrace of Viktor Orbán's Hungary. Aziz Huq recounts how the constitutional and legal foundations of the Weimar Republic eroded. And David Brooks describes the nihilism at the core of the MAGA movement. For the cover image, the illustrator Ricardo Tomás created an imperiled American flag, its stars and stripes on the verge of collapse. — Paul Spella, Senior Art Director A caption in 'O'Keeffe in the Frame' (February) misstated the location of Twilight Canyon. It is in Utah, not New Mexico.
CNN
06-04-2025
- Business
- CNN
On GPS: The historic decline in American mobility
Moving in search of better opportunities is part of America's DNA, but Americans are relocating at historically low rates today. Fareed speaks with The Atlantic's Yoni Appelbaum about why that is and what it means for American society.
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How moving can help beat MAGA: "We need to revive mobility"
The American Dream is now very sick and perhaps even on the verge of death. The Age of Trump and authoritarian populism are closely related to this in several ways. The imperiled American Dream helped to fuel the righteous rage at the elites and a broken economic and political system that lifted Donald Trump back to the White House. If Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans and the larger right-wing antidemocracy movement achieve their goals — even partially so — of gutting the social safety net, hollowing out the federal workforce and enacting tax and other spending and budgetary policies that siphon off even more of the American people's money and give it to the richest individuals and corporations, the American Dream will be even more out of reach. Public opinion polls and other research have consistently shown that a large percentage, if not the majority, of Americans believe that the American Dream is something in the past and that present and future generations will have a much more difficult life economically than previous generations. Homeownership and "living in a good neighborhood" are central to the reality and cultural mythology of the American Dream. As the United States becomes more economically stratified and the richest 10 percent now own a disproportionately large percentage of the country's wealth (60 percent), home ownership has become increasingly difficult for the average American to achieve. The rental market reflects this pressure. In many parts of the country, a combination of financial speculators and multinational corporations is buying up entire neighborhoods and communities, forcing out existing residents and then pricing the properties so that they are generally only accessible to affluent people. America's political polarization reflects these divides of who can enjoy the freedom and right of social mobility through moving from one home and neighborhood (or part of the country) to a more desirable one and those who are stuck, often intergenerationally, in the same homes and neighborhoods of their birth. Political scientists have shown that people who moved more than one hundred miles from their hometown were more likely to vote for Democrats. Those Americans who remain close to their places of birth were much more likely to vote for Donald Trump. To better understand the connections between the idea of home, the American Dream, social mobility, and America's increasingly fractured politics and larger society, I recently spoke with Yoni Appelbaum, deputy executive editor at The Atlantic and the author of the new book 'Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.' Given everything transpiring here in America with Trump's second term, how are you feeling? I have the rare privilege of doing work that grows more meaningful during times of tragedy or uncertainty. So, for my own part, I turn to the craft of journalism — working on stories that can help bring clarity, put new facts on the record and pursue accountability. And that's really the best advice I have to offer others, too. If things are unfolding that concern you, find your own small way to make the world a little better. You won't solve everything, but you may solve something. What is the American Dream? The American Dream and how a person feels relative to it — and the ability to attain it — is central to the rise of Trumpism and authoritarian populism and the rage at the elites. The best definition of the American Dream I've ever encountered came from one of the founders of The Atlantic, Ralph Waldo Emerson. He recalled kids in a schoolyard saying defiantly: I'm as good as you be. That's it. That's the dream. A country in which each of us is accorded equal dignity, equal rights, and equal opportunity. We can measure its realization in our own lives in a variety of ways, and often we tend to do so in terms of material goods. But those are just yardsticks. When people look around and see that the Dream has been denied to themselves or their neighbors, that's what they're getting at, the denial of the dignity of equality. What does 'home' mean relative to the American Dream? 'Home' and the American Dream and neighborhood and community are central to how people think about society and politics. One of the biggest things I discovered while writing 'Stuck' was just how often people used to move. At the peak, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, probably one out of every three Americans moved each year. As late as 1970, it was one in five. And it's been sliding for 50 years. We just got new numbers, and it's down to one in thirteen, an all-time low. I actually think that's a big problem! But for counterintuitive reasons. I think the lack of mobility is gutting our communities. The peaks of American mobility coincided with the peaks of community. At a broad level, the constant infusion of new arrivals energized civic life. And at an individual level, when you move someplace new, you have to seek out new friends, join new groups, and develop new habits. What historically made American communities special is that, to an unusual extent, our identities weren't inherited but chosen. Because we had the option to leave, the choice to stay became active — to remain in a town, a church, a club. It's why American civic life was long so remarkably robust, why the pews were filled on Sunday. And as we've stopped moving around, it's decayed very sharply. How many Americas are there? We are not one nation or people. We put the answer right on the dollar bill: E pluribus, unum. We're many, and we're one. The book talks about the difference between Israel Zangwill, who exalted the 'melting pot' as the ideal, and Horace Kallen, who coined the term 'pluralism' as an alternative. I think Kallen had the better of the argument. It doesn't make you or me any less American to also embrace our other identities or to be fully part of our particular communities. The idea that diversity could be a strength was a pretty radical claim when Kallen made it a century ago, but over time, I think it's been proved correct. Many of the majority white 'red state' and 'downscale' 'working class' communities that have flocked to Trumpism are not that dissimilar in terms of poverty, lack of upward mobility, limited opportunities, being hurt by globalization/neoliberalism/casino capitalism and other forces as compared to majority Black and brown communities. This is an important fact that is not commented upon enough in the dominant narrative that Trumpism is primarily about an aggrieved 'working class.' One thing that blue-collar communities share across the country—whether in rural areas or inner cities — is that their residents have lost their mobility. The freedom to move toward opportunity used to be an American birthright. Its revocation is experienced not just as a loss of income but as a loss of dignity and a loss of hope. When people lose the chance to move where they want, the research says they grow more cynical, more alienated, and more inclined to see the world as a zero-sum game, where others' gains come at their expense. I think many people in working-class communities can see, very clearly, that something has broken in American life, that they don't have the opportunities they expected. Unfortunately, demagogic politicians have also spotted that justified sense of grievance and exploited the rise of zero-sum thinking to set workers against each other—an effective way to win elections, but not to improve the lives of voters. America is race and class segregated. By some measures, America is as, if not more, segregated than it was in the 1950s. That segregation reflects and fuels the United States' extreme political polarization and negative partisanship. We do not live near people who are different from us, and therefore we don't see each other as real human beings. This is fuel for malign political and social actors. This is, sadly, all too correct. After a long period in which Americans fought incredibly hard to enlarge the freedom to move, tearing down barriers of class and race, we've spent the last 50 years re-erecting them. Only, instead of doing so transparently, the new rules have been written to be facially neutral — in zoning codes and community input processes, and building regulations — even as they have a predictably disparate impact. Wealthy communities have learned how to play the game of exclusion ever more effectively. And as we've stopped moving over the past 50 years, the country has become sharply more polarized. When communities were constantly revitalized by steady streams of new arrivals, they brought with them new life experiences, new ideas and new beliefs. Stagnant communities, by contrast, tend to homogenize over time, as people conform to the views of those around them. If we want to recapture our ability to see each other as fully human, we need to revive mobility. To the title 'Stuck.' What is the role of race and opportunity structures in your new book? Geographic mobility — the chance to move toward opportunity — has long been the key driver of social and economic mobility. There's no better way to understand the centrality of mobility to the American Dream than to trace the ways in which we've denied it to disfavored groups over time. The book unearths the contested history of mobility. It shows how minorities laid claim to this essential American freedom and the backlash that resulted. It traces the rise of zoning—first developed as a tool to ghettoize Chinese immigrants in California, then applied to Jews in New York, and as it spread, all too often used to target Black communities — as an instrument of racial and class segregation. It illuminates the ways in which increasingly restrictive rules and regulations have choked off the supply of affordable housing, constraining mobility today, with a disproportionate impact on the Black community. Work as a public sector/government employee has long been a path to the middle class for Black and brown stivers, white ethnics, and immigrants to America. These are good jobs that have a certain amount of prestige and pride. Part of that prestige and pride was that these careers enabled a person to buy a home and achieve the American Dream for their families and future generations. The impact of the Trump administration's gutting of the federal workforce will be felt widely across the United States. Living in Washington, D.C., I see the impact of the sudden job cuts in the federal government all around me, every day. And there's an added tragedy to the way they're unfolding. The robust equal employment protections of the federal government have long made civil service jobs a path up to the middle class for populations that otherwise face endemic discrimination. That's how my grandfather was able to get a job as a postal letter carrier. And today, it's why the federal workforce is disproportionately drawn from members of minority groups. Historically, it's been a win-win — the workers get the kind of jobs they deserve, and taxpayers get talented civil servants whose skills have been undervalued by a discriminatory private sector. Right now, though, it's a lose-lose — those public-sector workers are losing their jobs, and we're all losing the benefits of their skills and well-qualified and dedicated worker who loses their job for no particular reason is an individual loss. But collectively, the cuts in the federal workforce are devastating the communities that already faced the greatest challenges. What does it mean to lose one's home and all that comes with it? This is a great injury to a person's honor — especially for men — and feelings of being a productive member of society and not a 'burden' or 'taker'. I wrote an entire book about the magic of mobility. But there's a crucial caveat. I'm talking about mobility as an act of individual agency, of choice. There's another kind of mobility that comes about involuntarily — a result of foreclosure, eviction, or housing insecurity. That's generally devastating. That has its origin in restrictive rules that have made it too hard to build housing in the places where it's most desperately needed, driving up prices and rents. That squeezes the folks who live there, sometimes leading to the loss of housing, but leaving a far larger number in a state of precarity. And it makes it hard for people elsewhere who are struggling just to get by to follow the time-honored path of relocating toward greater opportunity. In effect, they can't; they've been walled off from the places where their chances would be better. Both sets of people are denied the dignity of providing for their families. The passing of wealth from the . That generational transition will reinforce the racial wealth gap because of how the GI Bill, VA and FHA home loan programs, and other government policies that created (white) suburbia and the American middle class discriminated against non-whites, and Black Americans in particular. The American Dream is a result of those policies. How is this dynamic reflected in your new book 'Stuck'? One story 'Stuck' tries to hammer home is how large a role government policy — federal policy — played in our present inequality. A variety of New Deal programs made it easier for some Americans to move out to suburban homes, even as they made it all but impossible for others to follow them there. Racially restrictive covenants and zoning codes became a precondition of federal housing loans. The courts eventually struck down the racial restrictions, but communities soon discovered that zoning could be almost as effective a tool of exclusion. So yes, all of these policies helped produce an enormous racial wealth gap, which is transmitted from one generation to the next. But it's crucial to recognize that we're not just feeling the long-term effects of historical policies — present-day zoning is still driving much of the inequality in America. Our communities are being torn apart and pulled at by different forces. Huge corporations and multinationals are buying up portfolios of properties and entire neighborhoods. There are the 'winners' in this increasingly stratified society who can move into formerly working-class, poor, and underclass communities and buy/rent property. The people who live there are being priced out and have fewer places to live. Affordable housing is increasingly an oxymoron and a cruel joke. In my neighborhood, I look for those U-Hauls and cars full of boxes on the last day of the month and all the things left abandoned on the sidewalk. It is very sad. What is this doing to the social and political fabric of this country? To individuals who must navigate it? You're pointing to two overlapping problems. One is that, as you say, mobility has become the privilege of the educated and the affluent. That's who still has the chance to move where they want. And because of the enormous advantages that mobility confers, the gap between them and everyone else is rapidly widening. The other is scarcity. For as long as we've had cities, neighborhoods have changed. While we still produced housing to keep pace with demand, most people welcomed such changes. You could add some luxury townhouses for the rich, and they'd move in. The housing they vacated could be sold or rented to the merely affluent. The upper-middle class could move in behind them. And so on down the line, in a chain of moves you can trace through the property records, right down to the impoverished immigrant leaving one tenement for a slightly more spacious one. The magic of this was that almost everyone who moved ended up someplace nicer or better-suited to their needs than where they'd started. But when there's not enough housing to go around, it's a whole different story. You still get chains, but they can be chains of displacement. The rich move in at the top, and everyone bumps down as rents rise. It's like a game of musical chairs where you keep adding players, but not seats, and you give a head start based on wealth. The results are predictably cruel. Who are the 'winners' and 'losers' in the story and social history you so deftly navigate in the new book? The answer varies by era. In the golden age of mobility, the winners were the dispossessed. By fighting for, and securing, the right to live where they chose to, they gained the chance to decide who they wanted to be. Our society became gradually more equal, and the scope of civil rights enlarged. Lately, though, the winners have been the propertied and the privileged, who have figured out how to rig the game in their favor, by using regulations and land-use rules to resegregate our society. And the losers? That's everyone else, shut out of opportunity. As has been my standard final question throughout the Trumpocene. Where do we go from here? The story I tell in the book is in some ways depressing. But I actually mean it as a hopeful tale. By recovering the story of the foundational American freedom — the right to live where you want — I'm trying to point the way to a better, more just, and more equal future. And it's also hopeful because we don't need to wait for a dysfunctional Congress to act, or for a presidential administration to want to tackle these challenges. The book focuses on state laws and local regulations. States and cities that want to restore mobility, recommit to growth, and open themselves to new arrivals seeking opportunity can do so on their own, right now. These problems are remarkably recent in vintage, and the historical record offers us proven alternatives that we can implement today.
Yahoo
20-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Americans Are Stuck. Who's to Blame?
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts May 1, 9 a.m., was once the hour of chaos in New York City. In a tradition dating back to colonial days, leases all over the city expired precisely at that time. Thousands of tenants would load their belongings on carts and move, stepping around other people's piles of clothing and furniture. Paintings of that day look like a mass eviction, or the aftermath of some kind of disaster. In fact, that day represented a novel American form of hope. Mobility, or the right to decide where you wanted to live, was a great American innovation. But lately, that mobility is stalling, with real consequences for politics, culture, and the national mood. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Yoni Appelbaum, a senior editor and the author of the new book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Appelbaum explains how, over the decades, several forces combined to make it harder for the average American to move and improve their circumstances. And he lands at some surprising culprits: progressives, such as Jane Jacobs, who wanted to save cities but instead wound up blocking natural urban evolution and shutting newcomers Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Hanna Rosin. I have moved many times in my life: across continents, across the country, back and forth across D.C., which is where I live now. And I didn't think much about it. I just chalked it up to restlessness—until I read Yoni Appelbaum's new book, which is also the March cover story in The Atlantic. The book is called Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Appelbaum argues that there is and always has been something quintessentially American—and also, quintessentially hopeful—about moving. In the 19th century, Moving Day was, like, a thing—a holiday celebrated across different American cities at different times, when everybody would just up and move. To quote Appelbaum: 'Nothing quite so astonished visitors from abroad as the spectacle of thousands upon thousands of people picking up and swapping homes in a single day.' But moving isn't happening so much anymore. As Appelbaum writes: 'Every year, fewer Americans can afford to live where they want to.' So what happens to a country—geographically, culturally, politically, and, in some ways, psychologically—when mobility starts to stall? [] Rosin: Can you read this from your intro, these couple of sentences? Yoni Appelbaum: 'The notion that people should be able to choose their own communities—instead of being stuck where they happen to be born—is America's most profound contribution to the world … The fact that it is now endangered is not just a problem for housing markets; it's a lethal threat to the entire American project.' Rosin: Okay. Let's start with the second half: Why is mobility the thing that defines the American project? Appelbaum: It is the thing that defines the American project, because it was the first thing that anyone who got here from Europe noticed. People would come to the United States and gawk. They saw this as either our greatest asset or our great national character flaw. But they were amazed at how often Americans moved. And they were particularly amazed that the Americans who were moving were not moving out of desperation, that Americans tended to be doing okay in one place and to still want something more for themselves—want something better for their children—and to move someplace else in pursuit of it. Rosin: And you're not just describing something geographic. You're describing something psychological. Appelbaum: Yeah. I'm talking about an attitude that Americans believed that they could change their destinies by changing their address, that they could move someplace new and do better than they were doing. And also—and this is the second half of the answer—Americans believed that they were not defined by the circumstances of their birth. That was the great gift that mobility gave us. And that had really profound implications that took me a while to unravel. Rosin: Right. Because it's not just about geography. It's not just about money. It's about a sense of yourself as having infinite possibilities. Like, you could just move and move. You weren't class-bound in any way. Appelbaum: Here's the thing about American individualism: We are individuals, in the sense that we have the ability to construct our own identities, but we define ourselves by virtue of the communities that we choose to join. Throughout the world, communities tended to choose their members. Even in the early United States, in the colonial era, if you tried to move in someplace, you could be warned out. The town had the right to say, Hey. You may have bought property here. You may have leased a building. You may have a job. We don't want you here. And not surprisingly, they disproportionately warned out the poor. They warned out minorities. Really, American communities, for the first couple hundred years of European settlement, were members-only clubs. And then in the early 19th century, there's a legal revolution. And instead of allowing communities to choose their members, we allow people to choose their communities. You could move someplace and say, I intend to live here, and that was enough to become a legal resident of that place. Rosin: So just in numbers, can you give a sense of where we are now? What's the statistic that shows most starkly the decline in mobility now? Appelbaum: In the 19th century, as best I can calculate it, probably one out of three Americans moved every year. Rosin: Every year? Appelbaum: Every year. In some cities, it might be half. In the 20th century, as late as 1970, it was one out of five. And the census in December told us we just set a new record, an all-time low. It's dropped over the last 50 years to one out of 13. It is the most profound social change to overcome America in the last half century. Rosin: It's so interesting, because if you told me that someone moved that many times in a year, I would not associate that with upward mobility. I would associate that with desperation and problems. Appelbaum: For a long time, that's exactly what historians thought too. There was this guy, Stephan Thernstrom, who set out to investigate this, and thought what he had discovered, in all this moving about, was what he called the 'floating proletariat,' right? Here was evidence that, in America, the American dream was chimerical. You couldn't actually attain it. There was this great mass of people just moving from one place to another to another. And several decades later, as we got better data-mining tools, we were able to follow up on the floating proletariat and find out what happened to them. The people who had stayed in one place, Thernstrom saw—they were doing a little better than they had before. But when we could track the people who had left, it turned out, they were doing much better, that the people who relocate—even the ones at the bottom of the class structure—across every decade that historians can study, it's the case that the people who move do better economically. And this is really key: Their kids do better than the people who stayed where they were. Rosin: It's like Americans are, in their soul, psychological immigrants. Like, that we behave the way we think of immigrants behaving, and the more robustly we do that, the better off Americans are. The most evocative image that you draw is something called 'Moving Day,' from an earlier era. I had never heard of that. Can you paint a picture of what that is? Appelbaum: We've got these wonderful accounts of Moving Day from people who came over, more or less, just to see it. By law or by custom, in most cities and in most rural areas, all unwritten leases expired on the same day of the year. And this actually gave renters an enormous leg up in the world in most times, in most places, because it meant that an enormous number of properties were potentially available to them. They could go back to their landlord and say, If you want me to stay for another year, you gotta fix the leaky sink. Or they could try someplace better. And they would all pile their possessions down at the curb. First thing in the morning, they'd hire a cart to take them across town or down the lane, and then they would push past the family that was moving out of some other apartment or townhouse or home. As they were taking their stuff out, they'd be moving their stuff in. But between sunup and sundown, a quarter, a third, half of a city might relocate. And there are these descriptions of trash lining the gutters as things fell out of the carts or there wasn't room for it in the new apartment, and people would go scavenging through the gutters, trying to find, out of the trash, their own treasures. It was raucous and wild, and respectable Americans always looked down on it. And yet, for the people who participated in it, it was a way to have their home be kind of like an iPhone or a car: You keep the one you have for a year or two, and then you trade up for a newer model. Rosin: So upgrades. Now, where is this happening? Is this happening in cities of a certain size, in immigrant communities? Like, who is doing all this chaotic moving? Appelbaum: Well, that's one thing that really upset the upper crust. Rosin: And who are they? Let's define all the sides. Who are the respectable Americans? Appelbaum: The respectable Americans are those of long-standing stock who are trying very hard to impress the European cousins. And they are appalled that this defect of their national character—that people don't know their place. They don't know their station. They're always moving around looking for something better for themselves, and they write about it in those kinds of moralistic terms. But the people who are participating in it, it's very broad. I mean, when you're talking about half the city moving, what you're talking about is activity that's as much a middle-class and upper-middle-class activity as it is a working-class activity. As long as you are adding a good number of fresh new homes to the market every year, pretty much everybody who moved could move up, because the wealthy were buying brand-new homes that had just been erected. But they were vacating, you know, homes that were a few years older or apartments that they were moving out of, and those became available to the upper-middle class, right? And you'd get a chain of moves. You can trace this, you know, a dozen, 15 moves, one family succeeding another, succeeding another—and everybody moving up to something a little bit better than they had the year before. And, you know, just like an iPhone or a car, they're chasing technological innovation. One year, you move into a new apartment, and it's got running water. And, you know, two years later, the water runs hot and cold, and it's a miracle, right? So everybody is constantly moving up in the world as they constantly relocate. Rosin: So there are decades of massive amounts of mobility. It's considered respectable enough. And then, at some moment, a few forces start to slow this all down. So can you tell the story of what happens in Lower Manhattan? Appelbaum: Yeah. It's sort of a sad story when you look closely at it. Lower Manhattan, the Lower East Side, is like no place that's ever existed before or since. It is so dense. People are living in tenements at a sort of rate per acre, the way demographers measure this, that is multiples of any place in Manhattan today. Rosin: Do you remember the numbers? Because I think they're extraordinary. Maybe I'm just remembering this from going to the Tenement Museum, but when you actually look at the density numbers, they are just hard to get your head around. Appelbaum: Yeah. I think it's, like, 600 per acre. It's really, really, really high. There's no place in Manhattan today that's even a third as dense, even though the buildings are now much, much taller. So they're really squeezed in there. And reformers are appalled. And there are real problems with some of these, you know—what they're really appalled about, it turns out, is less the housing conditions than the presence of so many immigrants, with their foreign ways, foreign religion, foreign languages, weird foods, odd smells, right? They're looking at this, and they are not happy that this is invading their city. They're not subtle about it. They're quite clear that they think that apartments are themselves degrading. This is the original progressive era, and there's a tight intertwining between the reformers and government, and they move fluidly among them. Rosin: Wait. Like, who is the 'they'? Are we talking about city planners? Just, this is a really interesting moment. So I just want to—because it's unexpected, this part of the history. Appelbaum: Lawrence Wheeler is sort of Mr. Tenement Reform. He's the guy who will write most of the reports, who'll serve on the commissions, who'll move in as the first deputy commissioner of the Tenement Office when New York creates one. Like, he is both a government official and a reformer, and that was pretty typical. They move fluidly among these jobs. And he is the guy who really goes on a crusade against tenements. And maybe the most remarkable moment in my research was stumbling across a speech he gave at a conference, where somebody had asked, How do you keep apartments out of your city? And he says, Well, you know. The problem is: If you put it to a vote, you can't keep them out of your city, because people actually like living in apartments. They serve a useful function. So what you have to do is solve it the way I've done it in New York: You call it fire-safety regulation. And you put a bunch of regulations on the apartments that make them prohibitively expensive to build. But be careful not to put any fire-safety regulations on single- or two-family homes, because that would make them too expensive. And as long as you call it 'fire safety,' you can get away with keeping the apartments and their residents out of your neighborhoods. And it's one of those moments where, you know, you just sort of gape at the page, and you think, I can't believe he actually said it. I was worried, maybe, I was reading too much into some of the other things that he'd said. But here he is straightforwardly saying that much of the regulatory project that he and other progressives pursued was purely pretextual. They were trying to find a whole set of rules that could make it too expensive for immigrants to move into their neighborhoods. Rosin: So we're in a moment of just resistance to tenements and apartments and crowdedness. How does this, then, become encoded? What's the next step they take? Appelbaum: You know, the problem with building codes is that, ultimately, there are ways around them. People are developing new technologies. It's not enough to keep the apartments back. It's not enough to pen the immigrants into the Lower East Side. And there's a bigger problem, which is that the garment industry in New York is moving up Fifth Avenue. And on their lunch breaks, the Jewish garment workers are getting some fresh air on the sidewalks, and this infuriates the owners of the wealthy department stores on Fifth Avenue, who say, You're scaring off our wealthy customers. And they want to push them out. They try rounding them up and carting them off in police wagons. They try negotiating with the garment-factory owners. But, of course, these workers want to be out on the sidewalk. It's their one chance for fresh air, and it's a public sidewalk. So there's a limit to what they can do, and they finally hit on a new solution, which is: If you change the law so that you can't build tall buildings near these department stores, then you can push the garment factories back down toward the Lower East Side. Rosin: You know, anytime you step into the history of the technical and possibly boring word zoning, you hit racism. Appelbaum: You know, the thing about zoning, which is sort of the original sin of zoning—which is a tool invented on the West Coast to push the Chinese out of towns and then applied— Rosin: —in progressive Berkeley! That's another thing I learned in your book, is how Berkeley, essentially, has such racist zoning origins. Appelbaum: It's a really painful story, and zoning, ultimately, is about saying there are always laws, which said there are things that you can't do in crowded residential areas. But zoning was a set of tools, which said, Some things are going to be okay on one side of the tracks and not okay on the other. And given that that was the approach from the beginning, it was always about separating populations into different spaces. And so New York adopts the first citywide zoning code. And at first, this is spreading from city to city. The New Deal will take it national. Rosin: And what does—the zoning code is not explicitly racist? What does it actually say in the government documents? Appelbaum: Well, that's the brilliance of the zoning code. The courts have been striking down explicit racial segregation. But if you wrote your ordinance carefully enough and never mentioned race, you could segregate land by its use. You could figure out how to allow in some parts of your city only really expensive housing, or in other parts of your city, you could put all of the jobs that a particular immigrant group tended to have. Rosin: Like the Chinese laundromat on the West Coast. Like, No laundromats. That's the famous one. Appelbaum: Exactly. That's the original zoning ordinance: We're gonna push all the laundries back into Chinatown. And if you push the laundries into Chinatown, you're pushing their workers into Chinatown. So there were ways to effectively segregate—not foolproof, but effectively segregate—your population without ever having to use any racial language in the ordinance, and so it could stand up in court but still segregate your population. Rosin: Okay, so we have zoning laws, we have government complicity in kind of dividing where people live, and then we have someone who comes in as a supposed savior, particularly of Lower Manhattan. Maybe not a savior, but someone who appreciates the diversity in the city as it is, and that's Jane Jacobs. And you tell a very different story of the role she plays in all of this, which really brings us to the modern era. So can you talk about who she is and what role she played in transforming Lower Manhattan? Appelbaum: Yeah, it's a little heartbreaking sometimes to look closely at your heroes and find out that the story you thought you knew is not the one that actually played out. Jane Jacobs was a woman who saw clearly what it was that made cities great, at a time when almost nobody wanted to recognize that. She saw the diversity of their populations, of their uses, the way that people mixed together as being not, as the progressives had it, something that needed to be corrected with rational planning, but as a strength that needed to be recognized and rescued and reinforced. And she stood tall against urban renewal, against the notion that the way to save cities was to knock them flat and to rebuild them with all the uses very carefully segregated out. And she wrote this brilliant book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that laid out these principles, and she saved her own neighborhood from urban renewal and became, in the process, sort of the patron saint of urbanism. And her great lesson that she took from all of these experiences was that you needed to empower individuals with a deep appreciation of urban life, with the tools to stop governments. And that was the gospel that she preached. And in many ways, it was necessary at that moment, at the peak of urban renewal. But what she didn't understand at the time—maybe couldn't have understood at the time—was that she was going to create problems that were even worse than the problems that she was trying to prevent. [] Rosin: After the break: how Jane Jacobs inadvertently contributed to the stuckness of America. [] Rosin: Okay, so here we have Jane Jacobs. She moves into—what street was that that she moved into? Appelbaum: She moves into 555 Hudson Street. Rosin: Okay, she's on Hudson Street. That's an amazing place to live. What had been all around her was—who was living there at the time? It wasn't other people like her. Appelbaum: No, it mostly wasn't. She and her husband are two working professionals in Manhattan who are able to pay all cash for a townhouse on this block that is mostly filled with immigrant families. And it's changing at the time. She's not alone in coming in, in that way. But it's mostly been a neighborhood of immigrants, the children of immigrants. It's got tons of street-front retail, and she writes about this beautifully, which activates the street front. The eyes on the street keep them safe during the day. She writes about the intricate ballet of the sidewalk as people dodge around each other, and people each pursuing their own tasks are able to live in harmony, in concert. She writes about this block absolutely beautifully, even as she is killing all of it. Rosin: So if we freeze her there, then she's a heroine of the city who appreciates it in all its diversity. So then what happens? How does the tragedy begin? Appelbaum: You know, I tracked down the family that was in that building before she bought it. It was a man named Rudolf Heckler. Two of his adult children and his wife were working in a candy store on the ground floor. So they were renting, living above the shop that they operated, and that shop was everything that Jacobs says make cities great. It was a place where you could go and drop your keys if you're going to be out for a while, and your kid could come pick them up and let themselves into the house. It was a place where you could just stop and talk to your neighbors. It was the kind of thing that Jacobs praised, but when she buys the building, she gut renovates it. She tears out the storefront. She turns it into a single-family home. She rips off the facade of this historic building and replaces it with modern metal-sash windows. She so thoroughly alters the appearance, presents a blank front to the street, where before there'd been a lively storefront, that when they eventually, at her urging, historically landmark the block, they find that the building that she lives in has no historic value whatsoever. And so here, you have somebody who has written this ode to the way people are living around her but buys a building within it and changes it to suit her own family's need—which was a reasonable thing, I should say, for her to do under the circumstances—but then landmarks the block, which prevents people from building new buildings in the way that that block had always had. So there's a couple buildings right next to hers that have been torn down and turned into a six-story apartment building before she moves in. But her changes make it so that nobody can do that again. And if you're not building new buildings to accommodate growth, what you're going to have in response to mounting demand is rising prices. Rosin: So the counterfactual history with no Jane Jacobs—I understand that this is imaginary—is what? You just build bigger, taller apartment buildings that more people can afford to move into, and you maintain it as a mixed neighborhood, which is partly immigrant, partly young professors? Appelbaum: Yeah, the counterfactual is that her neighborhood and other urban neighborhoods throughout the country continue to do what they had done right up until about 1970, which is that they evolve. Sometimes the buildings get taller; sometimes they get shorter. I lived in a neighborhood once that had seen lots of buildings have their top stories shorn off when demand had fallen. Cities morphed; they changed. And yes, in response to mounting demand, you would have had to build up. You have to make space for people to live in cities if you want to continue to attract new generations and give them the kinds of opportunities that previous generations have had. But she did not want that. And in fact, almost nobody ever wants that, which is a real challenge. Rosin: And is this aesthetic? Is it just that it's historic preservation? Is it just about: People arrive at a place, and they have an aesthetic preference, and that's what ends up freezing change? Like, that's what ends up preventing change? Appelbaum: Well, let's go back to the beginning of the 19th century, when we get this legal change, which says, You can just move someplace and establish residence. The reason that states make that change is because they are looking around at communities, and they see that communities individually are walling themselves off to new arrivals, even though, collectively, it is in the interest of the individual states and the United States to let people move around. They take that right away from communities. They recognize that if you let communities govern themselves, they will always wall themselves off. Change is really hard. It is uncomfortable. Even if a lot of changes leave you better off, while you're going through them, you may not welcome them. And if you give communities the power to say, We're going to pick and choose what we allow. We're going to pick and choose who can live here, then those communities will almost always exercise that power in exclusionary ways. And this is even worse: The communities that exercise it most effectively will be the ones that are filled with people with the time and the money and the resources and the education to do that. And so you'll separate out your population by race, by income. That's what happens. That's what was happening in the United States when we opened ourselves up to mobility. And we reversed that, and for a long stretch, we were this remarkable place where people could move where they wanted. And as we've switched that and given the tools back to local communities to make these decisions, the communities are behaving the way that local communities have always behaved, which is with a strong aversion to change and a disinclination to allow the interests of people who might move into the community to trump the interests of those who are already there. Rosin: And I guess the communities who are less willing to see themselves that way, because it goes against their sense of themselves, or progressive communities—like people who are interested in historic preservation, who say they love cities, who are interested in urban renewal—like, those are not the same people who think of themselves as complicit. I mean, your subtitle is accusatory. It's like, 'breaking the engine of opportunity.' Appelbaum: It is, and it's led to a lot of uncomfortable conversations with friends. But when I look out at the country, what I see clearly is that the people who believe that government can make a difference in the world, the people who believe that through laws and collective action, we can pursue public goods—they want government to do things like preserve history, protect the environment, help historically marginalized populations. Well, they create a set of tools to do this. They're inclined to see government use those tools. When, invariably, those tools get twisted against their original purposes and get used, instead, to reward affluence, it is the most progressive jurisdictions where this happens to the greatest extent. I'll give you a statistic from California that blew my mind, which is that for every 10 points the liberal vote share goes up in a California city, the number of new housing permits it issues drops by 30 percent. Rosin: You talked about how this changes our framework on certain things, like a housing crisis—that we tend to say there's a housing crisis, but that isn't quite right. Appelbaum: Yeah. We talk a lot about an affordable-housing crisis, but what we've got is a mobility crisis. And the distinction is twofold: One, there's a lot of cheap housing in America. It's not in the places where most people want to live. Housing tends to get really, really cheap when all the jobs disappear. I would not recommend relocating large numbers of Americans to those communities. Their prospects will be pretty bleak. You want the housing to be where the opportunities are rich. And so if all we're trying to do is make housing affordable, without an eye on where that housing is located, on what kinds of opportunities it opens up, we're pursuing the wrong solutions. We also often—and this is the other side of it—create solutions. If we think of it as an affordable-housing problem, you can do something like build a lot of new public housing. But we've never in this country managed to build enough public housing to meet demand. Usually, if you manage to get in, it's like a winning lottery ticket. Why would you ever give that up? Which is to say that you are stuck in place. You are tied to the place where you happen to be lucky enough to get the rent-controlled apartment, to get the public-housing unit, to get your voucher accepted after months of fruitless searching. And then you're really disinclined to leave, even if staying in that place puts you and your family at all kinds of disadvantages. And so if we have policy that's focused on allowing people to live where they want, rather than policy that's simply focused on affordability, we're likely to return not just the kind of social and economic dynamism that have made America a wonderful place to live, but we're also likely to return the sense of personal agency. Rosin: Okay. Last thing: In reading this book and having this conversation, what struck me is that, essentially, you're making a defense of America—its rootlessness, America's infinite choice. And right now, those two things—our rootlessness and our infinite choice—are things which we think of as cursing us. The words we often use now are loneliness, lack of community, bowling alone—however you want to call it. We talk a lot about our spiritual collapse as related to the same mobility and rootlessness that you describe as a positive force in the book. And I wonder how you've talked about that or reconciled it. Appelbaum: If you take a graph of when Americans joined a lot of clubs—the Bowling Alone graph, right, where Americans belong to a lot of voluntary associations and when they didn't—and you match it against the graph of when Americans have moved a lot and when they haven't, they line up really well, and they line up in a surprising way. When we're moving a lot, we're much likelier to build really vibrant communities. When you leave someplace and start over, you're gonna go to church on Sunday to try to find friends and build connections. Or if church is not for you, maybe you go to the local bar. Maybe you join the PTA. It depends on the phase of life that you're in. But when people relocate, they tend to be much more proactive in seeking out social connection. Over the course of time, we fall into familiar ruts. We tend not to make as many new connections. We tend not to join as many new organizations. And people who have been a resident for a long time in a place—they may list a lot more things that they belong to, but they're less likely to be attending them, and they're less likely to add new ones. The peak of American communal life comes during our peaks of mobility. When we're moving around a lot, we're creating a really vibrant civil society that was the envy of the world. And over the last 50 years, as we've moved less and less and less, all of those things have atrophied. And there's one other side, too, which is: It's not just about measuring the health of voluntary organizations. If you're moving a lot, you're giving yourself a chance to define who you want to be, to build the connections that are important and meaningful to you, as opposed to the ones that you've inherited. We know something about how that works psychologically. People who are trapped in inherited identities tend to become more cynical, more embittered, more disconnected over time. People who have the chance to choose their identities tend to be more hopeful. They tend to see a growing pie that can be divided more ways, and therefore they're more welcoming of strangers and new arrivals. They tend to be more optimistic. And if you restore that dynamism, it doesn't mean that you've got to leave behind your inherited identities. It means that committing to those inherited identities becomes a matter of active choice too. And so the United States, traditionally, was a country that was much more religious than the rest of the world, because people could commit to those faiths that they were adopting or sticking with. Americans were expected to have a narrative of, like, Why do I go to church? It wasn't something which was really comprehensible to somebody who came from a country where everybody had the same faith. You didn't have to ask yourself, Why am I Muslim? Why am I Catholic? In America, you always did. And so our faith traditions tended to be particularly vibrant. So it's not some sort of assault on tradition. I'm not advocating that we dissolve our social ties and each new generation negotiate new ones. I'm saying, the thing that has made American traditions very vibrant, the thing that often made American immigrants more patriotic than the people in the lands they left behind, and American churchgoers more religious than they had been in the old world was precisely the fact that they got to choose. And even committing to your old traditions and your inherited identities became a matter of active choice, and something that was much more important to folks. And so you got the vibrancy both ways—both the new affiliations that you could create, the old traditions that you chose to double down on. But it all stemmed from individual agency. You have to give people the chance to start over so that their decision to stay is equally meaningful. If you choose to stay, that's great. If you feel like you've got no choice, that's really terrible. Rosin: All right. Well, thank you, Yoni, for laying that out and joining us today. Appelbaum: Oh, it's a pleasure. [] Rosin: Thanks again to Yoni Appelbaum. His book, again, is Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
20-02-2025
- General
- Atlantic
Americans Are Stuck. Who's to Blame?
May 1, 9 a.m., was once the hour of chaos in New York City. In a tradition dating back to colonial days, leases all over the city expired precisely at that time. Thousands of tenants would load their belongings on carts and move, stepping around other people's piles of clothing and furniture. Paintings of that day look like a mass eviction, or the aftermath of some kind of disaster. In fact, that day represented a novel American form of hope. Mobility, or the right to decide where you wanted to live, was a great American innovation. But lately, that mobility is stalling, with real consequences for politics, culture, and the national mood. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Yoni Appelbaum, a senior editor and the author of the new book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Appelbaum explains how, over the decades, several forces combined to make it harder for the average American to move and improve their circumstances. And he lands at some surprising culprits: progressives, such as Jane Jacobs, who wanted to save cities but instead wound up blocking natural urban evolution and shutting newcomers out. The following is a transcript of the episode: Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Hanna Rosin. I have moved many times in my life: across continents, across the country, back and forth across D.C., which is where I live now. And I didn't think much about it. I just chalked it up to restlessness—until I read Yoni Appelbaum's new book, which is also the March cover story in The Atlantic. The book is called Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Appelbaum argues that there is and always has been something quintessentially American—and also, quintessentially hopeful—about moving. In the 19th century, Moving Day was, like, a thing —a holiday celebrated across different American cities at different times, when everybody would just up and move. To quote Appelbaum: 'Nothing quite so astonished visitors from abroad as the spectacle of thousands upon thousands of people picking up and swapping homes in a single day.' But moving isn't happening so much anymore. As Appelbaum writes: 'Every year, fewer Americans can afford to live where they want to.' So what happens to a country—geographically, culturally, politically, and, in some ways, psychologically—when mobility starts to stall? [ Music ] Rosin: Can you read this from your intro, these couple of sentences? Yoni Appelbaum: 'The notion that people should be able to choose their own communities—instead of being stuck where they happen to be born—is America's most profound contribution to the world … The fact that it is now endangered is not just a problem for housing markets; it's a lethal threat to the entire American project.' Rosin: Okay. Let's start with the second half: Why is mobility the thing that defines the American project? Appelbaum: It is the thing that defines the American project, because it was the first thing that anyone who got here from Europe noticed. People would come to the United States and gawk. They saw this as either our greatest asset or our great national character flaw. But they were amazed at how often Americans moved. And they were particularly amazed that the Americans who were moving were not moving out of desperation, that Americans tended to be doing okay in one place and to still want something more for themselves—want something better for their children—and to move someplace else in pursuit of it. Rosin: And you're not just describing something geographic. You're describing something psychological. Appelbaum: Yeah. I'm talking about an attitude that Americans believed that they could change their destinies by changing their address, that they could move someplace new and do better than they were doing. And also—and this is the second half of the answer—Americans believed that they were not defined by the circumstances of their birth. That was the great gift that mobility gave us. And that had really profound implications that took me a while to unravel. Rosin: Right. Because it's not just about geography. It's not just about money. It's about a sense of yourself as having infinite possibilities. Like, you could just move and move. You weren't class-bound in any way. Appelbaum: Here's the thing about American individualism: We are individuals, in the sense that we have the ability to construct our own identities, but we define ourselves by virtue of the communities that we choose to join. Throughout the world, communities tended to choose their members. Even in the early United States, in the colonial era, if you tried to move in someplace, you could be warned out. The town had the right to say, Hey. You may have bought property here. You may have leased a building. You may have a job. We don't want you here. And not surprisingly, they disproportionately warned out the poor. They warned out minorities. Really, American communities, for the first couple hundred years of European settlement, were members-only clubs. And then in the early 19th century, there's a legal revolution. And instead of allowing communities to choose their members, we allow people to choose their communities. You could move someplace and say, I intend to live here, and that was enough to become a legal resident of that place. Rosin: So just in numbers, can you give a sense of where we are now? What's the statistic that shows most starkly the decline in mobility now? Appelbaum: In the 19th century, as best I can calculate it, probably one out of three Americans moved every year. Rosin: Every year? Appelbaum: Every year. In some cities, it might be half. In the 20th century, as late as 1970, it was one out of five. And the census in December told us we just set a new record, an all-time low. It's dropped over the last 50 years to one out of 13. It is the most profound social change to overcome America in the last half century. Rosin: It's so interesting, because if you told me that someone moved that many times in a year, I would not associate that with upward mobility. I would associate that with desperation and problems. Appelbaum: For a long time, that's exactly what historians thought too. There was this guy, Stephan Thernstrom, who set out to investigate this, and thought what he had discovered, in all this moving about, was what he called the 'floating proletariat,' right? Here was evidence that, in America, the American dream was chimerical. You couldn't actually attain it. There was this great mass of people just moving from one place to another to another. And several decades later, as we got better data-mining tools, we were able to follow up on the floating proletariat and find out what happened to them. The people who had stayed in one place, Thernstrom saw—they were doing a little better than they had before. But when we could track the people who had left, it turned out, they were doing much better, that the people who relocate—even the ones at the bottom of the class structure—across every decade that historians can study, it's the case that the people who move do better economically. And this is really key: Their kids do better than the people who stayed where they were. Rosin: It's like Americans are, in their soul, psychological immigrants. Like, that we behave the way we think of immigrants behaving, and the more robustly we do that, the better off Americans are. The most evocative image that you draw is something called 'Moving Day,' from an earlier era. I had never heard of that. Can you paint a picture of what that is? Appelbaum: We've got these wonderful accounts of Moving Day from people who came over, more or less, just to see it. By law or by custom, in most cities and in most rural areas, all unwritten leases expired on the same day of the year. And this actually gave renters an enormous leg up in the world in most times, in most places, because it meant that an enormous number of properties were potentially available to them. They could go back to their landlord and say, If you want me to stay for another year, you gotta fix the leaky sink. Or they could try someplace better. And they would all pile their possessions down at the curb. First thing in the morning, they'd hire a cart to take them across town or down the lane, and then they would push past the family that was moving out of some other apartment or townhouse or home. As they were taking their stuff out, they'd be moving their stuff in. But between sunup and sundown, a quarter, a third, half of a city might relocate. And there are these descriptions of trash lining the gutters as things fell out of the carts or there wasn't room for it in the new apartment, and people would go scavenging through the gutters, trying to find, out of the trash, their own treasures. It was raucous and wild, and respectable Americans always looked down on it. And yet, for the people who participated in it, it was a way to have their home be kind of like an iPhone or a car: You keep the one you have for a year or two, and then you trade up for a newer model. Rosin: So upgrades. Now, where is this happening? Is this happening in cities of a certain size, in immigrant communities? Like, who is doing all this chaotic moving? Appelbaum: Well, that's one thing that really upset the upper crust. Rosin: And who are they? Let's define all the sides. Who are the respectable Americans? Appelbaum: The respectable Americans are those of long-standing stock who are trying very hard to impress the European cousins. And they are appalled that this defect of their national character—that people don't know their place. They don't know their station. They're always moving around looking for something better for themselves, and they write about it in those kinds of moralistic terms. But the people who are participating in it, it's very broad. I mean, when you're talking about half the city moving, what you're talking about is activity that's as much a middle-class and upper-middle-class activity as it is a working-class activity. As long as you are adding a good number of fresh new homes to the market every year, pretty much everybody who moved could move up, because the wealthy were buying brand-new homes that had just been erected. But they were vacating, you know, homes that were a few years older or apartments that they were moving out of, and those became available to the upper-middle class, right? And you'd get a chain of moves. You can trace this, you know, a dozen, 15 moves, one family succeeding another, succeeding another—and everybody moving up to something a little bit better than they had the year before. And, you know, just like an iPhone or a car, they're chasing technological innovation. One year, you move into a new apartment, and it's got running water. And, you know, two years later, the water runs hot and cold, and it's a miracle, right? So everybody is constantly moving up in the world as they constantly relocate. Rosin: So there are decades of massive amounts of mobility. It's considered respectable enough. And then, at some moment, a few forces start to slow this all down. So can you tell the story of what happens in Lower Manhattan? Appelbaum: Yeah. It's sort of a sad story when you look closely at it. Lower Manhattan, the Lower East Side, is like no place that's ever existed before or since. It is so dense. People are living in tenements at a sort of rate per acre, the way demographers measure this, that is multiples of any place in Manhattan today. Rosin: Do you remember the numbers? Because I think they're extraordinary. Maybe I'm just remembering this from going to the Tenement Museum, but when you actually look at the density numbers, they are just hard to get your head around. Appelbaum: Yeah. I think it's, like, 600 per acre. It's really, really, really high. There's no place in Manhattan today that's even a third as dense, even though the buildings are now much, much taller. So they're really squeezed in there. And reformers are appalled. And there are real problems with some of these, you know—what they're really appalled about, it turns out, is less the housing conditions than the presence of so many immigrants, with their foreign ways, foreign religion, foreign languages, weird foods, odd smells, right? They're looking at this, and they are not happy that this is invading their city. They're not subtle about it. They're quite clear that they think that apartments are themselves degrading. This is the original progressive era, and there's a tight intertwining between the reformers and government, and they move fluidly among them. Rosin: Wait. Like, who is the 'they'? Are we talking about city planners? Just, this is a really interesting moment. So I just want to—because it's unexpected, this part of the history. Appelbaum: Lawrence Wheeler is sort of Mr. Tenement Reform. He's the guy who will write most of the reports, who'll serve on the commissions, who'll move in as the first deputy commissioner of the Tenement Office when New York creates one. Like, he is both a government official and a reformer, and that was pretty typical. They move fluidly among these jobs. And he is the guy who really goes on a crusade against tenements. And maybe the most remarkable moment in my research was stumbling across a speech he gave at a conference, where somebody had asked, How do you keep apartments out of your city? And he says, Well, you know. The problem is: If you put it to a vote, you can't keep them out of your city, because people actually like living in apartments. They serve a useful function. So what you have to do is solve it the way I've done it in New York: You call it fire-safety regulation. And you put a bunch of regulations on the apartments that make them prohibitively expensive to build. But be careful not to put any fire-safety regulations on single- or two-family homes, because that would make them too expensive. And as long as you call it 'fire safety,' you can get away with keeping the apartments and their residents out of your neighborhoods. And it's one of those moments where, you know, you just sort of gape at the page, and you think, I can't believe he actually said it. I was worried, maybe, I was reading too much into some of the other things that he'd said. But here he is straightforwardly saying that much of the regulatory project that he and other progressives pursued was purely pretextual. They were trying to find a whole set of rules that could make it too expensive for immigrants to move into their neighborhoods. Rosin: So we're in a moment of just resistance to tenements and apartments and crowdedness. How does this, then, become encoded? What's the next step they take? Appelbaum: You know, the problem with building codes is that, ultimately, there are ways around them. People are developing new technologies. It's not enough to keep the apartments back. It's not enough to pen the immigrants into the Lower East Side. And there's a bigger problem, which is that the garment industry in New York is moving up Fifth Avenue. And on their lunch breaks, the Jewish garment workers are getting some fresh air on the sidewalks, and this infuriates the owners of the wealthy department stores on Fifth Avenue, who say, You're scaring off our wealthy customers. And they want to push them out. They try rounding them up and carting them off in police wagons. They try negotiating with the garment-factory owners. But, of course, these workers want to be out on the sidewalk. It's their one chance for fresh air, and it's a public sidewalk. So there's a limit to what they can do, and they finally hit on a new solution, which is: If you change the law so that you can't build tall buildings near these department stores, then you can push the garment factories back down toward the Lower East Side. Rosin: You know, anytime you step into the history of the technical and possibly boring word zoning, you hit racism. Appelbaum: You know, the thing about zoning, which is sort of the original sin of zoning—which is a tool invented on the West Coast to push the Chinese out of towns and then applied— Rosin: —in progressive Berkeley! That's another thing I learned in your book, is how Berkeley, essentially, has such racist zoning origins. Appelbaum: It's a really painful story, and zoning, ultimately, is about saying there are always laws, which said there are things that you can't do in crowded residential areas. But zoning was a set of tools, which said, Some things are going to be okay on one side of the tracks and not okay on the other. And given that that was the approach from the beginning, it was always about separating populations into different spaces. And so New York adopts the first citywide zoning code. And at first, this is spreading from city to city. The New Deal will take it national. Rosin: And what does—the zoning code is not explicitly racist? What does it actually say in the government documents? Appelbaum: Well, that's the brilliance of the zoning code. The courts have been striking down explicit racial segregation. But if you wrote your ordinance carefully enough and never mentioned race, you could segregate land by its use. You could figure out how to allow in some parts of your city only really expensive housing, or in other parts of your city, you could put all of the jobs that a particular immigrant group tended to have. Rosin: Like the Chinese laundromat on the West Coast. Like, No laundromats. That's the famous one. Appelbaum: Exactly. That's the original zoning ordinance: We're gonna push all the laundries back into Chinatown. And if you push the laundries into Chinatown, you're pushing their workers into Chinatown. So there were ways to effectively segregate—not foolproof, but effectively segregate—your population without ever having to use any racial language in the ordinance, and so it could stand up in court but still segregate your population. Rosin: Okay, so we have zoning laws, we have government complicity in kind of dividing where people live, and then we have someone who comes in as a supposed savior, particularly of Lower Manhattan. Maybe not a savior, but someone who appreciates the diversity in the city as it is, and that's Jane Jacobs. And you tell a very different story of the role she plays in all of this, which really brings us to the modern era. So can you talk about who she is and what role she played in transforming Lower Manhattan? Appelbaum: Yeah, it's a little heartbreaking sometimes to look closely at your heroes and find out that the story you thought you knew is not the one that actually played out. Jane Jacobs was a woman who saw clearly what it was that made cities great, at a time when almost nobody wanted to recognize that. She saw the diversity of their populations, of their uses, the way that people mixed together as being not, as the progressives had it, something that needed to be corrected with rational planning, but as a strength that needed to be recognized and rescued and reinforced. And she stood tall against urban renewal, against the notion that the way to save cities was to knock them flat and to rebuild them with all the uses very carefully segregated out. And she wrote this brilliant book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that laid out these principles, and she saved her own neighborhood from urban renewal and became, in the process, sort of the patron saint of urbanism. And her great lesson that she took from all of these experiences was that you needed to empower individuals with a deep appreciation of urban life, with the tools to stop governments. And that was the gospel that she preached. And in many ways, it was necessary at that moment, at the peak of urban renewal. But what she didn't understand at the time—maybe couldn't have understood at the time—was that she was going to create problems that were even worse than the problems that she was trying to prevent. [ Music ] Rosin: After the break: how Jane Jacobs inadvertently contributed to the stuckness of America. [ Break ] Rosin: Okay, so here we have Jane Jacobs. She moves into—what street was that that she moved into? Appelbaum: She moves into 555 Hudson Street. Rosin: Okay, she's on Hudson Street. That's an amazing place to live. What had been all around her was—who was living there at the time? It wasn't other people like her. Appelbaum: No, it mostly wasn't. She and her husband are two working professionals in Manhattan who are able to pay all cash for a townhouse on this block that is mostly filled with immigrant families. And it's changing at the time. She's not alone in coming in, in that way. But it's mostly been a neighborhood of immigrants, the children of immigrants. It's got tons of street-front retail, and she writes about this beautifully, which activates the street front. The eyes on the street keep them safe during the day. She writes about the intricate ballet of the sidewalk as people dodge around each other, and people each pursuing their own tasks are able to live in harmony, in concert. She writes about this block absolutely beautifully, even as she is killing all of it. Rosin: So if we freeze her there, then she's a heroine of the city who appreciates it in all its diversity. So then what happens? How does the tragedy begin? Appelbaum: You know, I tracked down the family that was in that building before she bought it. It was a man named Rudolf Heckler. Two of his adult children and his wife were working in a candy store on the ground floor. So they were renting, living above the shop that they operated, and that shop was everything that Jacobs says make cities great. It was a place where you could go and drop your keys if you're going to be out for a while, and your kid could come pick them up and let themselves into the house. It was a place where you could just stop and talk to your neighbors. It was the kind of thing that Jacobs praised, but when she buys the building, she gut renovates it. She tears out the storefront. She turns it into a single-family home. She rips off the facade of this historic building and replaces it with modern metal-sash windows. She so thoroughly alters the appearance, presents a blank front to the street, where before there'd been a lively storefront, that when they eventually, at her urging, historically landmark the block, they find that the building that she lives in has no historic value whatsoever. And so here, you have somebody who has written this ode to the way people are living around her but buys a building within it and changes it to suit her own family's need—which was a reasonable thing, I should say, for her to do under the circumstances—but then landmarks the block, which prevents people from building new buildings in the way that that block had always had. So there's a couple buildings right next to hers that have been torn down and turned into a six-story apartment building before she moves in. But her changes make it so that nobody can do that again. And if you're not building new buildings to accommodate growth, what you're going to have in response to mounting demand is rising prices. Rosin: So the counterfactual history with no Jane Jacobs—I understand that this is imaginary—is what? You just build bigger, taller apartment buildings that more people can afford to move into, and you maintain it as a mixed neighborhood, which is partly immigrant, partly young professors? Appelbaum: Yeah, the counterfactual is that her neighborhood and other urban neighborhoods throughout the country continue to do what they had done right up until about 1970, which is that they evolve. Sometimes the buildings get taller; sometimes they get shorter. I lived in a neighborhood once that had seen lots of buildings have their top stories shorn off when demand had fallen. Cities morphed; they changed. And yes, in response to mounting demand, you would have had to build up. You have to make space for people to live in cities if you want to continue to attract new generations and give them the kinds of opportunities that previous generations have had. But she did not want that. And in fact, almost nobody ever wants that, which is a real challenge. Rosin: And is this aesthetic? Is it just that it's historic preservation? Is it just about: People arrive at a place, and they have an aesthetic preference, and that's what ends up freezing change? Like, that's what ends up preventing change? Appelbaum: Well, let's go back to the beginning of the 19th century, when we get this legal change, which says, You can just move someplace and establish residence. The reason that states make that change is because they are looking around at communities, and they see that communities individually are walling themselves off to new arrivals, even though, collectively, it is in the interest of the individual states and the United States to let people move around. They take that right away from communities. They recognize that if you let communities govern themselves, they will always wall themselves off. Change is really hard. It is uncomfortable. Even if a lot of changes leave you better off, while you're going through them, you may not welcome them. And if you give communities the power to say, We're going to pick and choose what we allow. We're going to pick and choose who can live here, then those communities will almost always exercise that power in exclusionary ways. And this is even worse: The communities that exercise it most effectively will be the ones that are filled with people with the time and the money and the resources and the education to do that. And so you'll separate out your population by race, by income. That's what happens. That's what was happening in the United States when we opened ourselves up to mobility. And we reversed that, and for a long stretch, we were this remarkable place where people could move where they wanted. And as we've switched that and given the tools back to local communities to make these decisions, the communities are behaving the way that local communities have always behaved, which is with a strong aversion to change and a disinclination to allow the interests of people who might move into the community to trump the interests of those who are already there. Rosin: And I guess the communities who are less willing to see themselves that way, because it goes against their sense of themselves, or progressive communities—like people who are interested in historic preservation, who say they love cities, who are interested in urban renewal—like, those are not the same people who think of themselves as complicit. I mean, your subtitle is accusatory. It's like, 'breaking the engine of opportunity.' Appelbaum: It is, and it's led to a lot of uncomfortable conversations with friends. But when I look out at the country, what I see clearly is that the people who believe that government can make a difference in the world, the people who believe that through laws and collective action, we can pursue public goods—they want government to do things like preserve history, protect the environment, help historically marginalized populations. Well, they create a set of tools to do this. They're inclined to see government use those tools. When, invariably, those tools get twisted against their original purposes and get used, instead, to reward affluence, it is the most progressive jurisdictions where this happens to the greatest extent. I'll give you a statistic from California that blew my mind, which is that for every 10 points the liberal vote share goes up in a California city, the number of new housing permits it issues drops by 30 percent. Rosin: You talked about how this changes our framework on certain things, like a housing crisis—that we tend to say there's a housing crisis, but that isn't quite right. Appelbaum: Yeah. We talk a lot about an affordable-housing crisis, but what we've got is a mobility crisis. And the distinction is twofold: One, there's a lot of cheap housing in America. It's not in the places where most people want to live. Housing tends to get really, really cheap when all the jobs disappear. I would not recommend relocating large numbers of Americans to those communities. Their prospects will be pretty bleak. You want the housing to be where the opportunities are rich. And so if all we're trying to do is make housing affordable, without an eye on where that housing is located, on what kinds of opportunities it opens up, we're pursuing the wrong solutions. We also often—and this is the other side of it—create solutions. If we think of it as an affordable-housing problem, you can do something like build a lot of new public housing. But we've never in this country managed to build enough public housing to meet demand. Usually, if you manage to get in, it's like a winning lottery ticket. Why would you ever give that up? Which is to say that you are stuck in place. You are tied to the place where you happen to be lucky enough to get the rent-controlled apartment, to get the public-housing unit, to get your voucher accepted after months of fruitless searching. And then you're really disinclined to leave, even if staying in that place puts you and your family at all kinds of disadvantages. And so if we have policy that's focused on allowing people to live where they want, rather than policy that's simply focused on affordability, we're likely to return not just the kind of social and economic dynamism that have made America a wonderful place to live, but we're also likely to return the sense of personal agency. Rosin: Okay. Last thing: In reading this book and having this conversation, what struck me is that, essentially, you're making a defense of America—its rootlessness, America's infinite choice. And right now, those two things—our rootlessness and our infinite choice—are things which we think of as cursing us. The words we often use now are loneliness, lack of community, bowling alone —however you want to call it. We talk a lot about our spiritual collapse as related to the same mobility and rootlessness that you describe as a positive force in the book. And I wonder how you've talked about that or reconciled it. Appelbaum: If you take a graph of when Americans joined a lot of clubs—the Bowling Alone graph, right, where Americans belong to a lot of voluntary associations and when they didn't—and you match it against the graph of when Americans have moved a lot and when they haven't, they line up really well, and they line up in a surprising way. When we're moving a lot, we're much likelier to build really vibrant communities. When you leave someplace and start over, you're gonna go to church on Sunday to try to find friends and build connections. Or if church is not for you, maybe you go to the local bar. Maybe you join the PTA. It depends on the phase of life that you're in. But when people relocate, they tend to be much more proactive in seeking out social connection. Over the course of time, we fall into familiar ruts. We tend not to make as many new connections. We tend not to join as many new organizations. And people who have been a resident for a long time in a place—they may list a lot more things that they belong to, but they're less likely to be attending them, and they're less likely to add new ones. The peak of American communal life comes during our peaks of mobility. When we're moving around a lot, we're creating a really vibrant civil society that was the envy of the world. And over the last 50 years, as we've moved less and less and less, all of those things have atrophied. And there's one other side, too, which is: It's not just about measuring the health of voluntary organizations. If you're moving a lot, you're giving yourself a chance to define who you want to be, to build the connections that are important and meaningful to you, as opposed to the ones that you've inherited. We know something about how that works psychologically. People who are trapped in inherited identities tend to become more cynical, more embittered, more disconnected over time. People who have the chance to choose their identities tend to be more hopeful. They tend to see a growing pie that can be divided more ways, and therefore they're more welcoming of strangers and new arrivals. They tend to be more optimistic. And if you restore that dynamism, it doesn't mean that you've got to leave behind your inherited identities. It means that committing to those inherited identities becomes a matter of active choice too. And so the United States, traditionally, was a country that was much more religious than the rest of the world, because people could commit to those faiths that they were adopting or sticking with. Americans were expected to have a narrative of, like, Why do I go to church? It wasn't something which was really comprehensible to somebody who came from a country where everybody had the same faith. You didn't have to ask yourself, Why am I Muslim? Why am I Catholic? In America, you always did. And so our faith traditions tended to be particularly vibrant. So it's not some sort of assault on tradition. I'm not advocating that we dissolve our social ties and each new generation negotiate new ones. I'm saying, the thing that has made American traditions very vibrant, the thing that often made American immigrants more patriotic than the people in the lands they left behind, and American churchgoers more religious than they had been in the old world was precisely the fact that they got to choose. And even committing to your old traditions and your inherited identities became a matter of active choice, and something that was much more important to folks. And so you got the vibrancy both ways—both the new affiliations that you could create, the old traditions that you chose to double down on. But it all stemmed from individual agency. You have to give people the chance to start over so that their decision to stay is equally meaningful. If you choose to stay, that's great. If you feel like you've got no choice, that's really terrible. Rosin: All right. Well, thank you, Yoni, for laying that out and joining us today. Appelbaum: Oh, it's a pleasure. [ Music ] Rosin: Thanks again to Yoni Appelbaum. His book, again, is Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.
