Yoni Appelbaum’s Book “Stuck” Argues that Progressive Policies Have Frozen Social Mobility
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. Yoni Applebaum's new book, Stuck, is a fascinating entry in the genre of books about America that seek to answer the question, "Why are we like this?" And why is it like this right now? An academic historian turned Atlantic editor, Applebaum meticulously pulls a single concept through our country's timeline: mobility.

The ability for people to choose where they want to live and to, in general, move towards opportunity. It defined American life for decades and then over the last 50 years ground to a halt. Why? We'll get into it. But Applebaum argues that this change in mobility has been crucial to the erosion of American civic life. Coming up next, after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.

If you want to understand how Americans think about geographic mobility and you are a trained historian, you might very well go back to the colonial era as Yoni Applebaum does in his new book, "Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity." And back there in the shards of history, he's able to identify two strands of the country's underlying attitude towards property and community.

Drawing on Massachusetts and Virginia colonial traditions, Applebaum argues, quote, "...today Americans are a nation of individual landholders who expect to be able to do as they please with their own property, just as if they were Virginia gentlemen, even as they also expect to be able to tell their neighbors what they may do with theirs, just as if they lived in New England's covenanted communities."

We have not, that is to say, resolved some of the key tensions built into the founding of the country, and in our times, this contradictory impulse around what exactly property rights entail and what a neighborhood or city should be have created bizarre conditions.

We have nearly free housing in places with low economic opportunity like Flint, Michigan, and wildly, impossibly expensive housing in places with high economic opportunity like your beloved Bay Area. And as a result, people are stuck. They're moving less often, and Applebaum counterintuitively says that's not actually good for their civic participation.

It's a thought-provoking and unusual book, and we're so glad to have you here to discuss it. Yoni Applebaum, Atlantic deputy editor, welcome. YONI APPELBAUM: Oh, thank you so much for having me. So I think most Americans, and particularly Californians, are pretty familiar with this idea that the country is built on movement, that mobility is really baked into the American identity because so many of us have come from other places to the state.

So to you, as you researched why mobility was important to the United States, what are the key features that make it so important? Yeah, it's really tricky to recover just how weird this is. In the old world, most people were tied to a particular place. And that didn't just mean to a spot of land, although it meant that, but also to a particular place in the social hierarchy. Pretty much every defining feature of your life would have been something that was inherited.

your parents' occupation, where they stood in terms of their social class, the village to which you were tied. When people settle in the New World, particularly

Particularly in what becomes the United States, they invent a new way of being in the world. It takes a couple hundred years. It's fiercely contested. It's unequally enjoyed. But they create a freedom of movement, the chance to join a community just because you decide you want to belong to that community. Right.

And to redefine your life through that choice. And when you move someplace new, we know a lot about what happens. It's a chance not just to land someplace where there are better economic opportunities for yourselves and for your family. It's a chance to...

Define a new identity, to join new organizations, to figure out who you are in the world. And that is the source of many of the things that Americans really cherish about their society. It comes out of this ability to decide where you want to live. I mean, just on the statistical front, how much more did people move into the past relative to now?

You know, it's kind of amazing to recover this. In the 19th century, probably one out of three Americans moved every year. As late as 1970, it's one out of five. And since then, there's been this precipitous decline. Last year, the census says, we set a new record, and it's only one in 13. We've never been this immobile, and much of our society was not designed to work this way. What do you mean?

Well, you know, America is a place that has always prided itself on its diversity, on its ability to absorb new arrivals, on its ability to be economically dynamic. If you lose jobs in one part of the country, that in theory is going to be okay because people can move to where the jobs are.

For the last 50 years, we've had the dynamism of America, its lack of a social safety net, but we haven't had...

the ability of people to chase opportunity in the same way that they once did. You know, I think about the Bay Area this way a lot. 50 years ago, if you were a janitor in Alabama and you'd moved to the Bay Area, you would have earned more as a janitor in the Bay Area. Actually, you know, it would have been more than that. You might have switched jobs because there would have been other kinds of opportunities open to you. Your kids would have done better. But the key thing is when you move there on day one with the same job you had back home, you would have ended up ahead.

Today, that's still true for a lawyer in Alabama. If he moves to the Bay Area, he'll make a lot more, or a software engineer. It's not true of people further down the income scale. That janitor who moves to San Francisco today is going to end up paying so much more in rent and other cost of living expenses that it will more than wipe out any wage gains he has. He'll end every month further behind than he was. And so people are not moving anymore. Yeah.

We're talking with Atlantic deputy editor Yoni Applebaum about his new book, Stuck.

how the privileged and the property broke the engine of American opportunity. We want to hear from you. I mean, have you moved, you know, towns or states or countries for a better opportunity or education? How did your situation change? You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. Forum at kqed.org. You can find us on social media, of course, Blue Sky, Instagram, we're KQED Forum, and there's the Discord, of course.

Yoni, I mean, an interesting component of this is that when we, when I think of the period that you're talking about, or you know, that you just mentioned, say pre-1970, where people are still moving a lot, as you note, I also think of it as kind of the high point for local civic institutions, which seem to depend on long-time residents. Is that not actually true? Or like, how do you kind of square that?

Yeah, it's actually entirely counterintuitive and it's a little bit of a surprise to me. What happens is that when people move someplace new, it's uncomfortable to go and start a new relationship, join a new group. But when you land in a new town for the first time and you intend, you think you might be

be settling in. You go to church on Sunday, maybe you haven't been to church in years, but you show up to meet people. Maybe you turn to the person next to you at the bar and you actually initiate a conversation, one of the most awkward things you can do in a bar, right? Like, it's hard to put yourself out there. It's hard to get involved in things. When Americans were moving a lot, you know, Europeans who came over here and looked at our society, they were struck by two things. One was, we're always moving someplace else. We're always

Even if we're doing okay, we're seeking to do a little bit better. We have all this ambition. They're very unsettled by it. They're also deeply jealous of our civic life. And they don't see that these things are two sides of the same coin. The fact that people are always arriving in communities, it gives people a chance to build these organizations because they're not the interloper who's not welcome in the community.

And it also gives them the impetus to put themselves out there, to live in that uncomfortable spot where you're building new relationships and joining new organizations. And over the last 50 years, you know, our mobility and our civic life have fallen entirely in tandem. And it's not coincidental. It's the fact that people are not moving into new communities, not getting involved in things as they once did. If you live in a community for a long time and you work

You want to have more opportunity, you don't. You're likely to become alienated, disengaged. You allow your relationships to atrophy over time and communities- You get stuck. Yeah, with high levels of residential stagnation. They just don't join.

It's interesting too because some of the features of so-called American character that you're noting that Europeans at least saw, a lot of time people have ascribed that to the idea that there was an American frontier. And I'm kind of air quoting here. You say like actually a lot of the movement wasn't happening on the frontier, so to speak, but actually back in the older parts of the American country.

Yeah, it sounds like sort of an odd claim until you remember that's where most people lived. And so it's only a very, very small fraction of the population which is pushing along the frontier. Most of the population lives in densely settled areas, and they're moving all the time. They have remarkably high rates of residential mobility in the 19th and well into the 20th century. Americans understand that...

Well, they understand themselves this way. It's fascinating to go back and read their self-definition. They say, we're not a nation of oysters. We're not meant to be stuck in one place. Mobility is our national character. They really see themselves as distinctive from Europeans in that they are willing to pick up and move toward opportunity. Yeah.

One thing that's really interesting for those of us in the Bay Area who have endured many news cycles about out-migration from California, particularly to places like Texas and Florida, people ostensibly moving for some kind of opportunity. Is it just that the numbers really aren't there for that, or is mobility picking up again for some reason, at least out of places like California?

Yeah. You know, for 200 years, Americans moved to places with better economic opportunities. That sort of plateaus starting in the 70s and 80s into the 90s. And over the last two decades, we've actually seen a reversal of the flow. Instead of people moving from the poorest places to the richest places in America, we now have people moving from the wealthy places out to where the housing is cheaper.

And that has become the prime driver of mobility. People are not leaving necessarily because they think they'll have better jobs, because their children will have better prospects. They're moving because they can't afford to live in the place they want to live, or at least that's what they tell researchers. And they want to go someplace where they can afford to own a home or to rent an apartment large enough for their family. And that is really surprising.

Scary to me because you're talking about people who know where they want to be, who know what communities they want to belong to. And for the first time, they're being denied the opportunity to have that choice.

And in three sentences, would you say that the problem is essentially not enough multifamily housing has been built in American cities? Is that sort of the answer in the end? Yeah. Single family, multifamily, we're not building enough housing. And we did for a long time. If a place boomed, people put up more housing to accommodate new arrivals. Now when a place booms, you end up in a 10-year process before a zoning board of appeals and it's impossible to build. Yeah.

We are talking with Atlantic deputy editor Yoni Applebaum about his new book. It's called Stuck: How the Privileged and the Property Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. And of course, we want to hear from you. I mean, perhaps

Have you felt that you can't move because of your housing situation or other needs? Maybe geographic mobility has played a key role in your family's story. We'd love to hear that as well. You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. Forum at kqed.org. You can find us on Blue Sky. You can find us on Instagram. We're KQED Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.

Turing with Tia is the quirky YouTube talk show where Tia Creighton is the host and all her guests are talking AI chatbots. Whether it's health and beauty, science and technology, pop culture, or current events, Turing with Tia delivers answers about everything. That's T-U-R-I-N-G, Turing with Tia, a funny and fascinating way to experience artificial intelligence. Only on YouTube at Turing with Tia.

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Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We're joined by Atlantic deputy editor Yoni Applebaum talking about his new book, Stuck, How the Privileged and the Property Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Yoni, we're going to just go right to some calls. Lots of people want to talk about this. Let's bring in Marie in Oakland. Welcome, Marie. Oh, hi there. Thank you for taking my call. Yeah, this is a really interesting conversation. You know, the point that stands out is the bigger picture for me and the economic context.

of the trends and how these trends have evolved over time where we've seen really the economic opportunities are in urban areas. And then in the rural areas, you're seeing the loss of, you know, what we talked about before, manufacturing and the corporatization of agriculture. And to me, I

I'd be curious to hear what your thoughts are on how these are the real underlying drivers of this phenomenon, which is a very fascinating question. Thank you so much, Marie. Yoni? It's such a great question. You know, the first time I can find this complaint is in the 1840s in Ohio. It's the first place in America. You get a whole countryside emptying out, and people are really alarmed about the loss of opportunity.

Being in 1840s Ohio is not a great place to raise your family. By 1890s Ohio, it's one of the wealthiest places on earth. These things are cyclical. I can't tell you what the future brings, and we've certainly seen a concentration of opportunity in a handful of mega regions, but it's not just...

big cities, you know, Northwest Arkansas is a place that is booming. Um, there are places in America, uh, even rural places that offer an awful lot of opportunity today. So yes, the trend is toward greater concentration. Um, but what is really striking is, is that as patterns of land use and opportunity shift, we've usually allowed for enough construction that people can go to wherever is, is booming this decade. Uh, and, and then their kids and their grandkids relocate to wherever is booming the next decade. Uh,

And that's really what has changed more than a shift in opportunity, which has been as close to a constant as we have in American history. I mean, what's fascinating to me is you can find complaints, say, in Silicon Valley about what was called in the late 70s the jobs-housing imbalance. You can find that back in the 1970s with people essentially saying, if we don't build more housing, we're going to end up with a situation where no one can afford to live here anymore.

but that more housing is not built right um so let's start peeling back through um some of these layers um one that i wanted to get to because i'm much less familiar with this history um you know we know that race and restrictions on property and cities have been really intimately tied together like zoning and race they are growing from the same root stock in some crucial ways

And I was really surprised to learn that Modesto, Modesto, California, plays a really key role in the story. Can you tell us more about that? Modesto is the birthplace of zoning. This is a story that goes back to the decades right after the gold rush, when there's a large number of Chinese laborers who have come over to California for the same reason everybody else has come to California. They want to strike it rich. They want more opportunity. They're mining. They're working on

working on the railroads, they get chased off those opportunities and they have to find something else to do. You know, there's an enormous gender imbalance in California in those years. Many, many more men. They don't want to do laundry, which they regard as women's work.

The situation gets so desperate in San Francisco, I swear I'm not making this up, that an entrepreneur comes up with the idea of taking the dirty clothes, putting them on a ship and sending them to Hawaii to get washed. And then you can get your clean laundry clothes back in about six weeks. So it's kind of desperate. And the Chinese jump into this opportunity.

opportunity. They say, "Hey, we can launder clothes. It's our chance to claim to our piece of the American dream." And so the Chinese laundry becomes this sort of American icon. The thing is that they're living in these laundries and they want to be close to their customers. It's like a Starbucks. You're not going to walk past four Starbucks in order to order a cup of coffee. You're not going to walk past four laundries. You go to the one that's on your corner. And so they're moving into largely white

white neighborhoods. And the white residents don't want them there. And they try different ways to throw the Chinese laundries out of Modesto. They try arson, burning them down, and the Chinese rebuild. They try vigilante violence. They put on hoods and they go marching through the streets and they beat up Chinese residents and smash the windows of their places of business. And that doesn't work.

And then they escalate and they go to zoning. They do this thing that everybody understood was illegal, which is they create an ordinance that says you can only have your laundry in west of the tracks and south of G Street. And if you look, I pulled an old map of Modesto and there's only one block there.

That is west of the tracks and south of G Street. And it's got a label on it. It says Chinatown. This is a ghettoization ordinance. It's pushing all of the possibilities of Chinese employment back into Chinatown to segregate the city. And the state Supreme Court upholds it. And this will become the key precedent that will ultimately lead to the legalization of zoning in the United States. It really starts as a way to segregate Californian cities to keep the Chinese out.

Well, it's fascinating, too, because I didn't realize that then it becomes the case that lots of people might hear about at the Supreme Court. Right. With Euclid, the city of Euclid in Ohio is your. But this turns out to be what the Supreme Court points to. Right. As sort of the precedent American law that really didn't exist before this.

No, one thing you knew if you were a lawyer was that this stuff was illegal. You could come up with lots of restrictions on land use, but they had to have two things. They had to show a harm. So if you use your property in a way that harmed me, you had a tannery on it, for example. Because it's like built out of nuisance law, basically? Yeah, exactly. So you don't want somebody doing something on the plot of land next to you that's hurting you in some way.

So you had to demonstrate the harm, and the rule had to be consistent. You couldn't say, "It's okay to do this over in this part of town, but not in that part of town." And zoning reverses that. It says, "I can ban things just because I don't like them, even if they're not actually doing me any harm." They could be very like a nuisance, was the Supreme Court's phrase. So not actually a nuisance.

And I can apply different rules to different parts of town. And almost instantly, as zoning is created, it becomes a way to create one set of rules for the poorer parts of town and another set of rules for the richer parts of town. Let's bring in another caller. Let's bring in Stephanie in Petaluma. Welcome.

Hello. Thanks for the program. This program really resonates with me. I relocated here to the Bay Area over 30 years ago from a Midwestern area where things were fairly stable. We moved around within the metro area, but all my relatives were there. So we moved out here. I, as a registered nurse, got a huge pay increase immediately.

from moving out here. My husband took a huge pay cut to work at a very important, well-known company that certainly changed around. But the point of it was we had the luxury of renting for a year, looking all over the Bay Area. We chose Petaluma, have lived here 30 years, love it here, raised our kids here. But they haven't built housing. It's a huge outcry.

when most housing is proposed, and our children are late 30s, mid to late 30s, highly educated, can't afford to live here. So I spent a couple of years trying to sell to downsize and couldn't afford to do it. I would have paid double in housing for half the space. I want half the space, but I can't afford to pay double for it.

So now one of my sons and his fiance are living with me, trying to save for housing. So they're going to be looking somewhere else because they can't afford to make a life here. Yeah. Stephanie, thanks so much for sharing your story. I mean, this pretty much is the story of the book, Yoni, yeah? Yeah, I hear this story, Stephanie's story, over and over and over again. It's the story of generational change.

where people came to communities 30 years ago, 50 years ago, and they found one thing, right? That they found the chance to do better in life and to give their kids more opportunity. And it's something that sticks with me. The single most important decision you can make as a parent that will affect children

your kids' chance of success in life. It's not where you send them to school. It's not how you sleep train them. It's where you live. We have all of these studies which show that this is just an enormous effect, right? Because it affects everything else. It affects who their friends will be. It affects what kind of education they'll get, the way we do education in America. And

Earlier generations had the chance to choose those communities to have exactly Stephanie's experience to say, I'm going to relocate. I'm going to take a chance in life.

I'll get a better job that pays me a little bit more. I'll get my kids more opportunity." And now they're watching their own kids come of age and realizing that the world has changed on them, that their kids no longer have the chance to do what they did. And that I think is why this is such a story of generational change. And you really see it closely when you listen to the accounts of individual Americans.

I'm also curious about how different housing forms have played into this. And for Bay Area listeners, Elmwood in Berkeley turns out to be one of the kind of key players in the story you tell about sort of the rise of the single family home and its sort of impact on the type of housing that Americans live in.

You know, another thing that everybody understood before zoning was that you couldn't ban a two-family house because it's not a nuisance. There's nothing wrong with a two-family home. It might, in fact, look just like the single-family home but have two doors. And so nobody had tried it before a fellow named Charles Cheney in Berkeley, California, who was really annoyed that somebody has built an apartment building on his block. And he knows that he's got sort of a tough road to hoe here. But he will, in the end...

chair a state commission and then write a state level law and then write a Berkeley level ordinance and then be the guy that Berkeley hires to put it into effect all to keep apartment buildings out of his backyard he is sort of the original NIMBY in that sense and he creates single family zoning and

His goal, he's very clear about this, is to keep the renter class, which he finds sort of shiftless and worthless, out of his nice community across the bay. He has nothing against height. He's working every day in a downtown San Francisco office tower. And he has nothing against people moving to California to chase opportunity. That's the story of his family. What he resents is lower-income people moving into his community and changing the character of the neighborhood.

And that is how America got single family zoning. It starts in Berkeley. For those who are curious, too, I looked up exactly you give us address in the book and it's on Piedmont, just just off College Avenue in in Berkeley. Still, amazingly, one of the nicest blocks that you could that you could find anywhere in the country. And that kind of brings brings this question to you, which is.

That neighborhood is awesome. And it probably was when he was living there. In fact, maybe even better because you could take a streetcar into San Francisco and like half the time that it takes just to walk to BART at this point. But what if someone wants to keep a neighborhood like that?

Yeah. I don't think anyone should have to move. I live in a single family home, which I love, in a terrific neighborhood. And all across the country, there are Americans who really love their neighborhoods and their communities. But I'd say two things. One is we need to be careful to distinguish between the physical nature of our neighborhoods and the things that really makes them special, and that's the people. If you freeze the physical fabric of a neighborhood and don't allow for new construction, you

You are gutting your community. You just don't see it at first. It changes the kinds of people who can move in and it changes not just the people you can see visible on your walk around the neighborhood, but there's that janitor in Alabama we talked about before who's not going to be able to come, who's not going to be able to build a better life for his kids.

And a lot of Americans the last decade have discovered that if half the country is alienated and enraged, that's going to change things for them ultimately too. There are real problems with building a society that doesn't give people the chance to move toward opportunity. And the other thing I'd throw out there is that...

That neighborhood might stay idyllic just the way you like it, or it might change in some way, right? Change is sort of an inevitability, and you can try to freeze things. You can try to protect the neighborhood that you love, but...

the results will be distributed unequally. We've seen, and there's a million research studies that validate this, that over and over again, when you layer on protections or the right to protect neighborhoods, the people who use it most effectively are the people with resources. They've got...

got college degrees or postgraduate degrees, they've got money, they've got time, they have sophistication about bureaucracy, and they're able to weaponize those things to use the protections on a community to keep out new arrivals. Those same protections are theoretically available to other communities, but if they don't have access to those same resources, they're not able to use them. So you get a really unequal map. Well, I mean, what

What is interesting and I think somewhat challenging about this is that I think a lot of people in the Bay Area have experienced

forced mobility, which is to say displacement. They've been priced out of places that they have long lived. And so when I think, when people who used to live in Oakland and now live in Pittsburgh or people, industrial suburb north of the city, or people who used to live in San Francisco and now they live very far out in Sonoma County or something, they might be saying like,

But that's mobility, I guess, but it wasn't mobility that I chose freely, right? Yeah, that's the wrong kind of mobility, right? That's moving from a place with greater economic opportunity to a place with cheaper housing. That's exactly the story of the last 50 years. But if you take a step back and look at an integrated regional housing market, the fact that they're not building multifamily housing on Piedmont Ave in Elmwood, in a beautiful neighborhood...

is the thing that is displacing people out of Oakland in a working class neighborhood, right? The two things are tightly tied. I talked to a developer who told me very frankly that he tries to cite his projects in low-income neighborhoods because this layer of rules has made it all but impossible to build in high-income neighborhoods. And then he turned to me and said, is that thing on? Are we on the record here? I really shouldn't have told you that.

Right. But it would not come as a surprise to anyone who has lived in a neighborhood that has been targeted for development. So we've created this really unequal map. And if all of the development is flooding into low income areas that are less able to use the current laws to resist those sorts of changes, then you get

the kind of concentrated displacement that has really ravaged many lower income communities. If you can change the rules to allow developers to build in wealthier places too, they'll do that because they're profit maximizers. They're going to go chase the dollar. And what you get then is a very different pattern of development.

One of the fascinating things about the Elmwood example too is that it's right on the border of Oakland, which had different rules in effect for longer. And so you do on one side of that line, you have small apartment buildings and duplexes mixed in. And on the other side, you only have single family housing. And in fact, I would propose there's quite stark differences in the socioeconomic mix between those two places along that border, you know?

There are. And this is what happens when you allow each municipality to tailor its rules very, very differently. Zoning is something which legally operates at the state level. States have to delegate those powers down to cities and towns in order for them to use them. And they have the power to standardize them and just say, look, here are the rules. You can decide which zoning designation to apply to which neighborhood, but everyone's going to play with the same rules. And we're starting to see some movement in that direction in California and elsewhere. Yeah.

Bunch of different really interesting comments coming. I'm just gonna highlight a couple here. Joel writes, "As a career corporate retail professional, one of the biggest frustrations for me here in the Bay Area and other cities is politicians' push to attract high-paying jobs to their areas. Mayor Ed Lee was notorious for this and stated so on this very program," which is a forum, "The actions produce mono-economic societies of high wage earners that pushes out those who are vital to a functioning society."

Another person wanted to say, you know, tech companies in the Bay Area, especially once work from home became the norm, refused to pay people the same salary if they move elsewhere despite the same or more work being done. How does this hurt or help us? For context, if I had to move back home to help family, Southern Arizona, I'd immediately lose a decade of salary gains overnight despite doing the same job for the same company.

We got to go to a break, but I am just going to highlight that there are these other dimensions of economic change that I think people want to bring to this conversation, which we will do right after this.

after the break. We are talking with Atlantic Deputy Editor Yoni Applebaum about his new book, Stuck, How the Privileged and the Property Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. And we want to hear from you. We're going to get to more calls and comments after the break about you moving maybe to change your situation in life and sort of how it worked out for you. You can give us a call at numbers 866-733-

6786. That's 866-733-6786. You can email forum at kqed.org. And of course, on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, we're KQED Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more with Yoni Applebaum right after the break.

Turing with Tia is the quirky YouTube talk show where Tia Creighton is the host and all her guests are talking AI chatbots. Whether it's health and beauty, science and technology, pop culture, or current events, Turing with Tia delivers answers about everything.

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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking with Atlantic Deputy Editor Yoni Applebaum about his new book, Stuck, How the Privileged and Property Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Let's go back to the phones. Let's bring in Sean in San Francisco. Hi, this is Sean from San Francisco. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, sure can. Go ahead.

So I totally agree with what you're saying with the author. Totally agree with I'm a naturalized American citizen. Came here when I was 18, worked my way through college, lived in major cities like New York, Philadelphia and moved out to San Francisco. And then I became a U.S. citizen. And then it kind of hit me at one point that I can now freely move around this country freely.

But then I looked at the map and I was like, where can I even afford to live? Because even though I've earned a decent wage in most of my places, I still can't afford a house in New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco. And it makes me really question what I signed up for because.

I am struggling with the fact, like, how do I become a part of my society, put up roots, because the cost factor is so high, and do I feel comfortable just moving to a smaller town that I have no connections with? So I don't know if this is, like, a byproduct of just how societies develop, but, like, California, specifically San Francisco, feels very priced out for most people who want to work and stay here. Yeah.

What do we do? Like, do we all just end up leaving? We can't just keep on fighting because we do run out of money. But what's our next step? Thanks, Sean. Appreciate it. Yoni, you you do have some questions about this.

Yeah, you know, I've got sort of three solutions that might get us unstuck, as it were. One of them is trying to standardize the rules, which we just talked about, right? It's really not fair that municipalities have these wildly different rules. And if you standardize the rules, you can also standardize some of the housing solutions. Right now, builders are really small and specialize in building in one place. You often are better off hiring a lawyer than an architect if you want to build to start your process. So we can change that.

Um, the second thing we can do is, is we can get greater tolerance for different kinds of housing. Uh, the kind of housing I need today might not be the kind of housing I need tomorrow. Uh,

or the kind of housing that speaks to your needs might not be the housing that speaks to mine. And if we allow people to build different kinds of buildings, not just single versus multifamily, but buildings with really small bedrooms or shared bathrooms, the solution for 200 years, American reformers have looked at people living in poor housing conditions. And they keep looking at it and saying, this is awful. These people are really suffering. The problem is the building code.

And they don't say the problem is the poverty, right? And so we keep banning one form of housing after another. And, you know, now California has 170,000 homeless people. That's not actually a good solution. What you need is housing that works for different people, different stages of life and in different economic brackets. And then the last thing we need is a lot more housing. San Francisco has a 50-year, the Bay Area has a 50-year deficit to make up, essentially.

And so we're going to have to build. You know, sometimes people see one building go up and it doesn't solve the problem. Maybe prices continue to rise and they say, you see, building that building there made it worse. But, you know, that's just one teaspoon out of a bathtub of need. And so you really have to find a way to build at a large enough scale in the areas that people want to move. Yeah.

There's some pushback, Yoni, on the idea that it is, quote, progressive policies that would be to blame here. One listener writes, for example, you know, conservative policies have limited mobility, redlining, which morphed into neighborhood preservation, increasing wealth disparity, trickle down only wealthy to wealthy, stagnant minimum wage and waning labor union power. Applebaum contends it is progressive policies that have stood in the way of progress, though.

Yeah, so I think that's a great point. There are lots of problems in America that were created or exacerbated by the Reagan Revolution. There's no story you can tell without putting some of that in. But I'd also push back a little bit. Redlining was a policy of FDR's New Deal. Zoning was a policy of the original progressive movement. Of course, it was conservative Democrats in the South that wanted redlining. So I don't know. You could call that FDR. Some of it was conservative Democrats in the South. Most of it was...

People within the New Deal who were trying to figure out how to square a circle of mortgage loans, they didn't want – if the federal government was going to insure mortgages, they didn't want neighborhoods changing. And that can happen if you're giving somebody a 30-year loan. And so they insisted that you have a racial covenant on the land permanently insured.

barring the races from mixing before the feds would loan. It was a financial engineering policy, really. And when you look at that, you can see that progressives have often been to blame for this particular problem because they believe in the power of government to do good. And they're not wrong about that. But in California, there's a great study which shows that for every 10 points the liberal vote share of a municipality goes up, the number of new housing permits it issues goes down by 30%.

But I want to be clear about this because I do take the pushback and absolutely not every problem in America is caused by progressives. It's good news that this problem is caused at the local level by progressive jurisdictions because right now it's almost impossible to imagine Congress fixing anything. We're watching what the president is doing.

But this is a problem that originated primarily in progressive jurisdictions. That is where it is most acute. And it's something that progressive jurisdictions themselves have the power to fix. And that's actually a really hopeful thing at this moment. You don't have to wait for Congress to change hands. You don't have to hope that the president reverses course. This is something that we can do to make America work that can be done at the local level where progressives already have their hands on the levers of power.

Let's bring in another caller. Let's go to Sarah in Oakland. Welcome, Sarah. Hi. Hey, welcome. Hi, can you hear me? Yeah, sure can. Oh, great. I want to say my partner and I recently bought our first home together in our 40s.

And it was a really tough process. The first home we made an offer on, there were 18 offers total. And the second home, there were like 15. And the house we did buy, we weren't the highest bidder. The only reason why we got it was because the previous family wanted it to go to an actual family who would live in the home. And when I looked

into it, I realized we were constantly being outbid. And a lot of my friends buying homes had this. They couldn't afford a home because they were outbid by companies buying houses and renting them. And we also got a number of we looked at other homes we were buying that were owned by companies or people overseas. And

So I just wanted to get the factor of seeing how competitive it is in this housing market to actually buy a house. What's the influence of all these people buying houses or companies buying houses who don't actually live in them, who do them for profit, and how that displaces families like me or forces us to even pay more in renting in some situations than we would to actually buy one.

Yeah, thank you, Sarah, for that. Again, Yoni, I think people, you know, kind of pointing to the structure of the housing market in a lot of ways outside of, you know,

just having zoning laws and things like this. Yeah. I mean, it's a real problem. 18 bids. Wow. And that problem has come about for a very specific reason. The investors, private equity, who are moving into the housing market, they're vultures, right? They have spotted an opportunity, which is that government has created artificial scarcity. It's promising...

to give them outsized returns on their investment because if they can come in and squeeze the housing market, they can drive up their returns. And they feel pretty confident about that. They've looked around and seen how hard it is to build any new supply. And so they're saying to themselves, great, let's go in in large scale and really invest in the housing market. And that will enable us to squeeze renters, to squeeze purchasers and make a lot of money here.

And so I do think ultimately the solution here, it's a different facet of the problem, but the solution is the same thing. If you create more supply, the vultures will go pick some other carcass, right? They will leave the housing market because no longer is government guaranteeing them artificial scarcity.

And they'll go elsewhere. And that will free up much more opportunity for families like Sarah's to go and find the homes that they actually want to live in. And absent that, as long as we continue to constrain supply, the housing market will continue to attract people who want to exploit it.

Jen writes in to say, different line of attack here. Jen writes, "How exactly does the author define privilege? People work hard and get to reap the benefits. We cannot empty the world's entire population into the US, especially California, and expect there to be housing for everyone. Developing and paving over every inch of land with housing is not the solution. Humans need green space for a healthy mind and body." And of course, the Bay Area was a leader in this sort of open space movement, protected lots of land in the East Bay Hills.

you know, all the way down the peninsula. Other people say in the North Bay might say, but there's, you know, hard limits to the amount of water we have or, you know, we don't want to build in the wildland urban interface anymore because of the threat of fires. Like, what do you think the limits are to this sort of like build your way out of it strategy, which, you know, people on the show oftentimes call attention to some of the

biophysical limits to this building strategy? Sure. There are real limits out there. And California is a pioneer in trying to protect the environment. But around 1970, California doesn't just try to protect the environment. The state legislature, as California enters its era of limits, it declares growth to be the problem.

At that point, the population of California has pretty much doubled every couple of decades. But the median housing price is not budging once you adjust for inflation, right? So it's able to build enough housing to accommodate a lot of growth. And there's this report that's issued in the 1970s which says the problem in California is the overdevelopment of urban places.

and the sprawl around them, and the development of the last open places. Well, that actually defines the problem as any growth at all. And so I think if you reframe this a little bit and you say,

California needs to grow to stay healthy. It needs to grow in order to keep the country healthy and to give people access to opportunity. The question is, where does it grow? If you value open places, what you actually want is somebody going someplace where there's already buildings and building taller. That will keep the open places open. If you value the environment more generally, and we're seeing a huge generational change on this,

among younger progressives in the Bay Area. Many now advocate for transit-oriented development, for trying to build in places that reduce reliance on automobiles and other fossil fuel-producing technologies. And so you can actually have your cake and eat it too on this one. Not everywhere, right? There are places where the water is going to cap growth. But in many places in California, there's an enormous opportunity for additional development

But you've got to agree to let it go in where people already live. And that way you can both preserve the open spaces. People do need greenery. They do need access to beautiful unspoiled nature. And you can give them the housing opportunity they deserve to have. Let's bring in Peter in San Francisco. Welcome, Peter.

Yes, hi. The question I have is, it seems that housing has not just become a matter of housing, but a matter of a kind of a wealth builder and investment. And as a commodity, it's

It seems to me that you've got an entire political force of homeowners who are also encouraged by tax breaks and so on, who would lose out or who view themselves as losing out if housing were to become more affordable and more accessible and available. If you hugely increase the housing tax,

that's available to folks, whether by buying or renting, seems to me there'd be a lot less... You'd lose whatever increase you had in the value of your property, and it might even go down so much that you're losing money by owning, as opposed to wealth building by owning. So it seems to me that politically that has now got a huge...

And a lock-in effect, right? From a lot of people who would lose out and who therefore wouldn't be politically motivated to support having more housing because it would spoil their opportunity for wealth building with their house. Yeah.

Peter, I really, really appreciate this. One listener question I'm going to tack on to it. A listener writes, I've become convinced that the true root of this problem is that shelter, a basic human need, should not be a financial asset class. If other basic needs like water, food, or air were traded this way, we would find it ridiculous.

does the author have any thoughts on georgism and methods of reducing speculation i too am an owner whose well-paid professional adult children cannot afford a home and i certainly cannot afford to downsize um you may not be able to address georgism right in this particular which is is a fascinating area people should look it up um what i wanted to ask you about out of these um

out of these questions is that housing did used to be really different like the point in your book about moving day and that people used to move all the time and it was this

massive circulation of people through cities was that they saw housing not as a long-term asset the way we do, but more like as a service that they were purchasing for a time. Yeah, that's exactly right. It was like an iPhone or a car. It was something where you enjoyed it for a while, you expected to lose its value, and you hope to move up and get the latest model. Maybe the next one would have hot and cold running water.

or gas heat or some new miracle of technology. And so people did not used to treat housing that way. We have to, I think, the caller or commenter, they're exactly right. There is a constituency out there that now sees housing primarily as an investment. But I have actually found that if you ask people about their fear that a new development will depreciate their property, they'll say, yeah, they're afraid of that.

But if you ask them a different set of questions, if you say, do you want your neighborhood to be a place where young families can move in? Do you think that the preschool teachers and the firefighters and the nurses who service this community should have a chance to live in this community? Are you willing to let that happen even if your housing price goes down? People usually say yes. We're not as self-interested as we sometimes fear. And I think that there is

a chance to frame the choice that way, to show people the aggregate consequences of these decisions and to ask them what kind of society they want to build. You know, one of the things that has come in from a lot of listeners, just comments kind of in different ways, are all kind of getting at

the question of does the internet change these things? Because we're talking about civic life, we're talking about people's connection to where they've come from and striking out a new path. Is it possible that having essentially the social layer in the digital realm built over the top of these cities has made mobility less attractive for people because they don't have to move as much to at least social opportunity?

Yeah, I think there is a possibility inherent in digital life that people can find connection, find economic opportunity wherever they're living.

But I think if you look around at housing markets, what you see is most Americans are still voting with their feet. The most expensive places. There's something about meeting people face to face. There's something about that kind of human interaction that we have not yet successfully replicated online. And people know this at a gut level. And it's still the case that

the most prosperous places, the places with the best jobs that really offer that kind of face-to-face interaction, those places see a real premium in their housing prices. Maybe that'll change. Technology can do wonderful things. But so far, that value of face-to-face interaction and engagement is not something that we've managed to replicate in a real way. Do you see any place right now that's moving in the direction that you want things to move?

You know, I started writing this book, I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in an apartment that was a little too small for my family, that cost us a little more than we could actually afford. And started advocating with friends there for some greater development that would allow more working class families into the city, more young families to stay in the city. And we didn't have any hope that it would change at the time. I left Cambridge a decade ago, but other people took up that fight.

And last week, Cambridge rezoned the entire city to permit development up to six stories for housing, for ordinary housing, for ordinary families. And that's not a change that I thought I'd live to see. But it happened really fast once people were able to zoom out and see the consequences of their decisions. And watching that happen in a city like Cambridge, watching activists on the ground in the state of California

I have a lot of hope for the future. I think that Americans really do want to live in a dynamic society where people have a sense of agency in their own lives. And they're starting to make the changes that can restore that. We've been talking with Atlantic deputy editor Yoni Applebaum about his new book, Stuck, How the Privileged and the Property Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Thanks so much for joining us, Yoni. Thank you.

And thank you to all of our listeners for your thoughtful calls and comments and pushback and thinking through these issues. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kim.

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