Yoni Appelbaum, "Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of Prosperity" (Random House, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Stephen Pimper, host of the Public Policy Channel, and we are joined today by Yoni Applebaum, who is the author of Stuck, How the Privileged and the Property Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, new from Random House. Yoni, welcome. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks so much for talking. So I wonder if we might start by having you tell folks a little bit about who you are and what you do and how it is you came to this particular project.

Yeah, I'm a journalist by trade. I'm the deputy executive editor of The Atlantic magazine. But I came to this project back when I was still a historian, which is what I trained as. And I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, teaching at Harvard and living in an apartment that had already grown

little too small and much too expensive for my growing family. And, you know, that's not a peculiar problem in the world. But as a historian, I recognize that there was something a little bit peculiar about my individual circumstance. I was living in a neighborhood of Cambridge, which had been for 100 years, a place that

The children of immigrants moved to get the first broad rung on the ladder of American opportunity. They'd moved into this neighborhood, they had thrived there, their children had gotten an education that they hadn't been able to obtain and had moved up. It was such a consistent step on that ladder of success that sociologists came to study it and coined a term just to describe it, zones of emergence. And Cambridgeport was their prototypical example of a neighborhood like that.

wave after wave after wave of people had come through. And yet by the time I lived there, it was not serving that role anymore. I could look out my window and see that it was mostly young professionals walking past. It was no longer working class families. And, you know, neighborhoods change. And one neighborhood changing is not a big story. But as I looked around, I could see that it was part of a much broader story. The city of Cambridge had lost by that point

two-thirds of its children because families have been squeezed out of living there. Not, mind you, that it hadn't had population grow before. In most of its prosperous decades, the population had grown much more rapidly, but the pricing had changed. And all across the country, I was talking to folks who were experiencing some version of this, that in the neighborhoods that had traditionally given people a chance to

to improve their lives, to give their children more opportunities. The prices were skyrocketing. Families could no longer move in. And something fundamental was shifting. And I wanted to know what it was. And as a historian, I turned to the past for answers.

So before we turn precisely to that question, I imagine that there are some folks who would think you seem to be making argument here that geographic mobility is important for economic mobility. But I can imagine someone saying, well, wait a minute, don't we want stable communities that remain relatively constant over time? Don't we want people to be able to remain in one place?

What is for you this connection between the ability to migrate and the ability to move up the ladder of economic opportunity and success? Yeah, you know, the assumption in the old world was that communities...

should stay stable and stagnant, that everybody was born with a particular place in the world, a particular role. You inherited your identity. You inherited your place in a hierarchy. That was the assumption that the people who came and colonized America brought

with them, that everybody had their particular slot and you shouldn't rise above your station, you shouldn't seek to leave the web of obligations that hierarchy imparted. America, though, developed along a very different set of assumptions.

slowly, reluctantly, not with the consent of the people at the top of the hierarchy. Americans settled on the idea that people should be able to move. It was a freedom that we extended to individuals, I think for the first time in human history.

And it came as part of a long contested fight in the colonial era. If you tried to move into a community, you could be warned out. That community needed to accept you as a member in order for you to settle there. It didn't matter if you bought a house. It didn't matter if you got engaged, a girl from town. They could still warn you out, and they did quite frequently. And it's only really at the beginning of the 19th century that where you want to live becomes a matter of individual choice instead of communities choosing their members, people's

people get to choose their communities. Once we open up that opportunity, Americans discover that by moving, they're not only chasing economic opportunities, they are giving themselves, each other, the freedom to construct their own identities. This is the peculiar thing about American individualism. It doesn't mean that we're disconnected from those around us. In fact, our civic life was long the envy of the world. What it meant was that we construct our individual identities and

out of the communities that we choose to belong to. And so American dynamism, American mobility was actually the thing that underpinned our remarkably vibrant civic life that gave us a dense web of organizations that allowed people to define their own identities and to commit to each other, to commit to communities. And as our mobility has ground to a halt over the last 50 years, we've also seen an almost total disintegration of

our communities, of our organizational life. Those two trends are inextricably linked. So what happened? Yeah, it's a tough story. And it's a tough story for me to tell because the villains are not the people I'd usually want to blame. This is a story of how over the course of more than a century, a set of reformers, you

Three generations of progressives really went about restricting the ability of Americans to move to new places. The story starts out in California where reformers are upset about Chinese residents polluting their pure white communities by their presence. And they seek legal tools to exclude the Chinese. They try all sorts of things. In the city of Modesto, California, they try arson. They try burning them out of their homes.

They try vigilante violence. They hold on hoods and go marching through Chinatown and beating the people they find. But the Chinese won't leave Modesto because they're seeking the same thing as everyone else, the right to build a better life for themselves and their family. What they settle on in the end is an ordinance that says laundries need to be

west of the tracks and south of G Street. And if you look at a map of Modesto, and I pulled an old map to find this, you can see that that block has a label on it. It's labeled Chinatown. And so a facially neutral law, which just says some uses are okay in one part of town, but not in the other part of town,

effectively segregates the population of Modesto. That tool will get picked up in the original progressive era by reformers. It becomes known as zoning. This is America's first zoning statute. And it gets applied in a wide variety of cities, but always it gets applied as a means of segregating the population, sometimes by race, sometimes by income.

But the idea is that the original progressives were out for order. They wanted scientific rationality and expertise to govern us. And in many ways, we're responding to real problems. But the tools that they developed, the zoning tools are about separating out by use, by function, and by population. And that's the first part of our story. The second part

is that zoning goes national. It goes national first through Herbert Hoover and then through FDR's New Deal as the government is trying to get into the home loan business and it wants to minimize its risk. And it finds that if it can fix people down in place, then...

then loans become less risky. The neighborhoods are less likely to change. So they pass rules. The federal government will only in the 1930s loan to you if you segregate your neighborhood by putting a zoning ordinance on it and by putting an explicit racial covenant excluding people of other races than currently live in the neighborhood. That's a condition for a federal loan. You have to

have a legal restriction on the property that segregates it by race. The third- And also typically excludes Jews as well, right? Yeah, it might be, but by race, these covenants went both ways. They didn't want black neighborhoods getting white residents. That would also shift property values. They didn't want

depending on where you are, they might be excluding Jews, they might be excluding Chinese, they might be the first racial covenants, in fact, seem to have excluded Chinese, that they, the Irish and the Northeast were often excluded. So there are many groups being targeted by this. Near where I live, you can find one that excludes Armenians, Persians, I'm not sure what they had against all of these groups, except that they were following a premise of separating out Persians

And then the third wave of regulation comes in the 1970s. And this is well-intentioned urban reformers are watching out-of-control government agencies bulldoze cities through urban renewal schemes to run highways through them. They're seeing them tear down integrated neighborhoods and put up big, blocky, brutalist concrete buildings in their place. And they want to stop it. But they...

This is a sort of a two-step dance. The first two waves of change have made every new building in America a matter of government decision-making. You're going to need to get the zoning approvals and the other regulatory approvals in order to build. And then in the 70s, reformers press forward and say communities should have a chance to challenge those government decisions.

And when you put those two things together, first making everything a matter of government approval and then giving anyone with the time, money and effort to challenge it in court an effective veto over that government approval, what you've done is something which was perversely the opposite of what the reformers thought they were doing. They thought that they were shifting the balance back in favor of the public interest.

And in effect, what they do is they give the privileged and the property, the well-educated, the affluent, the people with access to lawyers who are lawyers themselves, who knew how to navigate bureaucratic processes. They give these people an effective veto over all construction. And America stops building. For 200 years, we build most of our new construction in the places that are thriving economically, and that's where people move.

But over the last 50 years, that tide slowed and then reversed. Instead of moving to where the jobs are, people now move to where the housing is cheap. So what's Jane Addams' role in all of this?

Yeah. So Jane Jacobs is this reformer in New York. Jane Jacobs, sorry. Entirely different Jane. Different generation of progressives, right? So Jane Jacobs is living in New York and she writes a brilliant book. She writes this book called The Death and Life of Great American Cities, where she has the courage to stand up and tell the experts. And she literally does this once at a conference at Harvard. She stands up in front of the room and sort of shocks everyone. She says, you're all wrong about cities.

The things that you hate about cities are actually the things that are great about cities. You may want to separate out all the uses, you may want order and rationality, but the organic life of cities is actually what makes them so attractive to people. It's the diversity of uses, it's people mixing together, it's the ballet of the sidewalk, it's the eyes on the street, all the shopkeepers who are looking out for themselves and for their neighbors. These are wonderful things to have in a city. And she's right about all of it, I think.

She writes this wonderful book. She's a wonderful advocate. And she stands up to Robert Moses, who's sort of the building czar of New York in these years, and tells him he can't bulldoze her neighborhood. And that's a singular triumph and is and should be celebrated. And that's half of Jane Jacobs' legacy. But that's what...

She did sort of in a positive sense. At the same time, she buys the townhouse in this neighborhood she's celebrating for its diversity of uses that has a candy store on the ground floor. It's exactly the kind of building that she's celebrating in her work.

But she buys it, she rips out the street front retail and turns it into a single family home. She rips off the historic facade and replaces it with modern metal sash windows. There is Jane Jacobs, the public intellectual, and then there's Jane Jacobs, the homeowner. And the two merge because the tool that she uses to turn back the ravages of Robert Moses and urban renewal

is community empowerment, which sounds great, right? It sounds great to put local communities back in control of their own destiny. But what she does in the West Village is she revives the New England village. She again goes to a logic where communities get to decide who joins. And the tools that she puts in place about public hearings and comment periods and the chance to go to court to challenge government decision-making, even where you have no direct

stake in that decision. All of that adds up to a system like the old New England village that gives communities again the chance to choose their people. And it's going to have tremendous downstream effects that she never envisions.

So let's add another piece into the puzzle. Talk a little bit, if you will, about maybe specifically focusing on California efforts at theoretically, right, protecting the environment and how that plays into the story. Yeah. And in the same years that Jane Jacobs is active, is saving the West Village.

There's a broad discontent among American liberals about the direction of the world. They're looking out at a world that seems to them ravaged by growth. They're looking at the aftermath of the New Deal and they're not celebrating it. They think that the big government created by the New Deal has been captured by big business, is asleep at the switch, is no longer safeguarding the public interest.

These are the years where you get Rachel Carson up the road from me writing Silent Spring about how pesticides are destroying birds and environmental regulators are not paying attention to it. You get Ralph Nader writing Unsafe at Any Speed about how auto regulators are not keeping the automakers honest. And

on the strength of that success, Nader creates this group. They're known as Nader's Raiders, which are going to investigate all the ways in which government has been captured by big business. And he sends a team out to California to look at land to figure out

whether government is just in cahoots with developers and is despoiling wild and unsullied places. And this team gets to California, and they find what they're looking for. They find lots of evidence that, in fact, government is promoting development. But their hostility to development, to growth, is pretty much absolute. They recommend that the cities no longer be so overdeveloped.

Also that the suburbs not be made any more dense and also that we not build in open spaces. And if you add up those three recommendations, what they tell the California state legislature in pretty much so many words is that California has too many people. Nobody else should be allowed to arrive. And certainly you shouldn't build anymore. And they and other advocates who are testifying in those years

are very clear about this, that California is for the people who are already there, that if you can restrict the resources like housing, you can drive up the costs and make it prohibitively expensive for new arrivals. This isn't a state which I should say, from the time it ascends into the union until

you know, through the 1970s and in fact into this century, most Californians were born somewhere else. Whether in a different state or a different country, California is a state of new arrivals. So these are, they're testifying before a legislature that's full of people who are not born in California. And they're saying, "That thing you did when you came here to pursue opportunity, let's not let anyone else do it." And they passed a set of laws that changes the playing field in California. Things like the California Environmental Quality Act,

which are touted as ways to protect open lands and then used overwhelmingly to target multifamily housing and affluent neighborhoods. Like, that's where the laws actually get used. And so they become these tools that affluent areas have to turn away new arrivals. And it is a tragic irony that Nader and his followers thought what they were doing was putting the public interest back at the heart of the policymaking process. And what they do, in effect...

is they give the privileged folks they were attacking the ability to veto anyone else from pursuing the same things that had made them so prosperous in the first place.

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So why don't we talk a little bit about what you think we can do about this? And maybe I'll ask you to start by telling us the story of Tokyo. And then maybe we will conclude with an event in the news about Cambridge, Mass., just in the last day or two and see if you see any hope in that particular development. That sounds great. Yeah, let's talk about it. I think there are, and I lay this out in the book, that there are three relatively simple fixes that we can put in place.

One of them is consistency. Right now, the country is governed by a bewildering array of zoning rules and building regulations. If you want to build a house, you're usually better off starting by hiring a lawyer than an architect.

And what this means in practice is not just that affluent places manage to exclude all kinds of new arrivals through particularly and peculiarly restrictive rules and that the most odious uses of land tend to get concentrated in impoverished areas.

So that's one problem with a lack of consistency. But the other is that it's almost impossible to take anything to scale. If you're a builder and you have figured out how to build a townhouse in New York, this does not help you build a townhouse in Boston. If you know how to build in Boston, you don't know how to build a single family home someplace. Like the rules are so wildly inconsistent that...

It gets very hard to attain any efficiency in the construction industry. And it's been one of the sectors of their economy which has shown the smallest productivity gains over the last 50 years for exactly this reason. It's specialized in complying with rules rather than in providing people the homes they want to have.

So if you can get consistency, that's one big thing. The second thing that you want is tolerance for a wide variety of building styles. The things that will work for some people aren't the things that will work for others. The things that will work at one phase of your life, like when you're young and single in the city and you just need a studio, is really different than what you need when you're raising a family, which is really different when stairs become a challenge in retirement.

And so you want to allow people to have a wide variety of housing styles available to them, even if you think they're ugly, even if it's not what you want yourself.

And then the third is abundance. And abundance is just building enough housing that people get to move to the places they want to move. So instead of policymakers trying to decide where it would be best to move people around like pieces on a map, what you do is you create a society that allows people to move where they want and allows the market to provide the housing that enables them to do so. And we've seen what this looks like in practice in Europe.

Japan, Tokyo was on the same trajectory as New York from the 1970s forward, where housing prices were going up, construction was grinding to a halt. There was this effective veto over new development and the...

the national government steps in and and zoning is a national question in japan and and so they come up with 12 basic categories of zoning that local municipalities can still apply them however they want you still have local control at that level

But they're the same 12 categories across the country. The most restrictive still allows for street front retail, still allows for multifamily housing. Can't have a single family zone in Japan. And so in countries or jurisdictions that have pursued these kinds of solutions, what we see is that housing prices either don't rise as fast or actually fall. You get a greater variety of uses. You get a lot of really positive public policy benefits out of pursuing this approach.

And I assume you've been paying attention to what Cambridge just did, either this morning or yesterday on the day that we're recording. The timing couldn't be any better. When I lived in Cambridge and first started researching these issues, I got together in somebody's dining room one night with a bunch of other people who were also concerned, and we started an organization called A Better Cambridge.

which was at the time one of the only organizations in the country devoted to fixing zoning by allowing for denser development. They've been... I've long since left Cambridge, but others have taken up that cause. The organization led a charge in Cambridge to upzone the entire city to allow for...

multifamily housing everywhere in that city. And last night, the Cambridge City Council ratified the ordinance that they had back in

and Cambridge is no longer going to pursue the same kind of exclusionary policies that will allow it to grow again. People can move there. It is a wonderful place to live. It has terrific playgrounds. It has good schools. It has a diverse population. It has thriving industries. It is exactly the kind of place that we would want Americans living in communities with relatively little opportunity to be able to move, to take jobs, to do better, to give their children opportunities.

And it has decided to open its doors and let them do that. And I couldn't be more thrilled. And are there, have you followed that closely enough to be able to tell other cities whether there are lessons there about what it made, what made it possible for Cambridge to succeed?

I think the biggest thing there was a generational divide where it was mostly, not all, but mostly younger residents of the city who understood that the Cambridge, the picture of Cambridge that older residents carried in their head, the city that they moved to when they were young, was no longer a realistic representation. That young people no longer had the same opportunities. And that was a big part of it.

mobilizing relatively new arrivals who wanted to create a city that would welcome the next generation of new arrivals. But the other thing is maybe the biggest insight that occurred to me as I researched and wrote this book is that there's two ways to think about all of these questions. One is you can ask people, do you want an apartment built down the block from you?

And overwhelmingly, Americans will say no. We are change-averse creatures. We don't like somebody intruding something disruptive into our neighborhood, something that changes the way it looks, changes where we find our parking. We are against it. But if you ask the same question, not focused on what people stand to lose, but on what they stand to gain, if you say, do you want to live in a community that has room for young families to move in?

Do you think that the daycare workers and the nurses and the firefighters who serve the residents of your community deserve the chance to live in the community themselves? Do you want to live in a diverse community with people of a variety of backgrounds? If you ask these questions, you get a very different response because instead of seeing restricting the ability of Americans to build as a way to avoid losses, people start to see these questions as a trade-off.

You lose something and you get something else in return. And it's a good trade. It's always been a good trade. People benefit. It's not just that the people moving into your neighborhood are going to benefit. You're going to benefit too. You're going to end up with more friends and neighbors. You'll get more local businesses because they'll have more customers within walking distance.

I live not far from a new development that was going up while I wrote this book. And now I've got a coffee shop I can go to when I want some coffee. I've got lots of new neighbors who are out there walking their dogs. And it keeps the streets safer at night. I have benefited from them arriving in my neighborhood, even if the construction noise annoyed me at the time. But it was a good trade to make. It was a good trade for me, for my neighbors, and it was definitely a good trade for them.

You are listening to the Public Policy Channel of the New Books Network. And we've been speaking with Yoni Albaubam, who is the author of Stuck, How the Privileged and Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, new out from Random House. Yoni, thank you so much. Thank you.