America was once defined by mobility, with a third of its population moving yearly. Today, restrictive housing policies are driving inequality and stagnation.
There was a time when geographic mobility defined America — one-third of the population relocated each year, chasing better jobs and brighter futures. But today, historian and journalist Yoni Appelbaum argues in his new book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, that America’s once-robust engine of upward mobility is grinding to a halt.
Appelbaum challenges the long-held belief that income alone dictates housing choices. Instead, he reveals how restrictive housing policies — exclusionary zoning, historical redlining, and modern NIMBYism — have dramatically limited the supply of new housing, effectively blocking the paths that families once took toward prosperity.
Today, affluent neighborhoods, often proudly progressive, tout diversity while quietly building invisible walls against newcomers, turning geographic mobility into a privilege reserved mainly for the wealthy.
The result is profound economic stagnation, deepening political polarization, and psychological harm — leaving millions trapped, angry, and increasingly cynical about the future. Yet despite the immense costs, estimated at $2 trillion annually, Appelbaum sees genuine hope.
Unlike many national crises, this one can be addressed locally. By reforming zoning policies to allow more housing construction, communities can restore the mobility and optimism that once defined the American dream.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. There was a time in America when a teacher, a factory worker, a clerk, could pack up their family and follow opportunity wherever it led, when the dream of a better life wasn’t confined by zip code or bank account. Today, that fundamental American promise, the ability to move toward prosperity has become a privilege of the few. This is the America that I guess Yoni Applebaum reveals in his new work, Stuck. It is the story of a nation that has quietly abandoned its most sacred promise, the ability to pursue opportunity wherever it leads.
We were once a people perpetually in motion from the desperate courage and determined optimism of the Oregon Trail, to the great migration, to the California dream. Our ancestors carved out a nation where in an almost unimaginable display of collective reinvention, a third of the population would uproot their lives annually in search of something better. Cities transform themselves on a massive scale, with neighborhoods emptying and filling again in an almost choreographed ritual of aspiration, where the possibilities of a fresh start drew millions toward new horizons.
But something fundamentally shifted. The engine of opportunity was methodically dismantled. Not by accident, but by design. It began in places like Modesto in 1885, where the first racial zoning laws corralled Chinese immigrants into segregated districts, and evolved into today’s landscape where progressive neighborhoods tout their diversity, while their policies ensure only the wealthy can afford to join their ranks, where environmental protections become sophisticated barriers keeping newcomers at bay.
Today we face a crisis few recognize, but all experience, a nation where the path to opportunity have narrowed to vanishing points, where moving trucks seem to go only one way, increasingly from prosperity rather than toward it. A privileged few have transformed America’s economic geography into a maze of invisible walls, with a fundamental right to seek a better life has become ironically, a privilege of the already privileged.
My guest, Yoni Applebaum, is a historian, former Harvard lecturer, and deputy executive editor of The Atlantic. His new book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke The Engine of American Opportunity, isn’t just an examination of housing policy or economic mobility. It’s the story of how America quietly abandoned a founding promise, and what that means for all of us who still believe in the possibility of a better life. It is my pleasure to welcome Yoni Applebaum here to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. Yoni, thanks so much for joining us.
Yoni: Thank you so much for having me.
Jeff: It is a delight to have you here. What is it that is in the environment now, in our political discourse, something out there that is finally making us realize that housing, that housing policy, that the geography of housing really is about more than just where people live. It’s more than just about housing, but has a much broader constituency.
Yoni: This is a crisis that has been at least 50 years in the making. And I think what has happened over the last decade, over the last few years in particular, is that our housing shortage nationwide and the inability of Americans to move toward opportunity has become more readily evident in more parts of the country. So 20 years ago, this was a problem that people talked about in our largest and most prosperous cities, but it has spread.
Almost no matter where you’d like to move in America today, if it’s a place with jobs, with good schools, with the neighborhood in which you’d want to raise your kids, it’s probably, if you’re a young person, priced beyond your reach, that the age of the median homeowner, first-time home buyer, just hit a new high at 38 years old. There’s an entire generation of Americans out there that just doesn’t see a way to build the lives that they had when they were kids, much less the lives that would allow their own kids to do better.
Jeff: There is this nexus that has become clearer and clearer in all these between geographic mobility and social mobility. Talk about that.
Yoni: That’s one of the things that I took away from this project. And I was really struck by how clear that linkage was. At any point that you’d care to sample in the American past, you can find two things are true. One is that Americans move more often over longer distances and to greater effect. That is, they earn more, their kids get more opportunities. Then match populations in Europe or really anywhere else in the world. So this is something that was distinctively American, that mobility unlocked those benefits. And also, in any decade you want to look at the American past, the people who move do better than those who stay on average.
That doesn’t mean that people don’t stay where they are and thrive. That’s great if that’s what works for them. But it does mean that that is a consistent statistical pattern, that the people who move from one place to another, they do better. And they do better, if you think about it, for a couple of reasons. One is when you move, you usually choose a place that has something that’s pulling you toward it. And so, if you’re choosing a place to go that is different than a place you’re starting from, you’re probably moving toward a place with more jobs, with more economic growth, with better opportunities, however you care to define that.
And so you’re putting yourself in the path of opportunity, and that makes a big difference in people’s lives. A second is when you move, you sever all of your old habits. And so suddenly, you got to start over. If you arrive in town and you need a job, you’re almost definitionally going to get hired into a growing industry because that’s where the jobs are. That’s who’s hiring. And so if you stay where you are, you’re likely to remain in whatever your earlier employment was.
But when you move, you’re likelier to jump industries and to end up in someplace that’s going to offer you more opportunity over the course of your life, and to build new social connections, and to commit to voluntary associations and groups, and organizations of all kinds, to go back to church if you haven’t been in a while. There are lots of ways that moving serves as a spur for people to engage with the world around them to find new opportunities. And so that has really been the thing that enabled America to give better lives to its citizens than most countries were able to offer.
And I’ll put one more point on this, which is that we know the story of immigrant success in America. But the secret there is that 100% of immigrants are migrants. They all moved. That’s definitionally what immigration is. If you match immigrants against native-born Americans who moved at the same time to the same places, what you find is that their outcomes are indistinguishable. That the immigrant advantage in America, and that the advantage for their kids is that they’re landing in the places that offer them opportunity. And when native-born Americans move to those same places, they get the same kinds of opportunities.
Jeff: There is also this sense that moving or not moving, lack of mobility impacts one’s worldview, and that people that move and people that move more frequently have a much broader worldview, both professionally and personally.
Yoni: One question I get a lot is maybe the people who move are just different. So maybe this is not about movement, maybe it’s about disposition. So there’s a great study that some University of Chicago psychologists did where they went and they asked people, do you intend to move in the next year or the next five years? So they were only looking at people who had whatever it is dispositionally that makes some people want to move. And then they followed up to find out what had happened. Had you moved?
The people who had ended up more optimistic. They were more future oriented in their thoughts and in their planning. They were likelier to make new friends and join new organizations. And I thought this was really interesting. They saw their success as being intertwined in the success of those around them. So if they were doing well, that was a benefit to their community. And if others were doing well, that would help lift them.
But the people who didn’t move, who had wanted to move and were stuck, they followed a different path. They ended up more cynical, more alienated, more withdrawn from their communities, and they started to see the world as a zero sum game. They started to see the gains of others around them as coming at their own expense. And that kind of orientation leads to a really dark worldview, and I should say not an unjustified one. They’re not wrong to be angry at being denied the opportunity to move, but the way in which actually moving changes your disposition, I thought was fascinating.
Jeff: There is something counterintuitive in that, because the argument could be made that those that are stuck or that are more ingrained in a particular place have a larger stake in the community and are more active in the community by virtue of the roots they’ve put down.
Yoni: Of course that is true to some extent. We can all think of somebody who is the cornerstone of their community and has lived there their whole life and anchors those around them. So obviously that happens. But on average, the story actually runs the other way. During our periods of peak mobility, the Europeans who came over here made two observations. One was, these Americans are crazy, they’re moving all the time. They get to one place and instead of being satisfied with what they have, with accepting their station in life, they’re moving on someplace else because they think that they can do better.
And the other observation they make is that America has all of these voluntary associations that they’re incredibly envious of, really jealous of our civic life. And they never put the two sides of the coin together. What gives America such a vibrant civic life, or gave it really, was the constant mobility of its people. As that mobility has declined over the last 50 years, our civic life has fallen apart. You can think about this empirically, an organization will tend to lose roughly the same percentage of its members every year, year after year. What sets apart growing organizations from shrinking ones is how many new members join. And it is, of course, mostly people who are new in town who come and join. That is where you get the infusion of new members.
But you can also think about it just at the level of an individual. If you are new in town, if you don’t have friends, don’t have relatives, aren’t embedded within the community, you have to do the hard, uncomfortable work of making social connection. I would usually prefer not to do that. It’s really uncomfortable to walk into a meeting room where everybody knows everybody else, and you’re new. It’s really hard to talk to the guy sitting next to you at the bar sometimes, or to walk into a new church on a Sunday morning and sit down in a pew. People force themselves to do those things when they are new, when they have severed their previous ties and need to build new ones.
In a community where lots of people are in that position, it gets a lot easier to do it. And so that is the sort of counterintuitive finding of the book, is that what really powers America’s vibrant civic life is our constant moving around. And that when people stay in the same place for a long period of time, on average, their social ties will atrophy. They’ll stop showing up at the meetings on Wednesday nights. Their existing friends will move away, will pass away, and they won’t be making as many new ones because they are settled in their habits and routines and don’t have to do that hard, uncomfortable labor. And so it really is the constant infusion of new arrivals that makes American communities work.
Jeff: How much of what’s changed is that instead of people moving because of jobs or because of families, or simply looking for new opportunities, that the more powerful force is like wanting to live near like. Certainly political polarization has added to this, racial disparity has added to this. People want to live near people that are like them. Talk about that.
Yoni: I think that you can measure it. That’s a real phenomenon. People have always wanted to live around those who are similar to them. It’s also the case that we want a lot of other things too. We want good jobs, we want opportunities for our kids. There are many things that affect our decisions of where to live. I don’t think the data show that Americans are deliberately moving into more polarized enclaves. In fact, I think it’s the opposite. Over the 50 years when we polarized, that’s the same period where Americans have been moving less and less and less.
What I see happening instead is that when people were moving a lot– and I should put numbers on this. At the peak, probably one in three Americans moved every year. Last year, the census tells us that we just got new numbers on this, that it went down to 1 in 13. That’s a pretty dramatic decline. And as people are moving less, our communities are homogenizing because of our tendency towards social conformity. So most of us want to fit in. There’s always one guy in every crowd who adopts exactly the opposite views of everyone around them. But for the most part, over time, our views will tend to change to conform to those of our friends and neighbors.
And when Americans were constantly moving around, there are always new people coming into town with different experiences, with different beliefs, different political affiliations. And they were your friends and neighbors too, and you had to find a way to live with them. We call that pluralism. But you needed to find a way to accommodate this constant mix of backgrounds and beliefs.
To the extent that we’re no longer moving, what happens is that we homogenize when it’s just the existing residents of a community who stay there for a long time. Even if they start off pretty diverse, they will, over time, tend to adopt the same kinds of views. And you can measure this empirically. This is what political scientists tell us is really happening. We’re not sorting ourselves out. We’ve stopped mixing ourselves together.
Jeff: How much of this do we have to look at in the context of simply the availability of housing, and that so much less housing has been built of late for a whole host of reasons that you talk about in the book?
Yoni: I went into this pretty skeptical because I don’t like monocausal explanations. The world is a big, complicated place, and it’s rare to find one factor that really is the dominant explanation. But I don’t think the numbers lie here. The more I’ve looked, the clearer it became that something profound had shifted in American life. For 200 years, the gap between the richest and the poorest places in America narrowed. Because people would move from poorer places to wealthier places in search of opportunity. Those wealthier places had faster-growing economies.
They made more jobs available. They offered more civic services and amenities, better education. And not only would the people who moved do better, their kids would do even better. The gap would widen in the second generation. That’s how America worked. People still want to live in such places. And you can tell that because if you’ve ever tried to buy or rent a home in a wealthy, prosperous city in one of our fastest-growing economies, you’ve seen what the prices are like. That is because there is extraordinary demand for the chance to live there.
What has changed is we no longer accommodate that demand with new supply. For 200 years, when more people wanted to live someplace, we built them more homes. It was possible to construct the housing, and that kept the housing relatively affordable even as populations surged. You can look at a decade in California where the population goes up by 50% and the housing supply goes up by 50%, and the median home price doesn’t budge. That’s how it worked in the mid-20th century. More recently, we see a reversal of this flow. Instead of moving from the poorest places in America to the places that are richest in opportunity, people are now leaving the places that are richest in opportunity and moving to the places where the housing is cheap.
That’s fine if that’s a choice that works for somebody who wants to move and for their family, but it is not fine if what that means in practice is that that family can no longer build a better life for its children. It’s not fine if it means that the gap between the rich and poor places is growing, which it now is, or that the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest Americans is growing, which it certainly is. Geographic mobility was the thing that made this country more equal over time. Geographic immobility is making it a very unequal place, and that’s a huge problem.
Jeff: And it’s happening on an economic level for a whole host of reasons, but it’s also happening in that in the wealthier neighborhoods or more progressive neighborhoods in many cases, particularly in and around our cities, that there is more resistance than ever to building that housing.
Yoni: There’s a lot more resistance to building the housing, and some of it is driven by concerns that I find entirely relatable. Like I don’t want a new apartment building built next to my single-family home. I don’t think it would be particularly great to have the construction noise or to fight for parking there. People tend to worry about the environmental impact of new construction. They worry about it changing the character of their neighborhood. These are very human concerns. And I get them. But there’s another side to it too. We’ve changed the rules to allow anyone with an objection to a zoning change.
Anyone who doesn’t like the new construction coming to their neighborhood to object to hearings during review processes, which are recent innovations, and then ultimately to go to court to try to block it. And that has made it really hard to build. It’s made it particularly hard to build in blue jurisdictions. That is where the constriction of supply is most acute. There’s a great study of this in California that shows that for every 10 points more liberal a city votes, its new housing permits go down by 30%. So it’s not just a blue versus red divide. It’s the bluer the jurisdiction, the more intense the problem.
And here’s the thing. Even if these decisions can be defensible from the perspective of the neighbor of each individual new construction site, once you’ve given everybody a veto to exercise over the construction of any particular kind of new housing, what you get is no new housing. And that has effects not only on the existing community, it has effects that ripple nationwide. There’s somebody who’s living in a poor community right now who would like to move to a community where they could get a better job, would like to enroll their daughter in your kids’ school, and they can’t do it because they can’t possibly afford the housing.
That’s a new problem in America and it’s denying that girl a chance at a life where she can put her talents to fullest use. If you flip it around on Americans like that, if you say, not, “Should they build an apartment on the lot next years,” but if instead you say, “Look, the housing restrictions we have, which don’t allow duplexes that don’t allow low-rise town homes,” those restrictions you’re thinking about in terms of buildings. But do you think that the nurses and the daycare workers and the firefighters in your community should have a chance to raise their kids in your community, the community that they serve every day? Do you think your community should make room for young families?
Do you want your kids to be able to move back to your town when they’re grown up and raise the grandkids within walking distance? Do you think that older residents of your community should have access to single-floor housing like an apartment so that they can age in place in the community and retain their social ties as they get older? Americans say yes overwhelmingly if you poll them, to all of those propositions. So the housing supply constriction is what’s driving this. What Americans, I think, don’t see is the way in which those housing supply constrictions, which makes sense that the lot by lot level are depriving them of the communities they say they very much want to live in.
Jeff: Talk about the role of education and schools in this, because that’s a big part of social mobility as well, and it is really keeping lots of kids out of better schools by not being able to move into those better neighborhoods.
Yoni: And this is something that’s a little bit peculiar to America. We do education, for the most part, by local jurisdiction, and we do zoning rules by local jurisdiction, and we tie the two together. People will proudly tell you they send their child to a public school, but maybe not tell you that all of the homes in that school district cost seven figures and they’re effectively paying a private school tuition through their mortgage. That is a real problem, I think. The inability of families to access good educational systems, we keep trying to find workarounds for this.
For a while, we turn to busing to move students from one jurisdiction to another rather than just letting people move their families from one jurisdiction to another. And that provoked a lot of opposition. We’ve tried other workarounds, but fundamentally, the way that we used to do this was letting people move into communities that were providing education and other social services that would enable their kids to get a real shot. And I really don’t think there’s any substitute for it. I think the workarounds have failed and our schools remain astonishingly unequal. And they do that, at some fundamental level, because of the zoning laws.
Jeff: What role, if any, do you find that the pandemic played in all of this problem?
Yoni: There was a moment during the pandemic when I think a lot of Americans, particularly those working urban white collar jobs, could allow themselves to imagine that we could solve these problems through technology. That maybe opportunity wouldn’t be so tightly tied to geography anymore. Maybe many jobs could be done fully remote. I don’t think it’s worked out that way. There was a little dip as people moved away from the hottest housing markets to places where the housing was cheaper. The problem is that a lot of them found when they got there that they were spending down a store of social capital.
If you had lived in a place which had offered you a lot of opportunity and build strong relationships, then yes, you can continue to do the same job for a while at a distance. But when you were up for a big promotion, when you wanted to switch jobs, those kinds of things got harder to do for people who are fully remote. And you can see this in the housing prices that those markets have heated up again, as people realized that to continue to access the opportunities they wanted, they needed that kind of physical proximity. Maybe one day technology will solve this for us, but so far, to gauge by the actual behavior of Americans, we’re a long way from a society where geography is not the biggest determinant of your fit.
Jeff: We’ve talked about the individual impact and what it has prevented from happening in terms of equality, in terms of success for individuals. Talk about the larger frame, the 30,000-foot economic frame, that it also has had an effect on innovation and economic dynamism for the whole country.
Yoni: I think that the aggregate effects here are grim. We’re probably, by one estimate, losing $2 trillion a year in GDP by keeping workers from relocating to places where they could be more productive. Housing prices, for those who were lucky enough to buy decades ago, it has become a huge asset. But for most Americans, housing prices are stubbornly high that the census considers most renters to be rent burdened to be paying more for their housing than they can really afford. So ordinary American families feel incredibly squeezed by the cost of housing, and there’s no really good reason for it.
There’s lots of ability to build more housing and bring the prices down. We’ve just artificially constricted the supply. So that has a big impact. And I think it’s driving a lot of the bitterness in America. People can see that they don’t have the kinds of opportunities that their parents’ generation had, that their grandparents had. They have the sense that something fundamental has broken in America. So it’s hurting our economy. It’s costing individual families a lot. And it is changing.
If you translate that study I talked about, about what happens when people move and when they don’t, and multiply that out by the number of Americans who are stuck in place, what you get is a country that is losing its optimism and losing its orientation toward the future and starting to adopt a zero sum mentality. And so I think you can see this hitting at multiple levels.
Jeff: Talk about how entrenched this all is, because in spite of the fact that it is now increasingly part of the public dialogue that you’ve written eloquently about it and there’s a few other books out now that touch on this issue, that there’s no sense that this issue is being addressed head on.
Yoni: I think that people are starting to pay attention to this. It’s not something that we’ve thought about, I think, terribly hard. The housing prices are a long-time subject of political concern. But I wrote the book to try to get people to think about not just the cost of housing, but about the downstream consequences. I think the real problem here is the lack of mobility. But there’s a fundamental optimism to my narrative here.
There are lots of problems that our gridlocked Congress refuses to solve. There are lots of problems that the current administration is uninterested in tackling. This is not a problem that anyone needs to wait on the federal government in order to address. It is the aggregate of a lot of decisions taken at the state and local level that have really produced the current crisis of mobility. And that means that they can be undone at the state and local level. If you want to live in the kind of country that has the kind of opportunity that we’ve been describing here, that lets people take charge of their own lives and exercise a sense of agency, that’s actually possible to do.
You just need to change the rules and open yourself to the possibility that there’ll be new neighbors moving in down the street and that you’ll gain a lot from their presence and they’ll gain a lot from yours. And so I think that this is not a problem that we’ve focused on. But it’s one that snuck up on us over the course of recent decades. And that’s actually good news because it’s a relatively recent change in the structure of our society, and it’s one we can still reverse.
Jeff: The other problem is that not only are people stuck in place, but there’s a sense of this framework that has created this problem also being something that we’re stuck in because of the psychological impacts people feel of being stuck.
Yoni: Yes. There is something really unsettling about losing control of your own life. One of the things that became clear to me, reading the accounts of Americans who had moved toward opportunity, whether in the the 1700s or the 1900s, or more recently, was that although their fates were incredibly uncertain, lots of moves did not produce better lives. Did it on average, but that average conceals a lot of failure and disappointment.
America was the place that gave you a 2nd chance or a 3rd chance or a 14th chance. You could keep moving and you could keep trying again. It gave Americans a fundamental sense that their lives were in their own control, that they could decide who they wanted to be. When they moved, they got to decide which church to join. This is the only country on earth, and this has been true for more than 200 years, where most people don’t belong as adults to the church or confession into which they were born as children.
Americans have been able to decide who they are religiously, decide who they are in terms of the professions or trades they want to pursue. They’ve been able to decide what kinds of communities they want to belong to. We’re an individualist nation, but that doesn’t mean we’re atomized; it means traditionally that we’ve expressed our individual identities by choosing the communities that we want to reside in and the communities with which we want to affiliate. That really gave Americans a strong sense of agency in their own lives.
That was the promise of mobility. You weren’t consigned to the role, the station, the social rank at which you were born. You could make of the world what you would. That’s, I think, the American dream. But it hinged on being able to move. And as we’ve lost our mobility, we’re losing that, that sense of agency. And I think a lot of Americans will articulate this, not necessarily as I can’t move, but rather as there are these malevolent forces that are in control of my life. I’m not in control of my own life. I am subject to large impersonal forces that are shaping my fate and that I’m powerless to resist.
Jeff: And finally, how much has technology and the fact that it has made the world smaller been a factor in this? The extent to which it impacts people’s ability to reinvent themselves, that places look like each other, that the world is smaller because of social media and technology, and the idea of moving somewhere else completely new and reinventing doesn’t seem quite as easy as it once did.
Yoni: Gosh, that’s such a good question. And changing your address does not change the top Google search result when somebody types your name in. So clearly that opportunity to leave your past entirely behind has been narrowed. But I don’t think most people who moved where ever trying to totally escape their past. For most people who relocated, it was more about the kinds of opportunities that became available to them. The reinvention didn’t mean erasure.
Sometimes it meant a doubling down on old identities. That was part of the power of America was that you could decide affirmatively to be more who you had been. You could decide to stay in place. That too became a choice. In a nation where everybody is moving, the decision to stay becomes a positive decision, an act of agency, rather than a yielding to fate. And so I think that yes, technology has narrowed our ability to reinvent ourselves or to escape our past, but it maybe hasn’t had as large an impact on our ability to shape our futures.
Jeff: Yoni Appelbaum, his book is Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Yoni, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast.
Yoni: Thanks so much for talking.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
