A defining feature of America from its inception has been physical mobility. And that physical mobility has been the engine of social mobility. But we’ve seen a great deal of economic and social sclerosis over the past few decades. Our guest this week has how, for many people, America has ceased to be the land of opportunity. Yoni Appelbaum is a deputy executive editor of The Atlantic, author of “Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity,” and a social and cultural historian of the U.S. He joins WITHpod to discuss how the idea of mobility has changed within the last century, how things might become less “stuck” and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Yoni Appelbaum: The definition of zoning is that you are saying that some uses are acceptable over here and they are not acceptable over there. The Supreme Court compares it to a pig in the parlor and not in the barnyard, right? Like, you can have a good thing that’s in the wrong place.
And the problem with zoning as a way to do this is that over and over again, the more fine-grained you make those rules, the more affluent communities get to use those rules as a means to keep their places free of pigs, but to consign other people to live in barnyards.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
I got a chance to go to China, I think it was around 15 years ago. It’s the only time I’ve been, and I was on a reporting trip for a week. It was awesome, mind blowing.
There was a million things about it that just absolutely broke my brain and it stayed with me. One of them was talking to someone about the intense migration that was happening in China over a course of decades from basically the countryside to the cities. And the fact that this migration was intensely managed and regulated by the government in the way that we think of immigration being regulated here, meaning you could not, in China, just be like: “You know what? I’m just going to go move to the city. Check it out, maybe rent an apartment, try to get a job.”
You actually had to like go through essentially an immigration process to get the government, and the government had caps on how many people could come in, and intensely regulated how many people can move to a city, even what city you can move to, whether you can move from one province to the city in that province or a city in another province.
And I remember thinking to myself like, oh, this is such an amazing thing. Like, this is so Chinese. This level of state regulation and offends some deep part of my Americanness. Like, obviously, I knew that China was a repressive state, a one-party state. They don’t have the freedoms of liberal democracy. They don’t have the Bill of Rights. They don’t have freedom of speech, all this stuff. But it somehow really struck my core. Like, I can’t just move where I want to go?
And it occurred to me in the moment how profound a sense of freedom that is, like how much that is core or freedom is like physical freedom of movement, freedom of mobility. And I was thinking about this because I just read a phenomenal new book that is about American mobility.
Mobility in two senses: Mobility in the physical sense, people moving from one place to the other; and mobility in the social sense, people moving basically up the ladder or down the ladder in American social hierarchy.
And this phenomenal new book called “Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity” makes the argument that a defining feature of America from its inception has been physical mobility, moving around a lot. And that, in fact, that physical mobility has been the engine of social mobility. And the sclerosis we’ve experienced over the last three to four decades has shut down the physical mobility and with it, that social mobility, and left us, well, in the words of the book’s title, stuck. The author of the book is Yoni Appelbaum. He’s Deputy Executive Editor at “The Atlantic” and it’s my great pleasure to welcome him to WITHpod.
Yoni Appelbaum: I am thrilled to be here.
Chris Hayes: Yoni, you were trained as a historian, is that right?
Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah. I’m a historian who’s gone wrong and launched into journalism.
Chris Hayes: Tell me about what kind of history did you study?
Yoni Appelbaum: I got a doctorate in 19th century American history and then was teaching at Harvard.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, it’s interesting because your historical ability really comes through in the book because there’ll be these sort of strands you pull on. And the person who was in the house that you lived in or a distant relative who moved around a lot and got booted out of two different congregations he tried to pastor over. So, there’s all these incredible, I mean, incredibly rich bit of historical and archival research that comes through in this book.
Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah. The legacy of having trained as a historian is when I see something I can’t figure out, I start thinking not just, why is that happening, but where did that come from. Can I look back and figure out why it happens the way that it does. And I could see a really big problem, which was that we have widening inequality in this country. People don’t seem to be able to live the lives they thought they would, and I wanted to know why. I wanted to know what had changed.
Chris Hayes: So, there’s a house that I lived in with my family until recently, and I would always say this about this house when I would think about this problem, that, here I am. I’m very lucky to have the job I have. I host a cable news show, and I have this house with my family that we live in. And my understanding about this house was that like 70 years ago, it would probably have been owned by a firefighter or a teacher or an accountant or a shopkeeper.
It’s same house. House been there for a hundred years and that the neighborhood would have been with shopkeepers, firefighters, carpenters and the like, that something had gone terribly wrong, that you had to host a cable news show to live in this house, in this neighborhood in our year. And you basically sort of start your book from a very similar place with the place that you live in Cambridge.
Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah, that’s when I started this research. I was living in an apartment in Cambridge that was already a little too small for my family. It already cost a little bit too much. And I’d look back to see who used to live in it. And for a hundred years, my building had been home to the children of immigrants. People just getting their start in America, pulling their way up the ladder, giving their children a little bit more opportunity than they’d enjoyed.
I could look out my window and that’s not who was in the neighborhood anymore. And all through Cambridge, this was starting to be a problem. Cambridge used to be a gritty industrial town. It used to be full of factories and full of immigrants and their kids and people making their way up in America.
The neighborhood I lived in was so famous for this that a bunch of sociologists had studied it to figure out its secret sauce. And they coined a new term, they called it a zone of emergence, because they’d watched, it’s just one wave after another, after another would succeed each other in this neighborhood. And then after a hundred years, it stopped. Something profound changed and you couldn’t get into Cambridge anymore.
It was too expensive. People could not move in, even though Cambridge still had great schools and good playgrounds, and it was a great place to raise a family. It had lost two thirds of its kids from the peak. School buildings were being turned into condos, because there was nobody to attend school. Something had really broken in the city.
Chris Hayes: I think that a lot of people know that or have a sense or have read the literature about this sort of problem of a lack of building of new homes and there’s been this YIMBY movement. And in some ways, the sort of point that your argument sharpens to is along similar lines.
Basically, we’re not building enough housing and letting people build enough housing to accommodate this. But the sort of deeper historical story you tell, which is just full of every page on some amazing revelation is part of what makes this book such a great read, so delightful and so it so reoriented my thinking.
Your thesis is that mobility, physical mobility, is the soul of the nation and the driver of the American exceptionalism that made us a less rigid hierarchy, particularly for white people. Although, migration for African-Americans becomes an enormous part of the story as well.
Walk me through your argument of the train through American history of mobility as a sort of central theme.
Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah. Let’s actually start on the other side of the Atlantic, right? In the old world, you were typically born into a village somewhere. You belonged to a particular place. I mean that like you literally belonged to that place. If you left that place, you could be taken up and removed back. That place was charged with your care if you became too poor, too sick to care for yourself. Everybody had an assigned place in the world.
And in the early modern era in England, people start to break free from this a little bit. And it’s enormously disreputable, to not be in your proper place is to have been so destitute and so desperate that you fled. And it was destabilizing. It was suspicious. It was disrespectable and they even had to coin a new word just to describe this shiftless mass of people who no longer slotted into their proper spot in the hierarchy, they called it the mobile vulgus.
And then, they contracted that down and they said, it’s just the “mob.” It’s a word that we still use, right?
Chris Hayes: It’s amazing. Yeah.
Yoni Appelbaum: It’s to refer to a mass of people we’re not quite sure about. It’s not a flattering term. So, that’s the world you start with. Everybody is attached to a particular place. That was true in England. It was true through most of the old world. It was true of most of human history.
But in that sense, when you were in China, it wasn’t the exception. It was a very typical way for a society to structure itself. But something changes when people come to the United States. They have to make it respectable to come in the first place. They have to invent an excuse for leaving their proper place. And they sort of hit on this idea that maybe it’s okay to leave sometimes if you’re going in the common good. If you’re going to establish a better community.
The people who first move over here think they’re just doing it once. They come to Virginia. They’re coming to New England. They’re going to go and they’ll reestablish the same kind of hierarchy, the same kind of everybody slotting into their proper place in the world that the old world had.
But by the early 1800s, a set of legal changes happen. If you’re living in the colonial era and you move into a community, that community can warn you out. It doesn’t matter if you bought a house. It doesn’t matter if you’re engaged to a girl in town. It doesn’t matter if you have a job. The community can deliver a notice and say, you don’t get to join. We select our own members and we don’t want you here. And then you had to leave.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, so let’s just stay on this for a second, because towns are kind of like, I didn’t know this at all, I’d never encountered the term worn out, warn you out. The towns are kind of like country clubs, basically. Like, they are membership organizations that get to choose. Like, you can leave a place.
So, the right to leave, no one keeps you in a place, you can leave. But the right to enter is pretty contested with a pretty high bar.
Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah. Many of these towns are warning out most of the people who want to settle there. They do it to defend their jobs. They do it to remain ideologically homogenous. They do it because they just don’t like the way you look, and I mean that literally. We can see that African-Americans were disproportionately warned out of these towns.
But what they did was once they let you in, you were in for life. They were obligated to care for you for the rest of your life and you are a member. But the world was full of these members only clubs and you couldn’t just decide where you wanted to live. And then, in the early 1800s, we’re settling out west in Ohio and the towns are competing with each other for population. The new territories are competing with each other. And they say, we’re never going to win this if we don’t just let people in.
So, they take away the ability and for the first time, really in human history, instead of communities choosing their members, people get to choose their communities. All you got to do is show up and say, I intend to be a resident of this town in Ohio. And you’re in, they have to accept you. And that is such a revolutionary change. And it changes the way we think about the world so profoundly that looking back, we’re not even cognizant of it. I moved into a house. It didn’t occur to me to be grateful that I didn’t have to ask anyone for permission to live there. It didn’t occur to me that I was off the hook and my neighbors couldn’t blackball me. It’s just not part of my mental world anymore.
But when we do this, it sets off this sort of riot of mobility. Americans suddenly have the chance to move from one place to a new place and to get that second chance, the third chance, the eighth chance in American life. And there’s something which shifts their whole social world. It’s not just about chasing economic opportunity. It’s not just about being born in one town and moving to another.
This was maybe the biggest revelation about mobility for me. It gives you a chance to decide who you are. If you’re living in the same community where you were born, where your family has lived for generations, most of the core aspects of your identity are defined right at birth. Your profession may be the same profession that your ancestors have followed for generations. Your place in the social hierarchy. You have very little opportunity in the way that Americans understand that word.
You are who you were born to be. If you are moving, you get a chance to start over, to decide what job you’re going to pursue, to decide what clubs or organizations you’ll belong to. Maybe you want to try a new church down the road. From about the time we opened up mobility, America has been the only place on earth where most people don’t belong to the church they were born into. Americans are always switching religions and denominations, because they have the ability to define themselves as they land in a new place and get that chance to start over.
And there’s great psychology research on this. It makes them relatively optimistic, relatively tolerant and much more interested in forming relationships with other people in their communities.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And we should say there’s some asterisks here, which you point out consistently through the book, like black folks are often excluded from places. There’s actually really interesting debates that happen about that.
And it’s actually not as clear cut as you would think. I think there’s a vote by one vote in Ohio very early on. Am I recalling this correctly? To essentially enforce a kind of segregated barrier. But the fact that it was one vote really stuck with me.
Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah. And if you want to know how important mobility is to Americans, you can look at what it means to deny it, right?
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Yoni Appelbaum: At the most literal sense, to be enslaved is to have your mobility taken away from you.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, exactly.
Yoni Appelbaum: And as enslaved people in the United States contest for their freedom, they do it by running away.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Yoni Appelbaum: By an exercise of mobility, they relocate. That is how you free yourself. And so, from the very beginning, the denial of mobility has been how this society excludes, how it arranges itself in its own kind of hierarchy. And the pursuit of mobility has been how the society allows people to rise.
Chris Hayes: And, of course, on the other side of this emerging frontier, indigenous folks who have lived there for hundreds, if not thousands of years, who can’t move in and are having their land taken for this project of mobility.
Yoni Appelbaum: Or being involuntarily relocated, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Yoni Appelbaum: So, it’s one kind of mobility. If you’re indulging in an exercise of individual agency, it’s quite something else if you’re being moved to the point of a gun.
Chris Hayes: Exactly. So, you have these like sort of different modes of mobility and the kinds of freedoms and privileges they confer. You make this really convincing case that I think one way you could think about this is, okay, well, America has this thing that no one else has, if you’re European, which they have this frontier. They have this kind of escape valve, where it’s, like, if everything’s too crowded or, like, oh, you guys have some real religious ideas, we don’t want you around. It’s like, all right, we’ll go out west. And you see this sort of restless frontier spirit.
But you make this very convincing argument that that isn’t the sum total of this mobility thing. That it’s not just the frontier and the conquering of the west from indigenous peoples that is this distinctly American form of mobility.
Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah. I’d even say it’s not mostly the frontier. The frontier is where it starts. So, when the first European settlers arrive here and displaced the native inhabitants, they are seizing land and the fact that that land can be seized is what allows them to be mobile.
But very, very quickly, you can look at the flows of population in the colonies and then in the young United States. Most people who are moving are not moving west. It’s only ever a small fraction of the population that wants to go out there and car farms out on the frontier. Most people who are moving are moving within the settled areas, because that’s where most people in the United States live.
Chris Hayes: Of course, right. Yeah.
Yoni Appelbaum: And they’re moving just astonishingly frequently. After we open up the possibility of mobility by the middle of the 19th century, it seems likely that one out of three Americans is moving every year. It’s just almost inconceivable.
Chris Hayes: I mean, you’ve got this great thing where you tell the Lincoln bio about his early years, but he moved a number of times, making his way ultimately Kentucky, I think Indiana, then Illinois. And it reminded me there’s so often, in my life, I’ve checked the bio of some 19th century American and they’re all like that. They all moved around a ton. I had this moment of like, oh, yeah, I do feel like I’ve encountered that so often in reading about that centuries’ worth of Americans.
Yoni Appelbaum: And it drove Europeans nuts. They’d come over and they’d see this and they’d say, “What is wrong with you, people? How come you’re —
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Why so restless?
Yoni Appelbaum: — yeah, your home, your hearth, how come you’re not loyal to the place where you were born. And what really drove them nuts was that some people, like Lincoln’s dad, when he moves from Indiana to Illinois. When he moves from Kentucky, the first farm in Kentucky gets taken away. The second farm gets taken away, so that’s one side of mobility is that you get these new chances. You can fail and you can start over again. And that’s really, really powerful.
When he leaves Indiana, he’s doing fine in Indiana, he just thinks he can do a little better in Illinois and that’s a very American thing. And the Europeans look at this and they’re like, this is wrong. You know, people shouldn’t rise above their station. You’re doing fine. You should accept your lot in life. You’ve got enough. Stay put in Indiana.
And Americans just see it totally differently. They’re like, I’m doing fine where I am, but I think I could do a little bit better over there. And then they get up and they move. And that constant mobility gives America a kind of dynamism that made it so literally the envy of the world that people fled over here to take part in it.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: There is an institution that comes to be, I think it’s in the late 19th century, late 1800s, that I had no knowledge of that you’d spent some time on that really blew my mind. You got contemporaries accounts called Moving Day. Tell us about what Moving Day was.
Yoni Appelbaum: Moving Day was this ritual, all unwritten leases in a particular jurisdiction would expire on the same day and almost nobody had a written lease. So, you didn’t have paperwork, but everybody knew that on a day, all the leases would be up. And that day was actually different in different cities. It was May 1st in New York. In some places, it was April, March, September.
But whenever that day was, a quarter, a third, half of the place would pick up and move. And it might be if you were in an area of leased farms, that farmers are swapping farms in a city. It was particularly dramatic, because people had to do it between sunup and sundown. So, in the morning, they’d pile all their belongings at the curb. They’d hail down a cart and try to get the cartman to drive however many blocks they were moving. And then, they’d have to unload the thing and get into the new apartment while the other family is moving out.
The city was total chaos. People would come over from Europe pretty much just to watch this. It was like that mandatory stop on the tourist itinerary. You know, you see the running of the bulls these days. You could see the running of the houses in New York. People are just swapping in that single day. And this is the magic of the thing, almost everybody ends up better off.
Chris Hayes: Your description of Moving Day is amazing. And one of the things that you observe, which has really stuck with me was, A, most people are renting —
Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — at this point. And that you say that people view their homes the way we now view a consumer good, like a phone. Like, you wouldn’t want the same phone for 20 years. You want it for a year or two. And then, there’s like new amenities and particularly, at this point, when there’s rapid industrial development, like plumbing gets better, wiring gets better, amenities get better. Windows can open and shut, where before they couldn’t.
And so, people actually, because they had the relationship to their homes, the way we think of it, to consumer goods, they actually like the constant upgrading. That was part of the reason you keep moving.
Yoni Appelbaum: It’s a big part of it. There’s this wonderful story about a girl whose parents want to surprise her and they take her out into this house. They take her inside and they said, “Here is your new home. We’ve bought this home.” And she absorbs it for a moment and looks at her parents and says, “Does this mean we don’t get to move next year?”
It’s not the American dream of homeownership as we know it. There’s really this assumption that your house this year has running water and maybe next year it has hot and cold running water. Like, there are technological upgrades and you expect that better things will become available.
And as long as they’re building, it’s not that they’re building lots of affordable housing, but if you add a bunch of units at the top, the richest people move into those. They vacate units and the upper middle classes bump up into those. And you can trace this through the property records and see chains of 10, 12, 15 families which are moving. One unit becomes vacant and a dozen families each get to bump up one level of housing.
And so, Moving Day is really working well for Americans. And I know it’s working well for them because you can also read an awful lot of complaints from landlords who hate the thing. They say —
Chris Hayes: Yeah. They have no leverage.
Yoni Appelbaum: — right, they’ve got no leverage. Like the renters here, they’re always asking for lower rents. They always want me to come in and fix up their apartment. And I’ve got no choice because Moving Day is around the corner or I’ve had to cut the rents again this year. And so, it’s a pretty good indication that this is working well for the renters.
Chris Hayes: So then as we get into the 20th century, there’s sort of these big other main sort of forces of mobility. There’s mass immigration happening in the end of the 19th century. There’s the, sort of, mass urbanization that’s happening. And then, of course, one of the great social mobility, physical mobility stories of American history, the great migration of African-Americans moving, as you said, like when they have no liberty, the one thing they can do is leave the south and moving to the north and west.
Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah, and all of that mobility is a little upsetting, so that there are lots of people in the United States who are taking advantage of it, leaning into it. You have this great churn of the population and you also start to get some real pushback against it. People are not thrilled that there are immigrant groups coming to their cities.
They’re not necessarily thrilled that there are internal migrants, who are coming to their regions and they start to cast about for ways to restrain the mobility so that they don’t have to put up with that.
Chris Hayes: It’s a place where the potency of mobility is so illustrated. Like what you said before about how slavery, though, like the literal meaning of it is, like, you do not have control over where your own body goes. But everyone’s still the same idea that like of that the pilgrims, like we’re physically going to relocate, so we got a better shot. The frontier black folks escaping Jim Crow immigrants, like the same idea is animating the same thing of like physical mobility will equal social mobility is sort of the guiding light through time and demographics and cultures in place.
Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah. And we articulate this ideal of freedom of movement. And like other American freedoms, it’s contested. So, at first it’s mostly white men who get to exercise it and other groups come along and say, we want our share of the American dream. We demand that this country live up to its promise, not just for white men, but for other groups, too.
And you start to see Chinese laborers in California assert this ideal of freedom of movement. You see the great migration. You get coming out of grinding Southern poverty, 20 million white southerners, 8 million black southerners move up over the course of the 20th century, because they, too, want the promise of America to be extended to them.
And that push to realize the American dream by going from one place to another becomes this insistent theme. And you can mark the progress of this society toward greater equality by the number of groups that get to exercise their freedom of movement.
Chris Hayes: When do things start to become stuck? If it’s the case that this is from the country’s founding through and across these different subgroups and parts of the social hierarchy, always contested, always fraught, battled in many ways. But this sort of engine of physical mobility and social mobility, when does it start to slow down?
Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah. So, in the 19th century, probably one in three Americans is moving every year. As late as 1970, it’s one in five. And the census just told us that we set a new record. It’s now down to one in 13.
So, the huge slide is from 1970 to the present. But the seeds of the problem are planted in Modesto, California in 1885.
Chris Hayes: Tell us about those seeds.
Yoni Appelbaum: In Modesto, this is a boom town where after the gold rush, lots of people have come to California. So many people have come to California seeking gold, mostly men, that they stink, because the men won’t stoop to do laundry. They consider it women’s work.
The problem gets so bad in San Francisco, I’m not making this up, clever entrepreneur takes people’s clothes and puts them on a boat and sends them to Hawaii to get washed, because there are Laundromats in Hawaii. And then, they ship the clean laundry back to San Francisco. That’s how desperate they are for laundries.
So, there are Chinese workers and they say, okay, this is our shot. We’re discriminated against in lots of aspects of the society, but we’re willing to do laundry and it gives us our chance at the American dream. They set up these laundries.
And it’s a little bit like a Starbucks. Like, you’re not going to walk four laundries down. You’ll go to the closest one and drop off your clothes.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Yoni Appelbaum: They move into the white neighborhoods to be close to their customers. And the people in Modesto are really upset about this. And they say, “We don’t want you here.” And they try different ways to get rid of the Chinese. Their first move is arson. They try burning down the laundries, but the Chinese rebuild.
Their second move is vigilante violence. They put on hoods. They march through Chinatown, smashing windows and beating people up. And the Chinese clean up the debris and, again, insist that they should have their shot at the American dream.
Their third move is zoning. They draft a clever little ordinance that says all of the laundries in town have to move west of the tracks and south of G Street. There’s never been a law like this in America before, which says that something is fine to do in one part of town, but not okay to do in another part of town. Not because it’s noxious, not because it’s hurting anyone, but just because you want to confine it to a certain place.
Well, I pulled an old map of Modesto. There’s only one block on that map that is west of the tracks and south of G Street. And it’s got a label on it, it says “Chinatown.” This was segregating the Chinese into a ghetto, but doing it cleverly without ever using the word Chinese, without ever saying what they were up to.
So, zoning becomes this means to segregate undesirable populations and to push them out of white communities.
Chris Hayes: I got to say, that portion of the book was like a absolute nuclear bomb aha moment. I did not know that story at all and felt sort of weirdly ignorant. How widely known is that story?
Yoni Appelbaum: I don’t think it’s widely known. Part of what I did when I was writing, it was try to find everything I could about what had actually happened in Modesto. I think other scholars have pointed to Modesto as the first ordinance. But I really wanted to tell the story as best I could of Hong Kee (ph). This Chinese launderer who should be an American civil rights hero.
He says, arrest me, I’ll be the test case here. And he gets arrested. He gets beaten up in jail. He pays a steep price for his courage. The case goes all the way to the California Supreme Court. By every precedent that is on the books, Hong Kee (ph) should win. And instead, the California Supreme Court basically waves its hands and says, well, it’s the Chinese. We’ll allow it.
Chris Hayes: So, the seeds are planted here, but this tool isn’t deployed at scale, really, for a while.
Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I mean, the fact that it’s sort of fruit of a poison tree is sort of an important origin story. When does it start to be deployed at scale?
Yoni Appelbaum: There’s sort of a two-stage process here. So the first citywide zoning ordinance happens 30 years later in New York. And in New York, it’s, again, an immigrant population that is unwanted. It’s the Jewish garment workers on the Lower East Side. The garment lofts are marching up 5th Avenue. The storekeepers, the merchant princes of 5th Avenue, are afraid that the garment workers are coming down on the sidewalk on their lunch break and scaring off all their customers.
They beg and plead with them not to do it. The workers, for some reason, think that public sidewalks should be free to walk on and they’re impervious to these pleas. They want to come down on the sidewalks. They want the fresh air. They want the break. They want to look in the windows of the department stores and find out what they should be selling in the afternoon. Their livelihoods depend on it so that they can’t be scared off.
Then they try rounding them up. They send the police to take people who are just walking down the sidewalk and cart them away. And this causes a huge uproar, because it is a public sidewalk and the workers are not actually doing anything wrong. And then, they hit on a solution. They say, if we could only restrict the uses and the heights of the buildings along 5th Avenue, we could push the garment workers back down into the Lower East Side.
So, they go to the mayor with this idea. And the city’s a little skeptical. They say, if we just do 5th Avenue, it’s a little bit obvious. The voters aren’t going to like that too much. What if we did the whole city? And they come up, in the end, a commission recommends a zoning ordinance for all of New York City. And it’s the first city to do this that says, we’re going to have different uses in different places. We’re going to designate the uses of the land.
And then, this will help us separate out the population. It will help us separate out uses. It will make a better city that’s cured of poverty and has no more problems. It will all be rational and scientific. And other cities then copy New York because New York needs to evangelize here.
The guy who drafts the ordinance says in so many words, there’s only one problem with my scheme of zoning, which is that it’s blatantly unconstitutional. But there’s a loophole. If I can get it widely adopted enough, by the time the case goes to the Supreme Court, then maybe they’ll think it is constitutional.
So, he’s out there evangelizing and trying to get lots of cities to adopt it. He works with the secretary of commerce, who’s Herbert Hoover, to promote the single-family home, to get those terrible immigrants out of their apartment buildings and down into single-family homes and uses zoning as the tool to do this, and it spreads nationwide.
I’m a little embarrassed to have to say this, Chris, but the man who really takes zoning nationwide is Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Yoni Appelbaum: And they literally make it a condition of federal home loans that you have to have a zoning ordinance.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: Do you think zoning is per se bad?
Yoni Appelbaum: I think that zoning is an awfully complicated tool. Land use regulations are not per se bad. There needs to be some sort of broader sense of the public interest, some sense of organization within a city. The definition of zoning is that you are saying that some uses are acceptable over here and they are not acceptable over there. The Supreme Court compares it to a pig in the parlor and not in the barnyard.
Like, you can have a good thing that’s in the wrong place.
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Yoni Appelbaum: And the problem with zoning as a way to do this is that over and over again, the more fine grained you make those rules, the more affluent communities get to use those rules as a means to keep their places free of pigs, but to consign other people to live in barnyards.
So, zoning is complicated. I don’t think it’s inherently bad. There are certainly other countries which have used systems of zoning without having the downsides that the United States seems to have gotten. And I don’t think it’s going away. It’s been here for a hundred years and while it can be reformed, it probably can’t be eliminated.
But the very premise of zoning sort of says, what’s okay for your backyard is not okay for mine. And that’s a complicated premise.
Chris Hayes: The other thing that happens starting in the ‘30s with the sort of federal home infrastructure, the FHA and other things, is this move towards the single-family home, the 30-year mortgage, all this stuff that creates the house as investment good, as opposed to consumer good, which also obviously has an enormous effect on what are the frictions and the costs of moving.
Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah. Hoover is trying to get Americans into single-family homes. He and other reformers, they grew up in a country that was mostly farmers and they’re living in a country that is mostly city dwellers. The country has changed profoundly from their youth. And they identify virtue with that single-family home that they grew up in. And they’re convinced that if only they could get the Americans into these homes, they could fix society.
For FDR, it’s a little different. He’s got a big problem, which is that the banks are failing throughout the country. And he needs to fix the mortgage crisis, which means the federal government is going to step in and guarantee the mortgages. But to do that, it’s shouldering this enormous amount of risk. If it was easy to do, the banks would have done it themselves.
But the feds have a tool. They decide that if they can only stop change in its tracks, then they can safely lend because they can give money for the home and the value of the home won’t change. So they say, you need a zoning ordinance before we’ll lend to you. You also need a racial covenant. You need to promise that this neighborhood, if it’s black, will always be black or if it’s white, will always be white. And unless you put a legally binding covenant on the property, we’re not going to loan to you because the neighborhood could change.
So what they’re trying to do is just to minimize the risks of the federal government as lender of last resort. Nobody sits down and thinks stretching five-year mortgages to 30 years so that the monthly payments on a mortgage is less than the monthly rent for a house, that’s a good way to keep people from defaulting. Nobody thinks through the implications. Nobody’s saying if we convince Americans not to move anymore, that’ll be good for society. They’re just thinking, how do we solve a banking crisis. And the new regulations they come up with have all of these downstream unintended consequences.
Chris Hayes: So, you’ve got zoning a kind of federalized homeownership architecture that basically subsidizes both the tax code and the sort of underwriting, 30-year mortgages, 30-year fixed mortgages, which is its own form of American exceptionalism, like they don’t have in these other places. But as you write in the book and just noted here, like you go from one out of three a year to one out of five in 1970. So, those tools are there, what’s happening post-1970 that really gets us from one out of five to one out of 13?
Yoni Appelbaum: It’s such a great question, because this is a two-step dance. It takes about a hundred years for Americans to make every new construction in the country subject to government approval. So instead of just building a house on a lot, because it’s your lot and you can build a house, now you need all clearance —
Chris Hayes: Right. You call that by right.
Yoni Appelbaum: — right, so you could build by right and now you can’t, almost nothing in this country can be built as of right anymore. And so, everything is subject to government approval. But that’s not enough to stop mobility on its own. It does segregate the population to some extent. It particularly has really terrible racial consequences, but it doesn’t stop people from moving.
What does stop people from moving is a turn against government in the 1970s. And this is a turn against big government from the left. And what happens is that people look at the New Deal and they say, we’ve got all these big government agencies, they’re not doing their jobs. Rachel Carson writes “Silent Spring” and says, the environmental regulators, they’re asleep at the switch. These pesticides are killing all the birds and they’re not doing anything about it, because they’re too close to the pesticide companies.
Ralph Nader writes “Unsafe at Any Speed.” He says, the highway regulators are too close to the big auto companies. The critique that the left has, which they’re right about, by the way, is that there’s been regulatory capture that these companies have taken over and corrupted the government bureaucrats who are supposed to be regulating them.
The critique is right, but the fix that they pose has these really pernicious consequences. They say somebody has to restore the public interest. Why not us? And specifically, what they say is let’s change the law, so anyone can challenge a government decision on the grounds that it was improperly made. And they imagine that a bunch of do-good reformers are going to start public interest research groups and environmental offense law firms and sue the government when it’s doing something really bad, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to imagine.
But once you’ve created that tool, anyone can use it. Once you’ve created a tool that allows anyone to go to court to stop a government decision, anyone can use that tool. And it turns out that the people who decide to use that tool are the people who have the most wealth, the best education and the most to protect. And the set of tools that was designed to turn government back into the public interest instead gets used to prevent any building at all.
Chris Hayes: And you tell a story of an early group that does this, the legendary group, Jane Jacobs, who writes “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” who buys a brownstone in the village in what was used to be like a very sort of fluid working class neighborhood. In fact, you tell a great story of the previous owner of that or the previous inhabitants of that home.
And in some ways, they’re like perfect kind of proto-gentrifiers. Like, I didn’t realize the degree if that was the case. But they’re living in this, like, dense urban neighborhood that had been pretty working class, but they all have pretty fancy professional jobs. And they set about using their abilities, social capital, legal resources to do something good, which is basically stop Robert Moses from destroying Greenwich Village, which thank God they did.
Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah, so Jane Jacobs is right about almost everything.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Yoni Appelbaum: She’s right that leveling neighborhoods is really bad. She’s right that Robert Moses was a genuine menace. She’s right that cities thrive on a diversity of uses and they thrive with diverse populations. And you want to have street front retail and people living above it. Like, she’s right about all of this. And then, she buys a building with street front retail and people living above it. An immigrant family. I tracked down the grandkids and they told me about the store and what it meant to the community.
And she renovates it. She rips out the storefront. She turns it into a single-family home. It’s like, oh, no, this can’t be right. But we have the photos, and you look at it, she rips off the whole facade of this historic building so that when she eventually landmarks the block, the report has to say it has no historic value anymore whatsoever.
So, she does write these brilliant things and gives these brilliant speeches. And then, she acts like most of us do, which is to say, very human and somewhat in our self-interest.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, I think part of the conundrum here that Jacobs embodies and that is at the heart of this, is that all of us, like the rational thing to want is for everyone else to be kept off the roads, but for you to be able to drive.
Yoni Appelbaum: Right.
Chris Hayes: Like the ideal situation is some regime, like, when you try to have to drive around New York City, it’s madness, it sucks. There’s a lot of traffic. And you think to yourself, goddammit, why are all these people on the road. But you are traffic. You are traffic.
And this is to me the kind of fundamental psychological core of what you’re getting at, because you’re telling a story that’s about legal regimes evolving. But what’s empowered is the best use case for me of the public roads would be I, and maybe a few people, my friends get to drive and no one else does, and that basically we’ve empowered that for a lot of neighborhoods.
Yoni Appelbaum: No, that’s such a great metaphor. And what she does in the West Village is she revives the New England village or at least its logic. She says, communities should be able to decide who moves in —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Yoni Appelbaum: — what gets built, which is the same thing. If you can’t build, new people can’t move in and it is an appealing logic. We all want that measure of control. I hate change. I’ve never wanted to move and I’ve never wanted anything new built in my neighborhood. It’s uncomfortable.
But I also know that lots of uncomfortable experiences yield benefits for me in the long run. I don’t like exercise either. I’d much rather sit on the couch, then get up and take a jog. But I know if I take the jog that I’ll be better off for it and that having put myself in that uncomfortable situation, I’ll gain in the long run.
If you give communities the right to control themselves, they will act in the interest of the existing residents, always.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And this is the really key part of this, and I’ve talked to Ned Resnikoff on the program before, who’s a sort of big B&B think tank guy in California, who I’ve known for years.
Like, it’s not irrational at all. In fact, in the short-term, it’s often the height of rational. Like, if someone’s going to put up a 20-story building that’s going to block the light in your house, like that’s kind of a bummer. Like, it will make parking worse. There are a whole bunch of things about it.
Now, I think it’s irrational in the sense that people don’t appreciate the upside, like what it does for everyone. But it really is just the problem of giving the power, not that people are benighted about their own. You know what I mean?
Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah. And I think that’s right. But I think you’re also right to point to that broader frame. So, if you ask somebody: “Do you want somebody to build an apartment building on your block?” Overwhelmingly, Americans will say, no.
Chris Hayes: Nope. No, thank you.
Yoni Appelbaum: We’ve got the polling on this. Like —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Yoni Appelbaum: — they don’t want that.
Chris Hayes: No.
Yoni Appelbaum: But you can ask the same question a different way. You can say, do you want young families to be able to move into your neighborhood? You could say, do you want to live in a neighborhood with people of diverse backgrounds? Do you think that the daycare workers and the firefighters and the nurses who are serving your community should be able to raise their own children in your community?
And if you ask people that, they’ll say, oh, hell yes. But it’s the same question. It’s the same question asked two different ways. If you’re going to get there, you’re going to need to put up that apartment building down the block. You’re going to need to allow for denser housing. You’re going to need to allow for new construction.
And so, I do think that it’s perfectly rational for communities to block this at the level of each individual project. But if you look at the country as a whole and say something profound has broken in American life. For 200 years, we move from places that were poor to places that were richer. And now, we’re moving from the places that are richer to the places that are poor.
For 200 years, each generation of Americans did better than their parents, and that’s breaking down. For 200 years, people were able to define their own identities and to feel a sense of agency in their lives. And now, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Chris, a lot of Americans are pretty angry at the system —
Chris Hayes: Mm-hmm.
Yoni Appelbaum: — and feel as if they’re getting screwed by elites. And it’s having some disturbing political consequences.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, I think this sort of like one thing that really struck me about your book, thinking in political consequences, which, again, most of the book isn’t about politics in some ways, it’s really nice to have a respite from that for me personally, selfishly. But this sort of idea of like who stays and who goes is actually an enormous selector of the political divide. So, like, there are people from all over this country, from tons of rural areas, southern towns, Midwestern post-industrial steel towns that move, for whatever reason, often because of personality that sort of select out and it’s a much smaller group than it used to be, who moves.
But those folks tend to move to large major metropolitan areas. They tend to go to college. They tend to basically become liberals or vote Democratic. Again, I’m generalizing, but we know this in the aggregate. And then, the people who don’t increasingly are conservative. And this sort of like spatial polarization is getting worse and worse and more locked in, so that nothing circulating this. Like, no one’s moving into these places.
And now, people are selecting consciously when they make their choices, these political valances.
Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah. And when Americans were moving all the time, what it meant was that there were always people coming into your community with a different background, a different set of political views. It reduced polarization.
Over the last 50 years, as people have moved less and less, you live in a community for long enough, you start to reflect the views of those around you. We’re conformist by nature. And people will, over time, most people will adopt views of the people around them. Our polarization is being driven in part by our lack of mobility. It’s less that we’re sorting out and more that without the constant movement —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Yoni Appelbaum: — we tend to polarize. But there’s another side to this, too. There’s a great study by some psychologists at the University of Chicago who pointed out that Americans who intend to move are less than half as likely to be able to follow through on that ambition now as they used to be. And they looked at the people who did move and the people who wanted to move, which is most Americans, by the way, who want to move and couldn’t.
And what they found was the people who moved, they grew more optimistic. They felt a greater sense of agency and control in their lives. They were also likely to believe that the pie could get bigger, that they were living in a country where their success and somebody else’s success could feed off of each other and to be more welcoming of outsiders. They’re more likely to reach out and join organizations or to make new friendships. So, all of this came from moving.
But the population in America I’m most worried about are the enormous number of people who tell researchers they want to move. And then, when they follow up a year later or five years later, they haven’t moved. Those people, we also know what happens to them. They become more cynical. They become much more likely to see others gains as coming at their expense.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Yoni Appelbaum: And we also know that they become, and not to get too political here, but people who had never left their hometowns were 30 points more likely to vote for Donald Trump. Whereas, people who had left their hometown at some point and moved were much more likely to vote for Democrats.
So, part of Trump’s genius was recognizing the rage and the anger that people felt. They may not have known what was wrong. If you asked Americans, like, why are you so angry? They might not say, because I wanted to relocate to a big city and didn’t have the chance. They just knew something had gone wrong, that their life wasn’t supposed to feel like this. They weren’t supposed to be acted on. They were supposed to have a sense of agency and be able to make their own choices. And that gets back to this fundamental idea that this is a freedom.
When you take people’s freedom away from them, they tend to get really angry and they tend to lash out. They tend to gravitate toward people who are promising them something better.
Chris Hayes: One thing I’d love you to sort of address a little bit is sometimes the discussion of housing in this country and housing costs get excessively refracted through the geographical clustering of the people that write articles, which is they live in extremely expensive places.
Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: There are huge swaths of America where housing is very cheap.
Yoni Appelbaum: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And one question is, why isn’t there circulation happening there? Why isn’t there more circulation happening there? Why isn’t cheap housing a lure?
When we saw the Springfield, Ohio moment in the news cycle, it was this classic post-industrial town, huge population loss, rising unemployment, rising opioid problem. And then, this new population of Haitian immigrants had come in. It had kind of brought with it some revitalization, also some tensions, et cetera.
But then the question is, like, why didn’t that happen earlier? Like, why isn’t there more of that circulation amongst the places? We know why you can’t move to San Francisco. That’s clear as day. They haven’t built enough housing. It’s too expensive. Clear as day. Same for the New York Metro, all these other places. But there still are a lot of cheap places to live in America.
Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah, when I started talking about this, I was having a conversation, a very D.C. conversation with the congressman and talked to him about some of my ideas on this. And he said, you’re an idiot. You don’t know anything. I represent Flint, Michigan. And my problem is not that the housing is too expensive. It’s that we can’t even tear down the houses fast enough.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Yoni Appelbaum: We can’t give them away. Come out to my district and you’ll see a different America. So, I did. I went out to Flint and I spent a week there and I spent a lot of time talking to people about why they were still living in Flint. And on the one hand, that’s a sort of an obvious question. Raj Chetty at Harvard has done this opportunity.
I was walking around blocks where the kids born there were in the bottom percentile. Out of a hundred percentile, they were in the bottom one for their life chances and talking to the parents and just ask them, like, why do you live here. And some of the answers are obvious, they live there because, their church is down the block.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Yoni Appelbaum: Because their grandparents help watch the kid while they’re working. Like, they have ties to place, to community and I honor that. But everybody in Flint, Michigan is at most like the grandkid of somebody who moved there to work in the auto plants.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Yoni Appelbaum: Like everybody relocated. Nobody has lived there from time immemorial. So the question is if their grandparents relocated, why didn’t they? There’s always a reason not to move, but they’re all the children of migrants. And the answers I got were really interesting.
Many of them had moved at some point. They’d moved to places where there were jobs and then they’d lost their housing or they hadn’t been able to afford it anymore. Or they had cheap housing in Flint, but they couldn’t pull enough equity out of it in order to buy housing in some place that was doing just a little bit better than Flint. Or they had a subsidized house.
I talked to a woman who was in a HUD subsidized apartment for $140 a month. She desperately wanted to move to Texas to be with her sisters. But where was she going to get $140 a month in Texas. So, even in the places that have a little more opportunity than other places and really cheap housing, you still have to be able to afford it. You still have to be able to get there and there needs to be a good job for you when you arrive there. And it’s really hard if you’re living in a place without much to pick up and relocate to some place, even with just a little bit more.
Chris Hayes: If we had a Yoni Appelbaum dictatorship and you on day one, like Trump, issued an executive order that overrides all known statutes and the Constitution that you abolish zoning in all major cities or let’s just say all major metro areas, would that just solve the problem?
Yoni Appelbaum: That dictator for day hypothetical used to be really fun.
Chris Hayes: I know it’s less fun now, yeah.
Yoni Appelbaum: It’s a little less fun these days. No, if you could wave your wand and get a roof zoning, it wouldn’t solve the problem because we have a whole dense web of rules. It’s not just zoning, it’s building codes. It’s not just building codes, it’s homeowner associations these days and gated communities.
Like, we’ve developed many, many mechanisms for letting people wall their communities off from opportunity. Reforming zoning, simplifying it, making it consistent across jurisdictions would be a really good start, get us a long way. I think we should also be tuning our housing policy in general to allow for a much wider array of housing options.
It’s sort of funny, you can sort of use a 19th century brain. Like, they would look at a building and say, wow, the people in that building are really suffering. The health conditions aren’t good. They’re crowded together. I think that I really need to solve, and if you’re mad living it, you’d probably say poverty or —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Yoni Appelbaum: — give them a living wage. And instead, they’re like, we should tear down the building.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Yoni Appelbaum: Like they always blame the building.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Yoni Appelbaum: It’s never the poverty. It’s never the capitalism.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Yoni Appelbaum: Like, it’s the building.
Chris Hayes: Right. Slum clearance, yeah.
Yoni Appelbaum: And we do that. For a hundred years, we keep getting rid of the kinds of housing that have poor people living in them.
Chris Hayes: Because that’s the problem, yeah.
Yoni Appelbaum: There’s now 170,000 homeless people in California. It’s like —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Yoni Appelbaum: — where did that problem come from?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Yoni Appelbaum: Well, you tore down all their housing. So, you have to be tolerant of even less than ideal housing types. You need to know that different people are going to want different kinds of housing at different stages of their lives. A single-family home is great. That’s where I live. I’m raising my kids in it. But by the time I’m old, I may want a house without a staircase. When I was young, I didn’t want a single-family home and I certainly couldn’t afford one, and I needed access to other kinds of housing opportunities to live my life.
And so, you’ve got to understand that, like, at different life stages and different people are going to need different kinds, so that’s the second thing.
And then, the third thing is we need a heck of a lot of new housing. So, just getting rid of zoning would be a dramatic step, but we need to make it easier to build in the places where people want to live. Not the places, by the way, where I think they should live. I’m not asking anyone to move. I don’t think government should be telling people to move. I’m even suspicious of a lot of place-based policy that tries to essentially bribe people to live in certain places, which seems really good if you’re thinking about the place. But if you think about the individual and you’re, like, look, I know from lots of —
Chris Hayes: You don’t want to be here.
Yoni Appelbaum: — social science research, like, you don’t want to be here and your kids aren’t going to do well if you stay here. But what if I gave you some tax incentives to stay anyway?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Yoni Appelbaum: Like, then it doesn’t seem like such a great idea. I’d really like to restore that sense of individual agency, which I think is a fundamental American value. The idea that people should have the power to shape their own lives and that other people shouldn’t be able to take that choice away from them.
Chris Hayes: Well, there’s two things happening. There’s enormous political obstacles to this. We saw in New York State where Gov. Kathy Hochul tried to promulgate a pretty ambitious package of housing laws that would have moved housing in the state towards your lines. We’ve seen it run in California every week, produces some insane headline, more insane than the last of some destruction of a housing. The residents of Berkeley rising up against a dorm, or, not even the residents, just like one litigant.
At the same time, there really is this growing recognition of the problem, this growing force behind what is called YIMBYism. We’ve seen huge gains in Minnesota, particularly, where under Gov. Tim Walz they passed a very ambitious housing agenda along the lines, I think, of what you would recommend.
We see in red states that are less regulated, places like Texas particularly, an enormous amount of growth in housing, just because of this sort of laissez-faire attitude towards this stuff. Do you think things are now moving in the right direction for the first time since like things got stuck?
Yoni Appelbaum: I do, and I think it results in large part of generational change. It’s very hard to change people’s minds about things, but generations tend to respond to the problems of the world into which they’re born.
When I started researching this book more than a decade ago in Cambridge, I also got together with a few friends one night and we started a group called A Better Cambridge. It was intended to advocate for zoning reform and for more construction for the kind of city we wanted to live in, that gave more opportunity to more kinds of people.
And the book’s out of date now, because on Monday night, Cambridge, thanks to the efforts of that group and the people who had taken it over long after I’d left, rezoned the entire city so that you can build up to six stories anywhere in it. It’s one of America’s most dramatic rezonings.
I didn’t think we were going to win that fight when we started it more than a decade ago, but the world changed because more and more residents of Cambridge had been born into a world in which the inability to build in the places that have the greatest opportunity seemed to them like a huge problem. And they really did want to open up their communities to new arrivals. They really did want to reverse this.
And so I’m actually really hopeful. I’ll give you one other positive thought. Really hard to get anything done in Congress right now. Really hard for progressives to work with this presidential administration. But the fact that this was a problem largely caused by progressives and largely hurting progressive institutions has a flip side. It can be solved now at the local level, without Congress and without the president.
This is something that progressives have control over and can really do a tremendous amount to move the needle on right now.
Chris Hayes: Especially if you’re listening to this as someone who feels themselves persuaded, I definitely think you should get the book, but you can also do stuff like, I’m not going to say who I voted for, but the last vote I cast in a municipal election in a primary was cast solely on this one issue voter kind of way. Like, a candidate who I felt like was resistant to building more housing, a candidate who was running, I thought, to build more housing, and I was basically a kind of one issue voter on this. And there’s a lot you could do locally to be that kind of person.
And whatever your politics on this, the book is really a revelation. It’s just, I tore through it. You learn so much. It’s just a great history of the U.S., a sort of different face of the cube that, sort of, you pick it up off the table and you’ve never seen it before. It’s really good.
Yoni Appelbaum is the Deputy Executive Director of The Atlantic and the book is called “Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.”
Yoni, thank you so much.
Yoni Appelbaum: Thank you, Chris.
Chris Hayes: Great thanks to Yoni Appelbaum. Once again, the book “Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity” is fantastic. Really recommend it. Would love to hear your thoughts, email us at withpod@gmail.com. You can get in touch with us using the #WITHpod across social media. You can follow us on TikTok, which still survives by searching for WITHpod. You can follow me on Twitter, what used to be called Twitter, Threads or Bluesky all @chrislhayes. Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday.
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