Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity by Yoni Appelbaum
Places Discussed
- Various
Posted 2026-01-01
Book Notes by John December
What is stuck? People are stuck because they can't move to better opportunities for themselves or their families because of housing costs. Productive places with jobs and opportunities have a limited housing supply, so someone wanting to relocate to such an area might not benefit financially from the move due to housing costs. Further, restrictions based on a range of factors--racial, class, housing type, municipal, historic, or housing association restrictions--further reduce the availability of affordable, right-sized, small, or alternative living arrangements so that people can gain affordable housing for a move to where they want or thrive where they are.
In the past, plentiful and diverse housing choices made access to housing and increased mobility and productivity the natural state of things, and easily achievable. But something happened on the way to the future. In this book, the author Yoni Appelbaum examines housing and land use in US history, traces the development of barriers to housing supply and mobility, and suggests some ways to get unstuck.
The author's strength in this book is his outline of the specific mechanisms of law and practice that have reduced housing choice. He then shows how this loss of housing choice ties to a loss of mobility.
The author summarizes:
"For most of our history, a highly mobile population moved toward opportunity. When a place prospered, it quickly swelled with new arrivals. Buildings rushed to meet the demand with housing. Farms gave way to clusters of houses, which turned into town houses, which sprouted into apartment buildings or even high-rises. But in today's burgeoning metropolises and boomtowns, restrictions have effectively frozen the built environment. As a result, housing has grown artificially scarce and prohibitively expensive. A fortunate few can still afford to move where they want. Most people though, would have to pay so much more for housing in prospering cities that offered better jobs that relocation would leave them worse off overall. Americans aren't moving anymore, because for so many moving threatens to cost more than it delivers." (p. 13).
In this book, Yoni Appelbaum surveys US history from colonial times through the 21st century and identifies key points and people contributing to the erosion of housing and mobility opportunities. In the end, the author makes a reasonable plea for reform, but his final call to increase housing supply seems naive and incomplete. His account earlier in the book showed how interlocked economic interests created wealth by fostering housing scarcity and shaping public opinion, marketing, and laws to limit housing choices. These interests assert these powers now (See Escaping the Housing Trap). Nevertheless, this book provides a good outline for understanding its subtitle: "How the privileged and the propertied broke the engine of American opportunity."
After reading this book, I understand these main points better:
A: How we got stuck: attitudes and laws gradually accumulated to foster resistance to choices for housing and mobility
-
The changing psychology of what it means to belong to a community member and what rights a person has to move among communities has contributed profoundly to national and social attitudes. In Puritan times, there were warning-out laws preventing people from moving into a community, as well as laws preventing people from leaving communities. The idea was that "...all people were from some particular place and belong to it and that they remained attached to it until some new place accepted them. Communities were members-only clubs." (p. 55).
The European settlements in North America gave a new chance to challenge this idea of mobility. In 1630, Puritan John Winthrop sailed to Massachusetts Bay. By 1641, the Massachusetts colony established a Body of Liberties, including the statement that "every man shall have free liberty... to remove both himself and his family at their pleasure' from the colony." Appelbaum states, "it was likely the first time anywhere in the world that this individual freedom was put into writing and defined as a fundamental right." (p. 42).
However, in the growing United States by the 19th century, people felt a need to "warn out" undesirable people (tell them they must leave). It was a duty of existing citizens: "If the existing residents suspected someone might eventually need their aid, they could warn them out." (p. 56). In 1816, the state of Ohio set this trial period for a person in a community: a year — you had a year to establish self-sufficiency, or you would be "warned out." It wasn't until 1854 that an Ohio statute "eliminated the right of communities to warn out" (p. 56). The deep-seated belief behind restricting housing choices arises from not wanting others unlike themselves, those unknown, or those who cannot take care of themselves in a community.
- Housing choices came under scrutiny because of the economic interests of homeowners. Appelbaum discusses the real estate developer Charles Cheney (born 1884), who developed a negative fixation on apartment buildings as distinctly "un-American" (p. 111). With an economic interest in selling single-family houses in Elmwood Park, Berkeley, California, Cheney called apartments "tenements" (p. 104) and renters the "less desirable and floating renter class" (p. 108). This attitude continues to this day, where people who rent their homes are sometimes called "transients" (apartment dwellers) and either pitied or disparaged as socially undesirable.
- A system of zoning separated land uses profoundly in a way that differed from previous millennia of human settlements. The resulting zoning experiment has destroyed cities by restricting housing supply where it is needed most (Gray, 2022). In parallel, a gradual Housing Trap developed over the twentieth century, embedding housing within global financial products that encourage scarcity to increase wealth hoarding.
-
Barriers to change piled on top of regulations to limit further how people can live or build on their property. Restrictive covenants, building codes, historic districts, review boards, height restrictions, outright discrimination and segregation, and limits on immigration all created additional barriers to change. These restrictions increased housing choice and freedom, often to "preserve neighborhood character."
Appelbaum states:
"Zoning alone... was rarely enough to stop the movement of the population, or to jam the wheels of opportunity. But the 1920s brought a broad revolt against diversity as a series of federal laws sharply curtailed foreign immigration, a raft of new zoning laws attempted to do the same to domestic migration, and restrictive covenants spread as a means to exclude unwanted groups...." (pp. 154-155).
-
Appelbaum surveys the legacy of Jane Jacobs and paints her in a distinctly different light than the "Saint Jane" reverence that many urbanists confer upon her. Appelbaum's critique shows that Jacobs, to save her beloved Greenwich Village, embalmed it: "In 1969, Greenwich Village was landmarked, safeguarding it from redevelopment in perpetuity... that character was frozen at a very particular moment in time" (p. 29). For centuries, the West Village's built form had continually evolved. Still, Jacobs's activism put a halt to efforts to add any more buildings like it" (p. 30). Her method set a pattern for future preservationists by her actions--she "moved into a vibrant immigrant neighborhood, bought a historic mixed-use rental property, and transformed it into a modern, single-family home. Then she pushed to change the rules so that no one else could easily do the same." (p. 30).
By Appelbaum's analysis, Jane Jacobs doomed subsequent generations to a hyper-expensive Greenwich Village. Jacob's methods became a pattern that continues to today, often derided as NIMBYism: "arming small groups of activists with the power to halt all construction [and to] imperil the very things she intended to save: the diversity of uses within a neighborhood, the vibrancy of its street life, and openness to change" (p. 33). I've not seen this critical analysis of Jane Jacobs anywhere else, but it reveals precursors to NIMBYism and perhaps the background agenda of some Jane Jacobs fans.
-
The empowered teams of people (Jane Jacobs is an example) with the ability to stop development of any kind have reduced possibilities for new housing or change in cities and towns. These groups of people (some of whom might not even live in the area of concern) thus get to tell other property owners what they can and cannot build on their own property, and how mixed land uses and housing can be built.
Thus, community improvements go by the wayside in the name of "preserving community character," with the benefits going to the owners of increasingly scarce housing opportunities.
Appelbaum uncovers these "generations of reformers, seeking to reassert control over their neighborhoods and their neighbors.... reimposing order and control on a jumbled and chaotic landscape that mixed shops and apartments in among the houses, and occupants of varied ethnicities and income brackets. Their chosen tools were building codes and restrictive covenants and zoning ordinances, designed to segregate land by use and class and race." (p. 12).
The author observes yard signs illustrating the irony of some community activists. In the neighborhoods near Cambridge, Massachusetts, he observed, on the same lawn, side-by-side lawn signs: one stated, "We're glad you're our neighbor," and next to it, "Vote NO [on new apartment building]" (p. 23). The author observes that this irony stems from people's tendency to protect their turf, but a housing shortage self-enriches homeowners who can increase it and thus their home's value. I have also had homeowners in a tony residential area near me express the feeling that "transients" live in apartments and good people live in houses, implying that this was a laudable and moral reason to enforce housing scarcity.
- The idealization of single-family homeownership and deriding or ignoring other living arrangements that serve different needs stifles opportunities for people. Varied forms of housing and living arrangements have served people for thousands of years. The irony of yard signs, Jacobs taking a mixed-use building for her single-family home, and anti-apartment zealot Charles Cheney living in hotels illustrates how many who seem to advocate for one thing are taking actions that differ from what they profess.
B. How we can get unstuck: tolerance for change, consistency of rules, and abundance of choices
Appelbaum proposes three reforms to unlock opportunity:
- Tolerance for "messy and unpredictable" growth in housing to avoid the "mistaken assumption that controlling the form that buildings take is an efficient means of reforming the people they contain." He calls us not to impose architectural order top-down, but allow the organic growth of buildings (p. 242).
- Consistency in formulating rules for buildings. The author calls for regulations, where necessary, to be spare and consistent: "Rules work best when they apply uniformly and predictably over the widest possible geographic areas." Zoning breaks this by insisting on separating and concentrating uses into specific areas, even though the majority of recorded human history shows that a mish-mash of uses jumbled together has produced great prosperity for many, particularly those starting in life (p. 245).
- Increase the abundance of housing so that "... when the music stops, everyone can claim a seat." (p. 248). Appelbaum calls for: "The only solution is to build such an abundant supply of housing that it reverts to being a consumer good and not an investment asset." (p. 250). (See also: Escaping the Housing Trap).
Appelbaum describes Moving Day in the early twentieth century in the United States, a day when apartment leases would end, and the residents might move to another apartment. On Moving Day, "Americans... intuitively understood that construction of a fancy new apartment building would set off a long chain of moves..." whereby people could sort themselves out because a wide set of choices for living were continually opening up--a plentiful supply to meet demand. This situation seems unimaginable now for people looking for an apartment in a city or a house in a close-in suburb and obscene for people who own houses or apartment buildings (because competition and more supply mean less ability to raise rents). Yet, data shows new housing supply does slow rent growth and that the new supply "triggers moving chains that free up units in all market segments." Note that current property owners who rent out units, therefore, do not want any more supply at all and can work behind the scenes to egg on claims of "gentrification" or encourage the general public to speak out against new supply.
The author is optimistic at the end: "...I learned that while this country has always been imperfect, it was also once remarkably fluid, allowing its people to pursue their dreams, and make it more perfect. And that gives me great hope that it can do so once more." (p. 23).
This is where the author falls short. Throughout the book, he has outlined the interlocking mechanisms that enforce housing-market scarcity and thus rising prices in the face of demand. But his solution of allowing supply to increase naively assumes that the tremendous wealth and political force of people whose economic interests are in housing scarcity can't keep housing scarce--they can, primarily because they are great in number--and they have been doing it for at least a century.
Related Links
- Yoni Appelbaum author Web site
- Good Reads Page for Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity