What Americans call a “housing affordability crisis” is really a mobility crisis — economic, geographic and social. Housing is where that immobility becomes most visible, and so expensive housing is more a symptom than the disease.
That’s from a new book by historian and Atlantic journalist Yoni Appelbaum called “Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.“
In healthy economies, including for much of the American golden age, people move to better jobs, cheaper places, growing regions. In the US today, people are increasingly trapped in place. When people can’t move, demand piles up in a small number of “winning” metros. Prices explode there, while other places stagnate or hollow out. I’ve written on the topic this year myself here and here.
Appelbaum’s book recounts the long trends that are piling up today. He recounts how American zoning regulations were introduced for race and class control, not for genuine health or safety concern. Early 20th century leaders, including eventual-US President Herbert Hoover, misunderstood crowded tenements and single-family homes as the obstacle and the accelerant, rather than what they really were: the launching pad and the eventual destination for those who made it out.
That history has persisted to today, where regulation and competing priorities strangle what might naturally occur. As famed mid-century urbanist Jane Jacobs said, over-planning a community is “attempting to substitute art for life”
Below I have notes for my future reference from Greenbaum’s detailed book. It’s wonky, and less colorful than I expected, but for anyone invested in the topic, it’s worth it.
My notes:
- The 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony and Virginia Company defined the first culture of anglophone America: Massachusetts prioritized mobility, exclusivity and productivity (embodied by scolding union); Virginia prioritized individual liberty, hierarchy and dynasty (embodied by the south)
- The New England idea of “warning out”new residents persisted, the idea that you belonged somewhere (1826 Ohio Supreme Court case in which teenager Kenneth Winkle’s health costs were paid by a town he lived, which then sued previous towns he had lived but none accepted him as one of their own, and so the court charged the small town of Lebanon where his parents had once had residence even though dad died and mother had moved to Virginia)
- Early on in the United States, more free white men could vote than England — something like 50-75% of white men depending on the colony before the Revolution, and 80-90% after revolution compared to 1 in 7 in England
- In 1854 a Ohio law eliminated “warn out” process of communities approving their residents, after a 1873 financial panic, laws that restricted the movement of poor people received backlash
- Ohio added in 1802 a law that black people required $500 bond guaranteed by two or more white citizens that they would not become public charges, and weren’t slaves
- “To the Puritan recognition of the right to leave, Midwesterners added the right to belong – the right to choose your own community, to move where you want, to declare a place your home.”
- Tocqueville found “something surprising in this strange unrest of so many happy men, restless in the midst of abundance”
- Stephan Thernstrom argued socialism never took root in America because economic mobility was high — but really it was about high rates of Americans moving most of all (Poverty and Progress in 1964) annual turnover rates higher than pure net migration
- Steven Herscovici: research on economic mobility and movement
- Moving Day holiday: housing was treated as a commodity like an iPhone to upgrade each year and plan for something better as new additions and improvements were added
- “Moving Day embodied the very American expectation that change would be the constant of their lives and that it would bring expensive opportunities”
- By early 20th century this was ending and World War I brought a housing shortage
- Homecoming celebrations at high school because Americans were so mobile: they’d join associations in new cities, and those associations thrived despite many departures because they had many additions and some stayed
- Modesto California in July 2 1885: the first zoning law (where they were built, as opposed to how they were built or operated)
- laundromats: racist to push the Chinese out, as they specialize in the trade in gold rush when women weren’t there and men didn’t want to
- Edward M. Bassett, considered the “father of American zoning”. As chairman of the 1913 NYC Heights of Buildings Commission, he was instrumental in creating the first comprehensive zoning law in the U.S., which was then actively promoted nationally to withstand legal challenges.
- Three tools: exclusion (closing immigration ), expansion (land tax, encouraging development), regulation (land use)
- Lawrence Veiller told a 1913 housing conference that fire safety was how he got NYC to stifle apartment building and focus on small family housing (his tenement reform was a sham, just trying to stifle them.
- 1890 how the other half lives
- Herbert Hoover and others mistook the tenement and the single family home as the obstacle and the accelerant, for what they really were: the launching pad and the destination
- In Cleveland:, Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. (1926) was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case where the Court upheld zoning laws as a valid use of government’s “police power” to protect public health, safety, and welfare, establishing that municipalities could restrict land use (like zoning industrial land for residential use) without unconstitutionally taking property without compensation, setting a precedent for modern urban planning.
- South black codes
- FDR HOLC and FHA reinforced segregation by essentially requiring zoning
- Convents and racial deeds: Gandolfo v. Hartman
- Edwards v. California (1941) was the landmark Supreme Court case that struck down California’s unconstitutional “anti-Okie” law, which criminalized bringing poor people into the state during the Dust Bowl migration, affirming the fundamental right to travel across state lines under the Commerce Clause and Privileges and Immunities Clause, protecting internal migration despite states’ fears of “outsiders” straining resources.
- Author: “The freedom to move is a fundamental American right”
- Census: more movement of people in U.S. between 1940-1944 than any other period
- 1940: 56% households rented
- CEQA, Nader’s raiders (Fellmeth) in California: this sped sprawl because it made it harder to build in density
- Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag contrasted 1960 and 2024: If a lawyer moved from the south to NYC, her income would go up by 39% after adjusting for housing costs, but a janitor’s income would go up by 70% in 1960 — today, it would decline by 7% after housing
- Americans still move 2x as much as average European
- Raj Chetty research gets shouted out
- Charleston SC resisted railroads in the early 1930s via zoning and historic preservation, and as a result it has been mummified (a rich preserved place, not a dynamic city)
- In 1986, DC preserved a parking lot and mall in Cleveland park, rather than let a mixed use transit development
- In Philadelphia and San Francisco just 2.2 and 1.4 lots of local historic preservation but 27% of Manhattan, 19% of DC and a third of Baltimore
- Jane Jacobs: over-planning a community is “attempting to substitute art for life”
- Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page: homeless is a housing problem