(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 522: Stuck with Yoni Appelbaum
February 26, 2025
This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Yoni Appelbaum to discuss his book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. We talk about the history of moving in the US and how the different traditions of land ownership and management in the US evolved. We also talk about how much people loved apartments at the turn of the 19th century and zoning’s targeted groups.
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Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the episode:
[00:01:41] Jeff Wood: Yoni Applebaum. Welcome to the Talking Headways podcast. So glad to be here with you. Yeah. Thanks for being here before we get started. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? [00:01:53] Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah I am a failed historian. [00:01:54] Jeff Wood: historian. I not so failed. You just wrote a great history book, right? [00:01:58] So [00:01:59] Yoni Appelbaum: I was a historian of the 19th century United States and. Was teaching and procrastinating and left some anonymous comments on the blog and the blogger reached out to me and I ended up writing regularly for his publication, the Atlantic, and then left academia to do journalism full time. So now I’m a deputy executive editor at the Atlantic, but I’ve never given up that passion for history. [00:02:22] And this was a chance to combine my work as a journalist with my training as a historian to really get at some of the big questions that have been bothering me for a long time. [00:02:30] Jeff Wood: That’s really funny. My dad was a history major. My sister was a history major. My sister did medieval history. I’m not sure exactly what the time period my dad did, but they both got jobs and something else. [00:02:38] And so when I was looking for a major in college, I was like, I want to do history. But then I was like maybe not. So I did geography instead, but it led me down this world. So your story rings true in my family as well, history, interest, and then turning into something else. What got you interested in these ideas of cities and planning and housing and mobility and those types of things you write in the book. [00:02:59] Yoni Appelbaum: I was living as a graduate student in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is a wonderful city in an apartment that was already a little too small for my family and already cost a little more than we could actually afford. And as a historian, I knew something about the neighborhood I was living in. [00:03:13] She said, Cambridge, people often think of Harvard. That wasn’t most of the city, Cambridge was the industrial town across the river from Boston. It was full of working class housing. My neighborhood, Cambridgeport, was a neighborhood of second generation immigrants and many generations of second generation immigrants. [00:03:29] It had so many waves of new arrivals come through that sociologists had actually coined a new term just to describe it and other neighborhoods like it. They called it a zone of emergence. This was a place where people landed, worked hard. Their kids did better than they had. And they moved up in American society and for a century to serve that role. [00:03:48] But by the time I lived there, it didn’t anymore. It was preponderantly a neighborhood of professionals and that’s okay. Neighborhoods change, except that you could. Tell the same story about zones of emergence in almost any American city. If one neighborhood changes, that’s okay. If we’re losing our zones of emergence altogether, that’s really not okay. [00:04:07] And so I wanted to know what had gone wrong. How come this thing had worked so well for so long? How come so many Americans have been able to move into places with jobs, opportunities of all kinds, see their kids do better than they had done. And then over the last several decades that had stopped happening and that’s why I started digging. [00:04:26] Jeff Wood: How did your ideas on this change from when you started writing the book versus when you finished it and published it? [00:04:32] Yoni Appelbaum: This is a great question. I went in thinking I was telling a simple story of decline that we used to let Americans move where they wanted and build where they wanted. And now we’ve ruined all of that. [00:04:41] I didn’t know the first half of the story at all. The United States is actually a really weird place. For most of the history of the world, in most times and places, you are born into your identity. You’re born in a particular place, your family has usually lived there for generations, you expect to live there, you expect your kids and your grandkids to live there, you inherit almost all the important aspects of your identity, your place in the social hierarchy, your religion, often your trade or occupation. [00:05:08] The United States was a place which started that way. It was settled by Europeans who expected it to look like Europe, just a better version of Europe. But very quickly, it spins out of the control of the elites who expected to govern it. And it becomes a place where people, by moving, by the exercise of mobility, are able to craft their own identities. [00:05:29] American individualism has never been about being atomized. And the right of the individual to choose their communities, to choose their affiliations, the organizations, they’ll be part of the communities in which they live. And that was a hard one, right? We don’t get it right when we land here. Initially, the great innovation is the freedom to leave, which was not a legal right you possessed in England. [00:05:52] You could be taken up and brought back with some exceptions. And in the United States, it gets incorporated into the Massachusetts body of liberties, which is best I can tell is the first time it’s like a right held against. The state that it’s an individual freedom, and then, it takes almost 200 years before we got a right to arrive until then. [00:06:10] Even if you bought a house, even if you got engaged a girl in town, you don’t have a right to move into a community. They could warn you out. They could say, you’re not welcome here. And you didn’t get to be a resident of that community. And it’s only really in the early 1800s that we get a legal revolution, which lets people. [00:06:25] Just decide that they’re going to be a resident someplace and buy a rental place there and move in and by virtue of their intent and their residents become a member of the community. And once we open up that freedom, Americans start moving with wild abandon. So I didn’t know that half of the story at all. [00:06:40] I thought it was a straight story of decline, and I came to understand that it was actually the story of the invention of something really precious that had shaped American society in profound ways. [00:06:50] Jeff Wood: And then it’s gradual erosion. I found that history really interesting, especially the difference between the different traditions that emerged in the South and the North and different places in the United States as states were being settled and as the settler populations grew as Native Americans were already there. [00:07:04] But I found that history really interesting. And I’m wondering like how you came upon that, why, certain Northern traditions were different than Southern traditions when it came to the ability to move the way that cities grew up the way that people organized their cities. And basically, like you said, warn people out. [00:07:18] That was an interesting piece to me. Yeah, the [00:07:20] Yoni Appelbaum: stuff has long fascinated me. The idea that the built environment reflects our social values. I leaned heavily in writing this book on the accounts of outsiders who can often spot differences or spot significant features of a society that the inhabitants of that society may not recognize, right? [00:07:37] It feels so natural to us that we could just I didn’t ask anyone for permission before I bought my house and moved in. I could just buy the house and move in and it never would have occurred to me that the community could say Hey, you arrived here a week ago, but we’re putting a notice on your door and you have to leave. [00:07:49] And so it’s the outsiders who can spot that stuff. There’s this great travel narrative from George Washington, who decides to embark on a tour of my land of the young Republic as he starts crossing up into New England. And he’s just this is so weird. All the properties are well maintained, but all the houses are roughly the same size. [00:08:07] There’s like nothing like Mount Vernon up here. There’s no grand mansions, but there’s also not the same kind of grinding poverty that existed among poor whites and certainly among the enslaved population of the Southern colonies. And he just finds it profoundly weird. These little nucleated towns are not the pattern that he’s used to either, right? [00:08:24] Because the landage entry in Virginia create their own sort of ersatz communities based on the manor homes, the plantation houses. And so it takes a George Washington traveling through New England. To show what’s really unusual about that society. And similarly, when Northerners go to the South, they’re astounded by what they find. [00:08:42] It’s not at all what they expect. So those travelogues are really useful historical documents that help us see that these were two mutually incomprehensible ways of living and they fuse as Americans move. West. There is this irony, right? That we have both of these traditions. We all expect to have absolute sovereignty over our own land and do exactly what we want with it. [00:09:04] Just as if we were Virginia gentry. And we all expect to be able to tell our neighbors exactly what to do with their land. Just like we were living in a New England covenant of community. So we carry these 2 traditions with us and they fuse into 1. Blended or you’ll find different emphases at different times and places, but one blended American way of land use. [00:09:24] Jeff Wood: One note I wrote myself is, are we doomed to fight the Civil War over and over again? Read your page on the Fugitive Slave Act, and now I think about sanctuary cities in the same way, and, how certain folks in the government want to push people to, do their bidding for them back then to make sure that slaves will return, and now that Sanctuary cities would, make sure to turn in the immigrants that quote unquote weren’t supposed to be there. [00:09:44] And so that note that I wrote I’m curious about your thoughts on that. Like whether the civil war is just something that is perpetual in our mindset moving forward. One of the things [00:09:53] Yoni Appelbaum: I was trying to do in this book was to retell the whole story of America, but centering mobility and thinking about what it means. [00:10:00] If mobility is the foundational American freedom, the thing that allows us. To be individuals with rights who can define our own lives, what does it mean to center mobility in that way? One of the things that means is that if you want to understand the structure of the society, you look not just at who’s exercising mobility, but who’s being denied mobility. [00:10:20] Enslavement is at its most fundamental sense. The denial of mobility, and we know this because we know what the opposite of enslavement is, which is what they called runaways, the auto emancipating enslaved peoples who leave bondage for freedom, right? And they do that by exercising mobility and that contested line between who we allowed to move and who we don’t is one that you can trace right through, right? [00:10:45] So that’s, what’s being contested with the fugitive slave laws is. People have exercised their mobility and Southerners do not think they should be able to do that. In fact, they think they should be denied that mobility and return to stasis. And that same contest keeps playing out over and over again. [00:11:01] It happens on the West coast with the Chinese. It happens on the East coast. And we can talk about this with the Jews in New York. It happens with various immigrant groups that arrive in this country. If you want to understand the structure of American liberty, you start with mobility and a lot becomes very clear, very quickly. [00:11:17] Jeff Wood: What are some of the negatives of moving around so much? You talk in the book about this day, this moving day that I had no idea existed. I moved around a little bit when I was a kid. My dad moved to different cities for his job, but I never knew that there was like a day that was set aside for people moving. [00:11:31] And a lot of people did it on that day and it was different in different places, that allowed them to get the opportunity, but there feels like there’s some negatives to it as well. [00:11:38] Yoni Appelbaum: Oh, for sure. Probably at the height, one out of three Americans was moving every year. This latest 1970s, one out of five, right? [00:11:44] So you’re talking about an extraordinary rate of residential mobility. And in many cities, there was this thing in rural regions, too. There was a moving day. Moving day was the date fixed by either customer law when all unwritten leases and almost nobody had a written lease expired on the same day. And so you have a quarter or a third, sometimes half of the population of an area picking up and swapping residences. [00:12:06] It’s just astonishing, right? In most times and most places, this is working in favor of renters because landlords need to fill their units on that day. And as long as you have the rapid production of new housing, it gives renters a lot of leverage over their landlords. They can say, fix this place up or I’m moving out. [00:12:24] And they can also, as long as you’re adding capacity at the top. You get these chains of moves where somebody moves into a new luxury unit and everybody down, 12 families in a row will all bump up, each moving into the apartment that somebody’s left behind. So it can work really well. It does not always work really well in times of constrained supply where there aren’t enough residents to go around. [00:12:44] Landlords can use moving day to jack up rent and we see them doing that. They can evict residents if they think that they can get more rent from somebody else. And you can look at housing court records and see the misery that they record. So it’s not just good all the time. It can also be, to the extent that people don’t want to move and find themselves compelled to really unpleasant, even the people who want to move toward opportunity. [00:13:04] And there was, I really need to stress an enormous cultural importance attached to this. There’s this great story of an old lady. Who doesn’t want to move one year, but decides to draw all her curtains and shutter the windows that her neighbors will think she’s moved and they won’t judge her for being the stick in the mud who doesn’t move stories like that. [00:13:23] Tell you that there was a real cultural value attached to this kind of mobility that we have. Lost today, but even amid all of that moving is really uncomfortable. I’ve never wanted to move. I’ve never been excited about relocating and packing and unpacking, but I’ve come to think of it a lot like exercise. [00:13:39] I don’t usually want to get up off the couch and take a job. Every expert I’ve ever talked to tells me. It’s not only good for me to take a jog, it’d be better if I jog more often and I can feel pretty good afterwards, like the things that the jogging gets me are good things and moving is a lot like that, very few people genuinely exult about moving what you find Americans really excited about in the 19th centuries is the things they’re getting from moving and so although moving day is this wild riotous festival of relocation. [00:14:07] You also like your possessions got banged up. And the cartman overcharges you and it’s all chaos. And what really excites them is what they’re getting out of it. Not the experience [00:14:16] Jeff Wood: itself. Lewis Wirth wrote about urbanism as a way of life in that piece, he wrote about pluralism and the idea that, you go to a place and you join a lot of groups and you have weak ties, but that’s what makes cities run because you can specialize. [00:14:29] You can go somewhere and you can be something specific instead of in a smaller town where. Everybody knows who you are. Everybody’s up in your business, all that stuff. And so I’m wondering how much this moving is connected to the urbanization of the United States as well. [00:14:41] Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah. Urbanization clearly plays a large role here. [00:14:44] You find it already at remarkably high rates while we are still a nation of farmers and that’s worth stressing. It’s not mostly East to West. We think of American mobility as I don’t know, the kind of Stokoe wagons going West just as fast as you could just possess the native peoples. But. [00:14:58] That’s only ever a small fraction of Americans. Most Americans live in the Southern East and that’s where mobility is perhaps highest actually on an annual basis. And so people are moving and they’re moving around rural areas very often. It really disconcerts Tocqueville and other observers. They’re like, look, you’ve got a perfectly good farm where you are. [00:15:15] You’re prosperous. Why would you pack up all your belongings and move someplace else? They really think that this is like a character flaw of Americans but Americans do this. And then as we start to urbanize, we do it even more. And some of the mobility that I’m talking about is about people moving in off the countryside, but it’s also people making money in the city and going back out to the countryside to buy a farm. [00:15:34] So the flow goes both ways. And I think what you’re pointing to is that. There are these outgrowths of that mobility, right? Old world literature is often about the claustrophobia of village life and trying to escape that heritable identity that you got at birth. New world literature is often about nostalgia for village life, right? [00:15:51] But it’s all written by novelists who left the village, went to the city. And so there is this possibility in cities of joining organizations America from. Very early on, probably from the colonial period, certainly the early republic, is the only place on earth where most people do not belong to the church into which they are born. [00:16:09] That’s been true here for more than 200 years, which is wild as a fact. We’re also consistently over that period a more religious country than most of the old world. When people choose their religious denominations, they commit to them. It’s an act of choice. Residences like this too, right? Even the people who are not moving. [00:16:27] End up more committed because they made the choice not to move. It was a choice, right? It was not the default assumption. And so you find these really vibrant communities throughout America and in urban spaces. The constantly locations are what give us the other half of observation, right? He and the other Europeans who come here, they’re like, God, these Americans there. [00:16:44] They’re terrible. They’re always leaving, always moving. They always want something better than what they have. They’re never content. Yeah. Boy, they’ve got this amazing civic life. That’s really great. I wish we had that in Europe and they never draw the connection. They never say the mobility is producing the civic dynamism and the really strong organizational and associational life of the United States. [00:17:04] But that’s true. That is what is doing it. And over the last 50 years, as we’ve stopped moving it’s atrophy. That’s why we are bowling a [00:17:10] Jeff Wood: lot. You mentioned the wagon trains, I think back to a story my mom tells about a family member who led wagon trains from a long time ago to California. And one of the trains that he led actually split off from the Donner party before they got stuck in the Sierras. [00:17:24] And so I guess I’m partially here because of a smart relative that decided not to go with the Donner party through the snow. They’re dangerous to mobility. They’re sometimes dangerous. The Oregon Trail game tells us that as well. You also brought something, the mobility to cities is something that also interests me, from a geopolitical standpoint today. [00:17:43] I’m thinking about China and how many people have moved from rural to urban areas there at this time. And I think in the last 20 years, and I’ve seen this stat somewhere that basically the population of the United States have moved in China from rural to urban areas, 320, 330 million people. And so I’m wondering how that kind of movement has gained their society. [00:18:02] While our stagnation has reduced some of the things that we’re able to do. [00:18:06] Yoni Appelbaum: I have been to China exactly once in my life, and it was a couple of decades ago, so I can’t speak with great expertise. There were ways in which walking around the cities there helped me understand what the 19th century might have felt like here, one city that was in a coal mining region, which was like the old accounts of Pittsburgh. [00:18:24] It was literally snowing coal ash, and I’ve never seen anything like that before in my life, but other cities that were just throbbing with people. China is not the United States politically, though. And my understanding is that many of those people moving in are moving in without legal residence in the cities where they land. [00:18:40] They’re in a liminal state. They don’t have that basic American liberty, which was to just declare where you wanted to live and by moving, make it your residence and. I think China’s gotten a lot of benefits out of mobility and part of its dynamism. And one of the reasons this economy is growing so fast is that it is letting the population move, but it only got half the equation, right? [00:18:59] That there is still this American political liberty that said, look, when you land someplace, it doesn’t matter if you’re born in Indiana. If you move to California, you can say, Hey, I live here now. And then you are a full citizen with full political rights. And I think that actually, that second half of the equation is something that may hurt China in the long run, that it hasn’t given, hundreds of millions of internal migrants the ability to belong to the communities where they land. [00:19:21] Jeff Wood: Kind of changing directions here. I’ve seen a lot of discussion about progressivism and NIMBYism and I’m wondering if progressivism equals NIMBYism or if it’s something different or something about the times that people grew up in or maybe something about the political system as it exists that leads people to maybe oppose housing and zoning reform and things like that. [00:19:40] Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah, the cover of the Atlantic this month says how progressives froze the American dream. It’s an excerpt from my book, and I want to be careful about what I mean by that claim, because I’ve gotten a little bit of pushback about that. And actually several different things simultaneously, right? [00:19:54] One is. The thing that broke American mobility was the layered reforms of three generations of progressives. So there is a historical claim here about who broke American mobility. And I think that’s pretty solidly grounded and we can talk about that. It is certainly true today that progressive jurisdictions are the places that people most want to live. [00:20:12] I know this because of the real estate prices there, right? And also the places that are growing fastest economically and producing the most opportunity to the places where. When you look at something like Rod Chetty’s Opportunity Atlas, they’re the places where people should want to live, right? And Americans are smart. [00:20:26] They figured this out. There are also the places where the rules against housing are most stringent, where it is most difficult to produce new housing. In California, there was this great study, which showed that for every 10 points of liberal vote share, a city went up, its housing permits went down by 30%. [00:20:42] So it’s not just Democrat versus Republican. It’s like the more progressive a jurisdiction gets. The harder it gets to produce new housing there. So that’s the other specific claim here, and that’s not to say that progressivism is inherently NIMBY. One of the things I found in my reporting for this is that there’s an enormous generational divide, and this dates back to the three generations of progressives who got us into this younger. [00:21:03] Progressives are increasingly yimby, right? That they are people who no longer view growth is the world’s greatest challenge or as a dirty word. And in fact, they modify it with things like smart growth, right? That they see growing in a certain way is actually a way to make the world better. And so there has always been another strand of the progressive tradition going back to the earliest zoning laws. [00:21:25] There are people putting in place zoning as a means of racial and economic segregation, and there are other progressives standing there and screaming at them and saying, don’t do this. You are actually doing great damage to the world. And so it’s not that progressivism is inherently evil. It is rather that for a long time in America, one particular strain of progressivism won on these issues. [00:21:44] And I think we are seeing a generational reversal where the other strand is coming out among younger progressives who really see the problems this has caused. [00:21:52] Jeff Wood: Another interesting thing that’s related is we talked to Chris Redfern and Anthony Orlando recently about a paper that they wrote about the growth of California and Texas and how, the regulatory regime seemed not to matter. [00:22:02] It’s actually how much open land you have to build sprawl, sprawl that’s actually next to opportunity centers anyways. And California actually ran out of that a number of, decades ago and Texas is coming up fast on the same problem. And so I find that interesting that maybe part of the problem is also not necessarily. [00:22:16] necessarily just the NIMBYs and those reformers and the zoning regulations but just the fact that our penchant for being able to build single family homes and the bank’s ability to focus on that specific type leaves us in a worse position because we can’t do the infill or the change of direction that maybe we need to because of a different type of housing that we need. [00:22:35] Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah, it’s a good point. It’s easiest to build where there is no neighbor to object. So where you get that open land, it’s relatively easy to construct single family homes or frankly any kind of housing and where open land becomes less available and direct proximity to really prospering regions. Then it gets harder, but that assumes a lot of priors. [00:22:55] It assumes that somebody can, in a place with tremendous demand for housing, simply build new housing that there’s going to be some sort of a regulatory process, even in Texas, which is tuned differently from a regulatory perspective, even a city like Houston, which doesn’t have zoning per se. [00:23:12] It has all kinds of land use regulations that are layered on all kinds of community input and review processes. And so you’re talking about different ends of a spectrum, but it’s all very different than it was 50 years ago. And so the broad point is right that it’s a lot easier to do this where there’s open land, but it assumes a set of priors. [00:23:28] I don’t think we have to assume. It is possible to have a whole different approach to this that yields really different outcomes. And even in Texas, Austin has been building housing lately and the rents have been going down lately. And that’s a pretty cool proof of concept that if you do, in fact, flood a market with new housing, you can not just arrest the rate of growth. [00:23:45] You can actually drive down the cost of housing. And it’s the kind of approach that could be applied more broadly. That wasn’t because they had lots of open land in Austin. It was because they made it a lot easier to build. [00:23:56] Jeff Wood: I was also interested in a piece of the book that talked about how, Americans liked apartments much to the chagrin of some of the folks who were trying to reform. [00:24:05] They liked living in these places where they had opportunities. And now, we have this kind of situation where there’s a lot of preference surveys out there that say, half people like single family homes or half people like living in the proximity to stores and things like that. [00:24:17] And people will thread the needle in terms of what that actually means, what preferences people actually have. But I’m just curious about that kind of historical finding that Americans really liked apartments and that befuddled the reformers. [00:24:30] Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah, apartments were weird to the reformers and here, we have to go back to the beginning of the story, right? [00:24:35] 19th century, everybody moving around, cities are growing and one of the things that happens in the cities that are growing is they start building up in particular, they start building apartments, which were often called tenements for the newest rivals for immigrants, and these are really practical dwellings. [00:24:49] They’re practical in the same sense that a little house on the prairie is practical, not a particularly safe or sanitary place to live necessarily. But a heck of a lot better than the country where you’re coming from and your first step towards something better. And the reformers are really appalled by the flood of these people into their cities. [00:25:09] And they are convinced that apartments per se are immoral. I just have to say that again because it’s like a weird thing to wrap your mind around to view the world through the mind of the 19th century, right? Like they think that living in an apartment is a morally corrupting And they’re coming at this from the perspective of a nation in which they’re born, which was preponderantly rural. [00:25:27] And by the early 20th century, mid 20th century it’s preponderantly urban, right? So they’ve all been born in the farmhouse and now they’re living in the city. And they’re looking at these immigrants who seem to like. Apartment living and they’re thinking like, how do we Americanize them? How do we make them less dangerously foreign? [00:25:43] And the answer that comes to them is like the single family home. If they grew up in single family homes, the way we grew up in farmhouses, all would be well. So the single family home becomes an object of government policy. And this is really clear as a means of Americanizing and assimilating immigrants, right? [00:26:01] It’s equated with virtue. It’s equated with Americanism. Folks like Herbert Hoover. Promoted on that basis, folks like Herbert Hoover, who, by the way, was like living in a New York City apartment for much of the time period I’m talking about. So it’s a little bit of do as I say, not as I do. The key reformer here is Lawrence Wheeler, who is Mr. [00:26:19] Tenement Reform. He writes the big reports. He chairs the big commissions. He becomes. The city official in charge of enforcement more than anyone else. He’s the guy who gives us our modern image of the tenement as a hell hole, which it mostly was not, but he tries very hard to persuade Americans. The tenements are dangerous and should be banned. [00:26:37] And he’s at this conference and somebody says, how do we keep apartments out of our communities? And he says here’s the real problem. If you put this to a vote, a referendum, you’re going to lose because, If in the abstract, I might tell you that I’d like to live in a 50 room mansion, there are certain, he doesn’t say this, but I’m thinking like there are certain constraints, right? [00:26:53] Like, all of these are embedded choices where we’re trading off areas goods, right? So apartments are a very good, cheap mode of living for people who are trying to get a foothold in a city. And there knows this, and he knows that it’s going to lose the vote. He says, you can’t just ban apartments, but there is a trick that I’ve used in New York and that you can use. [00:27:11] If you call your anti apartment regulations, fire safety, you can layer on so many requirements that they become prohibitively expensive to build. But he says, you’ve got to be careful. Don’t add those same requirements to the single and multifamily homes, the one and two family homes, because those are good housing. [00:27:27] You don’t want to make them too expensive. So it’s like not about fire safety at all. He’s very clear about this. He’s not trying to save anyone’s life. He’s just trying to find a way to ban apartments. And, we have not grown past that entirely. We still have all kinds of building codes and zoning regulations that are purely protectual in exactly this way. [00:27:42] They’re intended to drive up the cost of housing, to make it prohibitively expensive for poor people to move into areas. And VLAIR says it out loud and we’ve been doing it ever since. [00:27:52] Jeff Wood: I just think about parking and then across the bay. I think about student noise. Those are the things that have continued that tradition of fire safety. [00:28:00] And then the Supreme Court, jumps on this and I was struck by the language, like a pig in a parlor instead of in the barnyard trying to, basically demonize where people should live and how people should live. And I, that was Euclid versus Ambler Realty, which is the main standing in terms of zoning regulations in the United States and where things changed, or at least were. [00:28:19] Regulated to where we are today. [00:28:22] Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah, the guys who write the first zoning codes, they know what they’re doing is unconstitutional and that because they write it at the time they understand this, that this was not the traditional understanding of what they call police powers, the ability of cities to regulate their residents and they pull off a kind of a magic trick. [00:28:37] They say. A police power can be constitutional if it’s ubiquitous. So what we need to do is to spread zoning so far and wide across the United States that by the time it gets to the Supreme Court, it will retroactively have been a legitimate exercise of the police power. And they pull that off. They spread zoning very widely. [00:28:56] But zoning has a flaw at its heart, which is that if you’re saying, a pig in a barnyard is a proper thing, but a pig in a parlor is not a proper thing, what you’re effectively saying is some people should get to live in the parlor and other people should have to live in the barnyard. We had lots of land use regulations before zoning, but they tended to be place neutral regulations. [00:29:15] So you could say. You can’t build a tannery next to housing because you will hurt the people living in the house. That’s bad. But you had to show actual damage and it needed to be the same regulation that applied everywhere. Zoning says some things are perfectly legitimate over on this side of the tracks, and they’re illegitimate over on the nice side of town. [00:29:34] And that is a tough thing to get away from once you’ve started down that road. [00:29:38] Jeff Wood: Yeah, and in Modesto and in San Francisco and other places where the Chinese laundries and Chinese laundries aren’t even a harm people in at the time said, these don’t harm anybody. They’re just uses that you don’t like because there’s Chinese people in them. [00:29:50] And I found that interesting too, is that a lot of people were actually very vocal about this doesn’t harm anybody. So why are we making these changes? [00:29:56] Yoni Appelbaum: It’s amazing. I had read in a number of histories of zoning that the first ordinance was about laundries in Modesto. I couldn’t find much about it. [00:30:02] And so I spent a long time digging back through contemporary accounts to figure out what was really going on in Modesto. And there is this forgotten civil rights hero there, a Chinese launderer named Hong Ki, who is operating his laundry. And he’s trying to get his piece of the American dream, after the gold rush, California is preponderantly male, right? [00:30:20] All those miners had out there. They really smell because none of them want to do laundry. They view it as women’s work. It gets so desperate in San Francisco that somebody comes up with a bright idea. He starts gathering everybody’s laundry, putting it on a boat to Hawaii. They wash the clothes in Hawaii and put them back on the boat to San Francisco to get a clean shirt. [00:30:37] That’s where the situation stands. And so the Chinese who are being discriminated against, driven off the railroads out of the gold fields, they see the laundry is their chance, right? They can do this work and have their purchase. And so in communities like Modesto, that was the primary thing that Chinese were doing. [00:30:54] And they move into the white neighborhoods in order to do this, because it’s like a coffee shop. You don’t walk out of your way to get to a different Chinese laundry. You go to the one that’s on your corner. And so they’re moving into the white neighborhoods. The elite of the city are really frustrated. [00:31:07] They try to convince the residents not to patronize the Chinese laundries. That doesn’t work. Some of them try arson. They try burning the Chinese out and the Chinese rebuild. They try vigilante violence. They put on hoods and march through Chinatown, smashing windows and beating people up. That doesn’t work. [00:31:22] And then they hit on zoning. They write an ordinance is America’s first zoning law. All laundries need to relocate West of the tracks and South of G street. And I pulled an old map of Modesto and there is only one block on that map at the time, West of the tracks and South of G street, and it says Chinatown. [00:31:38] So this is a racial segregation ordinance that is written in the arid race neutral language that could pass legal muster. And it does. And that is America’s first Senate law. And so that history, I think, was largely lost. Hunkey challenges this in court, fights it all the way up to the California Supreme Court as a test case. [00:31:58] And he’s forgotten because he loses. He fought a good fight, but America goes in a different direction. [00:32:03] Jeff Wood: I think you’d do well, maybe if you put together a plaque and brought it to Modesto and see if you can place it somewhere or look on those Sanborn maps and see if you can find where that laundry was. [00:32:11] I would [00:32:11] Yoni Appelbaum: love to memorialize that, right? The guy goes to jail, he gets beaten up in jail by another inmate. He really pays for his willingness to fight this, but he doesn’t because he’s trying to build a better life for himself. And he hangs on a Modesto even after he loses the case. And people like that who are continually pushing against the boundaries and fighting for their own right to mobility are the people who enable America to grow as it does. [00:32:34] Jeff Wood: I saw your discussion with Rachel Cohen at Vox, and I wanted to continue one of her questions on the era of deregulation. We just chatted with Stacey Mitchell of ISLR, and there are a lot of things about the increase in conglomerates and the reduction in access to goods and services between then and now that seems to fit your narrative actually pretty well. [00:32:50] We deregulated, but it also consolidated power in a few hands versus a many, and I’m wondering, How that consolidation maybe was part of this story about the grinding to a halt of mobility because of how many companies were coming together as conglomerates. Maybe how many people were consolidating power in cities as the ability to keep people out or to make sure that they weren’t building housing. [00:33:11] There seems to be, it feels like anyways, this story about deregulation, the seventies and eighties. Leads us down this road to over regulation that we’re seeing now in the housing market. [00:33:19] Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah it’s a super interesting question and it’s a funny dynamic. The forces in the 60s and 70s that give us the modern problem, right? [00:33:27] You have a couple generations. You have the original zoners in the original progressive era. We develop zoning as a tool of racial segregation, but also just of imposing order and rationality on cities. Then you have a second generation in the New Deal who take this national. The New Deal makes federal housing lending contingent on communities being zoned. [00:33:44] And so lots of communities that haven’t adopted it are basically forced to adopt it. The third generation 70s. And these are people who have grown jaundiced about the New Deal. They’re looking at the marriage of big business and big government. They think the regulatory agencies have been captured by businesses and they’re often not wrong about that. [00:34:04] They can see the consolidation of corporate power and they come up with an alternative. They say, the problem here is that government is no longer protecting the public interest. We need to pass new laws that allow the public to challenge governmental decision making because. Otherwise, ordinary citizens and small communities are powerless in the face of this kind of consolidation. [00:34:28] So it’s a critique of the New Deal that comes from the left, and it’s a critique of corporate power. And you can think of the figures who launched this critique in their own ways. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is a critique of the way that environmental regulation has been captured by the chemical industry. [00:34:42] Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed talks about how highway safety regulation has been captured by the auto industry. And Jane Jacobs is death and life of great American cities. It’s assault on urban renewal is about how the governance of cities has been captured by the real estate development industry and it’s unholy alliance with big government, which wants to develop things wholesale. [00:35:04] So there is a big revolt against bigness and consolidation. The trouble with it is that it pushes to the opposite extreme. So the remedy it creates is a set of legal changes. Which enabled people to sue and to do this in two ways, right? One is you no longer in most instances need to demonstrate that you yourself have been damaged by a decision that government makes in order to challenge that decision. [00:35:27] So a public interest group can sue. And then the other big change it makes is that it allows people to challenge the government for not following its own rules and procedures. And we’ve got a bunch of different laws that in different ways enable people to bring these kinds of legal challenges. So if the first two generations of progressive reformers have made every. [00:35:45] Question of construction in America, subject to government approval through zoning and other kinds of regulation. This 3rd generation then gives any individual who dislikes the government, the decision, the power to bring the government to court. And that’s a power that is unequally exercised. And this is the complicating wrinkle. [00:36:04] It is. The wealthier, better educated people in America who can work the bureaucratic system, they know how to navigate it, have the resources to bring the government to court in those communities, a single individual, a small group can grind everything to a halt. They can keep the development from coming in there. [00:36:21] In other communities, that’s not the case. They may not have the resources to challenge governmental decision making to challenge the granting of a permit, for example. And so you get this real inequality taking root and it comes from this well intentioned place. People can see the consolidation of corporate power. [00:36:36] They want to challenge it, but their remedy is not to make government strong enough to challenge corporations. The remedy is to kneecap government to make it impossible for government to democratically elect. To act in the public interest at all by essentially distributing a veto to anyone with enough money to exercise it. [00:36:54] Jeff Wood: I just wrote a newsletter item about the Chevron decision, as well as this thing that just came out the other day about NEPA and the regulations that govern how it’s basically administered. And the Trump administration is trying to get rid of the way that things have been done since 1977. [00:37:07] And I think back to that initial environmental movement about how. It allowed people, individuals to sue withstanding based on harms and how that changed the game completely. But as you said, it goes the other direction and I just, we’re living in this weird, strange world where we’re getting to the point where they’re trying to do these things that I don’t necessarily agree with, but people have been complaining about for quite a while. [00:37:28] Yoni Appelbaum: You can see that part of what Trump has done is harness very real and I think justified anger about some things. I think the progressive movement has been very slow to recognize that in its effort to pass laws and procedures that allow people to give. Voice and incorporate community and minimize harm. [00:37:48] It has been doing real harm at times that the balance is off. Trump has been very good at discovering grievances. This is one of his superpowers, giving voice to complain. The problem with progressives not recognizing this themselves is they’re handing political weapons to their opponents who whose equal and opposite reaction may be even worse, right? [00:38:08] If we swung the pendulum way too far toward local control. In the seventies, with those legal changes and the harms have been accruing ever since what Trump is proposing to do is to sweep away environmental protections in some cases, almost entirely. And there’s gotta be a better balance, right? That there are ways to protect the environment, to protect some number of historical structures without landmarking parking lots, which is a thing that in my own community people have done. [00:38:36] And if you can get that balance right, progressivism. Can continue to try to safeguard the environment, but there is a real problem with a lot of these laws. The overwhelming majority of CQA cases that have been brought in California, and that was a law pushed as a means of protecting open spaces have not been about open spaces from the very beginning. [00:38:55] Those cases have preponderantly been about multifamily development in dense urban areas. That is where the cases go. And so if that’s what the law is being used for, what it actually does in some sense is push the development out in terms of sprawl, right? I think you can make a very compelling empirical case that a lot of these environmental regulations had precisely the opposite effect that they intended. [00:39:14] They made it very hard to build in areas with other people around and led to much more development of greenfields, which was the very thing they were supposed to stop. And at some point. I think progressives need to take a step back and say, okay, we know we are trying to accomplish. Has the law done that? [00:39:31] Or did this actually backfire on us? And if so, without abandoning that very good goal, is there a way we can tweak the law or change our approach here so that we’re advancing instead of undermining that goal? [00:39:43] Jeff Wood: In the book, you write about how the 2016 election told you a little bit more about this mobility and what’s been happening. [00:39:48] And I’m curious about that. I’m also curious and I thought about the same time, the 2016 election coincided with the Brexit movement. And if we have seen the same thing happen here in the United States that we saw in England or in Europe. [00:39:58] Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah, the United States was remarkable for its mobility, but you can see some of these same trends and I do think that, there’s an enormous housing debate right now in England. [00:40:06] And if you look at a map of the Brexit vote, it mirrors a map of the last 2 elections in the United States where rural areas. depressed industrial cities. These are our bases of support for the conservative parties and the thriving metropolises are the basis of support for the progressive movements on both sides of the Atlantic. [00:40:27] And that pattern does relate to mobility. And in this particular way, there is research in what happens to people who move and to people who want to move and can’t. If you want to move and can’t, you are likely to become more cynical, more disconnected from your community. Less likely to join organizations to form new friendships, you are also likely to see the world as a zero sum game where others gains come at your expense to see it as a rigged game. [00:40:54] The anger grows to if you move the act of moving, right? So if you start with a sample of people who all say that they intend to move in the next year, and then you look at the ones who pull it off and the ones who don’t, the simple act of moving makes you more optimistic. It makes you likelier to see that others gains are beneficial to you, right? [00:41:11] Like you’re moving into a new community, that somebody else is doing well, you’re doing better. You feel optimistic, you reach out, you’re more likely to form those friendships, to join the clubs and organizations. You have the set of characteristics that people around the world for 200 years thought of as quintessentially American. [00:41:27] Americans were a bunch of optimists, sometimes heedless optimists, but they were people who thought the future would be better than the past. They thought that they could collectively get ahead as opposed to fighting over a fixed size pie where your neighbor’s slice comes at your expense. And we know that this played out in voting in 2016 too, that people who still lived within a few miles of where they’ve been born were overwhelmingly more likely to vote for Donald Trump. [00:41:50] Those who had moved a little became somewhat more likely to vote for Democrats. If they moved a lot. They were a lot more likely. To vote for Democrats, but you can also map that onto the political attitude. So I think that there are ways, it’s tough to tell a progressive community, you gotta let them build multifamily housing in your backyard. [00:42:06] There are so many reasons, so many rational reasons people might oppose that. They might say, I’m worried about parking. I’m worried about stressing the existing infrastructure of the schools. I’m worried about traffic. I’m worried about my view, but if you go to that same person and you say. Do you want to live in an America where the blue states and cities are shutting population because people are no longer moving toward opportunity? [00:42:26] They’re now moving toward cheap housing and they’re losing political representation and getting locked into permanent political minority. Do you want to live in a city where? Young families can no longer move in and the service workers who are making your lives possible can’t afford to share the community by living alongside you. [00:42:43] Do you want to live in a city where people have longer and longer commutes, right? And do you want to live in a country where we’re divided between haves and have nots, where these islands of blue prosperity amid a large sea of red suffering and anger and reap the consequences of that? Are you happy with American politics over the last eight years? [00:43:02] Very few progressives I know say, yes, I’m very happy with the way elections have gone for us lately. I’m really happy with the direction of American policy. Let’s keep steady on. This is great. And if you frame it in those terms and get them to see building that housing in their backyard is, in fact, the solution to these problems. [00:43:19] The thing that the lack of that hasn’t caused these problems in the addition of the housing can help solve them. Suddenly it’s a whole different conversation. [00:43:27] Jeff Wood: I got a couple more questions for you before I let you go. We talk a lot about transportation on this podcast, as you noted before we started chatting. [00:43:33] And the idea of mobility is something that, from the way that you write about it is about economic mobility. But for the most part, we talk about, transportation as human mobility. I’m curious how the transportation policies have led to this kind of stagnation as well. We had folks on previously to talk about how the highways have led to the expansion of the suburbs and more kind of conservative thought. [00:43:52] We’ve talked about the accessibility that people have to jobs and the economic opportunities that they have in that way. But I’m wondering how the infrastructure discussion melts into the idea that you’re talking about, which is like the broader mobility across the country. [00:44:05] Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah, I’m sorry to tell you that the father of zoning, Edward Murray Bassett, got interested in the issue first because he was a transportation advocate for better streetcar service out to his Brooklyn neighborhood. [00:44:16] That was his gateway into the topic. These things are intertwined though. What he was thinking was, New York doesn’t have to be a festering hellhole of immigrant apartments if we got really good streetcars, it could be a low density place because people could commute. You could compress distance by speeding up the time of commuting through good streetcar service. [00:44:38] So he was passionate about single family homes, but he saw. Better transportation is the way to do that. I think we can flip that around on Bassett and think about the way over the last hundred years, a lot of our focus in investment and infrastructure has not been about genuine mobility, about helping people get to the places where their families will have more opportunities. [00:44:57] It’s been about allowing people to get stuck, right? Like we have built this enormous infrastructure and then set up the federal financing of homes to encourage people to find a place and stay there. And. If you tune your transportation policy a little bit differently, you can get people many more options. [00:45:14] You want people to be able to switch jobs that is empirically they will end up better off in the long run. If they’re able to jump laterally and diagonally through their careers, you want people to be able to switch residences. And if you get density and good transportation, you are enabling them to do these things to the extent that the transportation infrastructure is spider webbed out with an enormous amount of investment for a relatively. [00:45:37] We. Disperse population, all of these things get a lot harder to pull off. And so I do think that particularly the last 50 years, as we’ve ground to a halt, the way we’ve invested in transportation has accelerated that and different kinds of transportation investments could help restore American mobility in the geographic sense, which leads to the economic sense. [00:45:56] And that’d [00:45:56] Jeff Wood: be pretty [00:45:56] Yoni Appelbaum: cool. [00:45:57] Jeff Wood: That gives me even more negative feelings towards drive till you qualify, which is something that people talk about when they’re getting mortgages. The further out you go, the cheaper the housing, but then the more the transportation costs increase. You’ve been a lot of talks and you’ve chatted about the book with a number of people. [00:46:11] I’m wondering if there’s a question that people haven’t asked you that you wish they would. It’s a quick question. I’ve [00:46:15] Yoni Appelbaum: never gotten that one and I’m glad I did. I think one of the aspects of this that I was fascinated by as, as I wrote, was the multiplicity of housing types that existed until relatively. [00:46:29] Recently, people often think about their own current situations to get a lot of callers and call and shows who say things like, I’m looking here. I wish I could look there, but at different parts of our lives, we need different kinds of housing and people in different income brackets need different kinds of housing. [00:46:43] And the guy who wrote the original zoning ordinance, Edward Murray Bassett lived in A dozen different kinds of housing along his journey. He rented a bedroom in somebody’s house, illegal in most American cities today. He lived in a bachelor hotel. Again, not something we really have anymore. There were lots of relatively cheap housing options as he was a young man on the move in the make that were available to him that he then effectively outlaws once he has Landed someplace with genuine economic security. [00:47:10] And that’s a conversation I think we really need to have that it’s not just about building more, right now I’m living in a single family home. If people like single family homes, I think that’s great. I love my single family home. It’s not the only place I’ve lived. I doubt it will be the last place that I live. [00:47:24] As I get old, the steps in this house will no longer be easy for me to navigate. There are. Tradeoffs in any housing and, those preference surveys you’re pointing to, if you ask people do you want a mansion? Most people like, yeah, I want a mansion. You say, do you want that mansion? If there’s a 4 hour commute each way to your job, people will think differently, right? [00:47:41] And that trade off is something that we make whenever we select our housing. And if you give people many more options. Then they can get closer to the things that match their needs. 19th century reformers kept on looking in 20th century reformers at people living in really bad housing conditions. [00:47:57] And there was this kind of blindness that they, I don’t quite get it, but they’d look at, somebody living in a terrible apartment and they’d say, we should. Ban apartments like that. And then they look at somebody in a tenement and they say, we should ban tenements like that. They never said let’s ban poverty. [00:48:11] Like it was always like, if we could just get rid of the apartment, we’d solve the problem. The apartments were fine. I went back to see my great grandfather’s tenement in New York that was targeted by reformers, that particular building targeted by reformers as a hell hole. I couldn’t rent it. [00:48:23] It’s 7, 200 a month. There was nothing wrong with the apartment. It turned out what was wrong with poverty. And we’ve gone down a long road in this. country of banning housing types as a way to address poverty and produced an enormous homelessness crisis as a result. And if we can get back to a wider array of housing styles that are permitted in our communities, I think that we could give people a better chance to find the housing that works for them at their particular situation. [00:48:49] Jeff Wood: Very well said. The book is Stuck, How the Privilege and the Property Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Where can folks find a copy if they wish to purchase this wonderful book? [00:48:59] Yoni Appelbaum: I always encourage people to seek out their local independent bookstore. You can find a copy anywhere, but there’s something special [00:49:04] Jeff Wood: about walking into a small business and it’s affordable. [00:49:06] Yoni Appelbaum: And [00:49:07] Jeff Wood: there’s so much more in here than we’d talked about. I could talk to you for three hours. I feel like there’s tenements, there’s Jane Jacobs, there’s Flint, Michigan. There’s all kinds of things in here that I think will touch a lot of folks and give people a lot of information that they need to make places better. [00:49:19] Yoni, where can folks find you if you wish to be found? I’m on X, I guess it’s called these days, [00:49:24] Yoni Appelbaum: why Alabama you can find my work in the Atlantic, which is my day job. And you can keep track of the book talks and the rest at Yoni, alabama. com. Awesome. [00:49:33] Jeff Wood: Well, Yoni, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time. [00:49:36] Yoni Appelbaum: Thank you so much.
