UCLA Housing Voice

Ep. 116: ‘Stuck’ Book Club pt. 3 with Yoni Appelbaum

• UCLA Housing Voice Podcast • Season 5 • Episode 20

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Part 3 of our book club series on Yoni Appelbaum's 'Stuck', covering chapters 9–10. Appelbaum himself joins us to wrap up the series. 

Show notes:

Shane Phillips 00:00:06
Hello! This is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. 

This is the third and final episode of our book club series on Yoni Appelbaum's 2025 book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. If you haven't already listened to part one and two, go back and listen to those first. That said, our guest this time is Appelbaum himself, so if you're only interested in hearing from the author and no one else, then I suppose you're in the right place. 

And yes, I confirmed just before we started recording that Giselle had it right and it is Appelbaum, not Applebaum, so he has my apologies, even if he was very gracious and didn't bring it up himself or give me any trouble over the mistake. 

Each episode of this series has been a lot more work than a typical episode of Housing Voice, and that is saying something. But it's also been a really rewarding experience and it's just been fun to try something new and I think you'll agree that Yoni really delivers as our final guest in this book club series. Even having read the book very closely for these walkthroughs and interviews, I gained a lot of new and unexpected insight from this conversation. 

I want to offer a sincere thanks to him for joining us and to Stan for co-hosting with me through all three episodes and about eight hours of recording time. If you liked this series, be sure to share it with a friend and subscribe on whatever podcast platform you use. The same goes for our Substack, uclahousingvoice.substack.com, if you want to follow us and talk to us there. And if there's another book you think we should cover sometime in the future, or a study or report we should cover with our regular format, reach out and let me know. 

The Housing Voice podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, with production support from Claudia Bustamante, Brett Berndt and Tiffany Lieu. You can reach me by email at shanephillips@ucla.edu, and our Substack again is uclahousingvoice.substack.com. With that, let's wrap up this book and get to our guest, Yoni Appelbaum. 

Yoni Appelbaum is a deputy executive director at The Atlantic and the author of Stuck, which anyone listening to part three of this book club is probably well aware of by now. Before joining The Atlantic, Yoni was a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University, and before that he taught at Babson College and at Brandeis University, where he received his PhD in American history. 

Yoni, thanks for joining us for the book club and welcome to the Housing Voice podcast.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:02:58
I'm so glad to be with you today.

Shane Phillips 00:02:59
And Stan Oklobdzija is my co-host again. Hey, Stan.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:03:03
Hey, what's up, Shane?

Shane Phillips 00:03:04
We've spoken pretty glowingly of this book throughout the series, Yoni, so as much as we appreciate you being here, I think we can say that we appreciate the work you put into actually writing this book even more. It has made for a lot of great conversation. And, as you saw in my notes for this episode, there's a lot more we could talk about than we've actually been able to get to or will be able to get to today. I had, I think, 24 pages of notes for part one, reduced that to 19 for part two, only 11 or 12 on this one, so I've gotten more efficient with these episodes. So, making progress, though I guess we only have two chapters this time. Structurally, we are going to treat this episode similarly to our last one with Giselle Hale, combining a walkthrough of the last few chapters with some more direct questions about the chapters and about the book as a whole. But we will start with a question I am certain you have answered a million times by now, but I do think is an important place to start for any of our listeners who haven't heard you speak elsewhere. What led you to writing this book in this way, with its combination of history and policy and its focus on mobility and housing, at this time?

Yoni Appelbaum 00:04:16
You know, one of the things I love about housing is that when I talk to folks about where their interest comes from, there's almost always a personal story, sort of an experience they had at some point in their lives that led them down this particular rabbit hole. For me it was living as a graduate student in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in an apartment that was a little smaller than my family needed and that cost a little more than we could afford. And I knew something about, as a historian, I knew something about the neighborhood we are living in, which is that for a century it had been a neighborhood of working class homes where folks came and they worked hard and then their kids moved up and did a little bit better. It did this so consistently that sociologists came just to study the neighborhood as this ladder of opportunity that they coined a whole new term for it: a zone of emergence. And then they identified neighborhoods like this in cities all across the country. But obviously by the time I was there and studying at Brandeis as a grad student, that's not mostly what the neighborhood was. Something had changed. It had broken after 100 years of working really well for that purpose. And that'd be fine. Neighborhoods change. Except that there wasn't exactly a neighborhood like that left in the Boston area, and other zones of emergence around the country were also rapidly gentrifying and ceasing to serve that function. And so I started this book with a really pressing question, which was: why had the places that were most prosperous in America ceased to offer opportunity to the people who needed it most? And, as a historian, that led me into the past. And the answers I found were really different than what I expected to find, and that's what produced the book.

Shane Phillips 00:05:51
And I think you said in an email, an early email exchange, that this had maybe started with a conversation or kind of the seed of the book from the mobility perspective had started with a conversation with Peter Ganong. Maybe you said a decade ago or more.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:06:06
That's right. He was working on this fabulous paper that he and Daniel did, where they showed that the richest and the poorest parts of America had been on a convergent path for 200 years, the gap was narrowing, that people had consistently moved away from places that were struggling and toward places that were prospering, and that something had started to stall out after 1970. And then the gap had actually started widening. It had ceased to pay off to move from a place that was really depressed economically to a place that was prospering. And what they very cleverly showed was that there was sort of a direct correlation with the intensity of the land use regulation and how often these rules were fought over in court. And that sort of piqued my interest, and it happened at the same time that I was living in this apartment and looking for explanations, and so that's when I started digging into this story. I thought, wow. You know, as a historian, I love narratives about change over time. I want to understand what it is about our moment that's different than the America that other folks have lived in previous generations, and why and when changes took place. And it was a little bit like pulling on a string. I thought I was going back to 1970. And I thought: well, gosh, you know what was it like before that, right? And I kept pulling and pulling until the whole skein of wool had unwound and I found myself back with the earliest European settlement in the US. And I thought: you know, I really can't go any further than that, so this is probably a good place to start writing.

Shane Phillips 00:07:31
I mean it also shows how long a lot of these research projects take, because I think that paper by Peter and Daniel came out in — I don't know — maybe 2019 or 2020 or around there, but I'm sure that they started working on it in, you know, 2012, 2014. A lot of these things take a really long time to germinate, much like books often do. So we're going to cover these last two chapters and, as I said, kind of intersperse questions about the chapters but about the book as a whole. Chapter nine is titled A Plague of Localists. The chapter is about the rise of local control and the problems that came with it, but it opens on a positive note with the case of Edwards v. California, a 1941 case that went to the Supreme Court, in which a man was charged with bringing an indigent migrant, his brother-in-law, actually across state lines. This was a form of warning out, which you've talked about, that was still persisting in 27 states, and Stan mentioned in an earlier episode about this. In this California context, which we're definitely going to talk about more in just a moment, the invalidation of these laws preventing people from crossing state lines is framed as a sort of final triumph of American mobility, at least at the time, clearing out some of the last vestiges of the old system. And so, of course, the backlash is just around the corner. It's argued that the resistance to mobility and diverse types of housing and integration were all driven by conservative impulses up to this point, but the backlash really gained strength when progressives joined the fight in the 1960s and 70s, inspired by books like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, all books that questioned the unchecked power of large corporations as well as government and that called for shifting decision making to private citizens and to local communities. In 1970, we get the National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA, and the California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA, which do plenty of great things but also create a sort of template for stopping good projects as easily and indiscriminately as bad ones. And in 1978, we get California's Proposition 13, which has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Perhaps not coincidentally, 1970 is also the last decade where income gaps between rich states and poor states were still shrinking, as you talked about. And we close the chapter on the shortcomings of local control, covering a few ways its promises of more democratic decision making end up failing in practice, often functioning more like a veto power organized and wielded by the wealthy against the interests of the broader population. So, as with all of these, chapter summaries very incomplete. But before we dive in, anything either of you guys want to add to that overview?

Yoni Appelbaum 00:10:27
Thanks. That was beautifully done. The one thing I'd add is that this was a hard chapter to write. A lot of the stories in the book that you went through in the previous two episodes are about people acting maliciously out of motives of racial or class-based discrimination, and that's how this chapter starts. But that's not how the story unfolds in the late 20th century. It's a really tragic tale of a lot of folks who actually had laudable intentions in many cases, who ended up producing an outcome that was really different than the one that they sought, and that difference between intent and outcome, I think, is one of the things I was really trying to get across here.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:11:06
I'd just like to shout out a song from 1940 by Woody Guthrie about this very practice in California of stopping migrants from Arkansas and Oklahoma and other southern Dust Bowl states at the border and telling them to go around. So if you have some streaming service, check out Do Re Mi by Woody Guthrie. It's very weird because a 1940 song sounds very applicable to our modern times.

Shane Phillips 00:11:27
So the place I wanted to start here is with this Supreme Court case, with Fred Edwards driving his brother-in-law, Frank Duncan, from Texas to California in 1939. Duncan went with his wife and infant son hoping that the change in climate would improve his wife's health. But he struggled to find work in California and ended up on the relief rolls of the Farm Security Administration, and that led to his brother-in-law Edwards being charged by the state controller with violating a California law against transporting an indigent person across state lines. So, as I said in the summary, 27 states had similar laws at the time and the case ended up going to the Supreme Court. The justices were in a difficult position because the Constitution did not obviously prohibit states from restricting who could move between state lines or across state lines, which sounds a bit strange to the modern ear. It certainly did to me. But, Yoni, you write that the right of, quote, ingress and regress between the states was actually included in the nation's original Articles of Confederation and the framers left it out, presumably intentionally, when they drafted the Constitution. But the justices clearly agreed that people should be free to move where they want to, and war mobilization was adding urgency to this issue. As the government really needed people to be able to move to different parts of the country where we were producing boats and ammunition and planes and all the rest. So the justices ultimately did invalidate the laws by arguing that they restricted interstate commerce. While agreeing that the laws were unconstitutional, in a concurring opinion, Justice Robert Jackson disagreed with the majority opinion or the reasoning behind it, saying that it reduced people to objects of commerce, which is especially problematic when we're talking about the legal foundations of basic rights and freedoms. One big problem is that this commerce logic can cut against personal freedoms as easily and as often as it supports them, and I think that's something we've seen with the Commerce Clause in more modern times. I really like this line from his opinion, though, speaking about how the laws restrict people's movement. He said they would — quote — divide our citizenry on the basis of property, into one class, free to move from state to state, and another class that is poverty, bound to the place where it has suffered misfortune — unquote. Great line. Absolutely correct, I think. And increasingly where we find ourselves today. Another justice wrote that upholding the laws would have — quote — converted the United States into 48 concentration camps — unquote. And notable that this decision came a month before the U.S. entered World War II, so we probably did not use that term lightly. Even though the justices did not all agree on the reason, they did decide unanimously that these laws were unconstitutional. Yoni, first I'll just say that this is a great example of the historical work you do throughout the book, without it really feeling like a work of history alone. But second, I'm interested to hear what you made of this case. One of the things that really stood out for me is how the freedom to move between states was not clearly enumerated, even 90-ish years after the state of Ohio had set the precedent of letting people decide for themselves whether they belong to a community or not, which was the topic of, I don't know, chapter two or three or four.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:14:59
You read through the decision and the concurrences and the justices can't really settle on why this is unconstitutional, which is really fascinating to me, because this is a case where they look at something and they say that's just downright un-American. Give us a moment here while we look in the document, to find out why. But there's never any doubt in their minds that you can't do this. Somewhere in the 19th century we go from referring to these United States in the plural to the United States as a singular nation, and what the justices are really saying is: if we are a nation, then we are a nation in which people can move freely. Like, you cannot do this. You cannot separate us out into separate states and post armed guards at the border. That is the difference between being a confederation of independent states and being a nation, and there's something profoundly un-American about telling people they don't have the right to move toward opportunity.

Shane Phillips 00:15:49
Do you get the sense that the war was really the driving factor here? Or was there — you know, why did this happen in 1941 and not 1915 or 1925?

Yoni Appelbaum 00:16:03
I think you know Duncan and Edwards get really lucky with their timing. When the case is brought, the U.S. is still trapped in the throes of the Great Depression, and there's a lot of political anxiety about large masses of indigent people — Okies and others — moving across state lines and throwing themselves on the relief rolls. By the time, it takes forever for things to move through the U.S. legal system. By the time it gets up to the Supreme Court, the concern has flipped. And, as you say, they were much more concerned about the ability for war industries to hire sufficient numbers of people, and allowing states to turn away people who wanted to work at the border seemed like a really bad idea, but I think it's more than that. In part, this had simmered below the surface for a long time, and it's the depths of the Great Depression that forced the issue. Finally, there had been cases of indigents being barred or removed, but typically not fought. You know, if they were, they could often find new work wherever they ended up. In the Depression, though, the desperation of the population sort of pushes the states to be more aggressive about their enforcement, and also you get people like Edwards who stand up for their rights. I'll say one other thing about this, which is I really wanted to know what had happened to Frank Duncan. Like, every account of the case I read sort of brought it right up to the Supreme Court decision and left it there. But I thought, you know, what happened to this ne'er-do-well brother-in-law, and eventually I was able to dig up the answer, which is that he found employment in a war industry. So you know, the court didn't know that at the time it ruled, but there was something about his personal story which really validated the premise of the case, which was that California said we need to keep these people out because some of our fellow Americans are just bad people, right? Like, they're poor and you know they're sponging off the public dole. And in fact Duncan desperately wanted to work, and as soon as there was a decent opportunity he was able to pursue. It's something he wouldn't have been able to do if he stayed where he was, where there were not jobs. And so not only does it transform Duncan's life, but it also enables the U.S. to arm for World War II. It's a win-win, and that's generally the case with internal migration within the U.S. When we let people move toward opportunity, it doesn't just improve their lives. It improves the lives of those around them.

Shane Phillips 00:18:14
In this same section you summarize the majority opinion as saying that, quote: the logic of Elizabethan poor laws should no longer apply in a country that offered state and federal relief, and I found that really interesting, helping me kind of draw a connection between safety net programs and mobility that I hadn't really considered before. The idea here being that when every state or community is responsible for providing the resources to help those who need assistance, especially at a time like the Great Depression, this practice of warning out makes a lot more sense, frankly, even if it is morally objectionable. If they don't prevent people from coming in, they can be taken advantage of by other jurisdictions that might be more exclusionary. You know, when a homeless person is bussed away to another city or state, that's sort of a modern version of what these mobility restrictions were trying to prevent. But with federal programs where the resources to provide assistance are pooled from taxes collected across the country and directed wherever they're needed, now there's less incentive to exclude people and it's easier to justify taking that exclusionary power away from states and localities. The cost isn't yours to bear just because someone who needs help decided to migrate to your community instead of someone else's. Later in chapter 10, you also point out how it might be natural for a maturing society to slow down a bit and for people to move less — more like what you see in Europe, for example — and how that would likely require more redistribution away from thriving areas and toward declining and economically stagnant places, also like what they do in Europe. I found this idea really compelling and insightful and I was hoping you could say a little bit more about it.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:20:02
You know. I think there's basically a tradeoff here, and it'd be nice if public policy didn't involve messy tradeoffs, but it usually does. You can engineer a society for stagnation or stability, right. You can assume that you know if a worker loses his job in Dusseldorf or Stuttgart, that he's going to stay there, and then you need to set up some sort of a social welfare state which says, okay, this person is no longer going to be employed here, but I can create programs that minimize the chance of them being laid off in the first place. I can create programs that take from economically thriving areas of my country and push those resources into the ones that are in economic decline, because I don't expect the labor to relocate, because I don't expect people to move. What's left, then, is either redistribution or strong incentive programs to try to keep the jobs exactly where they are.

Shane Phillips 00:20:58
Or just letting them suffer in place, I guess, right?

Yoni Appelbaum 00:21:00
And you can let them suffer in place. We'll get there in a sec, but there's a cost to that, right? Like, the alternative is to engineer society for high levels of dynamism of all kinds so that you expect people to move toward opportunity, you expect companies to grow, and that means you can also let companies fail. It means that you can look at a place that is economically stagnant and say, well gosh, you know, folks there are probably going to move toward the places that are growing economically, and so that is the best way to solve. The problem is to double down on the areas of the country which, in that particular generation, are successful. And it's not a permanent thing, right, and we'll come back to this later, I think. But you can look at a place like Ohio as a good example of this. Ohio is like the first boom town in America, where they open up the Northwest Territory, and then, a couple decades later, it's the first bust in America. The farmers move out of Ohio and they continue westward to Illinois, to Indiana, where there's good, rich soil to till, and Ohio goes into net population decline. We don't respond to that by funneling massive federal subsidies into Ohio. In the early 19th century Ohio goes into decline, it will eventually rise again. By the 1890s Cleveland's like the most prosperous place in the country. It's like where Rockefeller and other industrialists have set up shop and it's an amazingly prosperous state, and obviously it has gone through boom and bust cycle since then too. That is very American. That is the other way to engineer our society. You can engineer it for stasis, you can engineer it for dynamism. Part of what strikes me about the contemporary United States is that we have started to engineer our society with sort of like an American style social safety net, which is to say, not very much, the European levels of immobility, and so we're sort of left with the worst of both worlds, that we're not doing very, very much to help the people in economically depressed regions. Neither are we allowing them to relocate toward opportunity, and that's a really bad outcome. Like, you can face the trade-off of either of the other two decisions: lower levels of economic growth, more redistribution, or higher levels of economic growth and less. You really don't want to be stuck in a situation where you have low levels of economic dynamism and low levels of support.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:23:09
Do you think our American federalism has anything to do with that? I mean, like, European nations are sort of generally unitary governments, like what's good in Berlin is good in Stuttgart, it's good in Dusseldorf, but here in America we have sort of like 50 little laboratories kind of working at certain times like really independent of one another. Do you think that might be part of the case?

Yoni Appelbaum 00:23:28
That's a great point. And one of the really interesting things about that sort of Brandeisian laboratories of democracy idea is, you know, built into it is the notion that people are going to vote with their feet. They're laboratories of democracy not just because the experiments that are run one place could be adopted someplace else. It's that the engine of adoption is that if you don't follow best practices, if you don't learn from the experiments that other states are doing, folks will leave. They'll move out toward the places that are giving them more of what they want in life. And one of the really perverse things about the contemporary United States is we're still running all the experiments at the state and local level. But if a particular city or a particular state starts running the experiments really successfully, it means everybody else can sort of press their nose up on the glass and gaze on in envy at the economic prosperity that it's producing. But they're largely excluded from taking part in it. And that's what's really changed about the American system. We've always been a federal system when we were moving along, when we weren't, but these days that federalism now fuels both envy and despair.

Shane Phillips 00:24:33
So coming out of World War II, there was a resurgence of membership in things like church groups and fraternal brotherhoods and other associations, and it was also at this time that people expressed historically high rates of trust in their fellow Americans. I had originally added to that sentence — and this was despite about one in five people moving every year. But you make the case that the mobility rate and public trust are positively correlated, that it's not despite, but maybe even because of the high rates of mobility that public trust was so high. This comes up at a few points in the book and I think it's one of the ideas I found most surprising and interesting and kind of hopeful in a way too. So could you talk about that idea and how you came to it?

Yoni Appelbaum 00:25:20
I was reading a lot of travelogues of European visitors to the—

Shane Phillips 00:25:23
Not what I expected.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:25:23
U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And you know they all make two points about the U.S. They all say, wow, there's something really wrong with the people in the U.S. Even if they're living someplace that's perfectly good, instead of accepting their assigned rank in society, instead of, you know, submitting to their leaden life, they always want something better. They're always moving. I don't know what's wrong with these people, but they always want to move. That's one consistent observation. The other consistent observation is: wow, American communities are so vital and vibrant. They have associations of all kinds for every purpose. They're always building all of these communities, religious communities, social communities and around hobbies and activities. Why can't Europe be more like that? And sort of, the light bulb went off and I thought, you know, those are actually two sides of the same coin. And you can chart this: in periods of peak American mobility, our rate of organizational activity surges, and in periods of comparative geographic stasis, the rate declines. It is a little counterintuitive. We tend to be really loss averse. People, psychologically, are loss averse. We tend to focus on how many people are moving out of a community. You know it's really painful if there's a high rate of mobility. Longtime friends, family members, you know, members of your club are going to move away. But this actually dates back to some of my doctoral work on voluntary associations, where one of the things I found was, across a really broad array of voluntary associations, they tended to have a constant rate of attrition. You know, maybe they were losing 5% of their members every year, and the difference between a voluntary association or community group that is growing and one that is shrinking is not usually the rate of attrition, it's usually the rate of accession, it's how many new people are joining. And if you think about it just for a sec, the people who join are the new arrivals in the community. That is the moment at which you are likeliest to sign up for something because it's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable to show up at the lodge hall or the church for the first time and have to introduce yourself to the people around you, and you push yourself to do it when you're needing social connection, when you've just arrived someplace. So that's like part of it. Part of it is like the engine of all of this community building in America is that people are always arriving, they're always seeking this connection, they're always revivifying the existing organizations or starting new ones, and then the other part of it is that they're mixing, right. So this is actually where the public trust comes from. When you are constantly mixing, you're encountering people of divergent experiences and divergent backgrounds, and we can show this empirically that the places that are constantly getting new infusions of arrivals are places that are less politically polarized. They have higher trust. Communities will tend to homogenize over time. We tend to reflect the opinions of those around us, and so, you know, over the last 50 years, as we've stopped moving, it's specifically the places with really, really high rates of residential stagnation that show sharply declining political trust, that show really sharp levels of political polarization, that show really low levels of organizational activity and of membership. Those are the places where Americans are bowling alone, and so it's a little counterintuitive. We all have this romantic view of the small town where everybody knows everybody, but that is not actually accurate. You know, in places with very high levels of residential stagnation, you have lower levels of communal activity and organization.

Shane Phillips 00:28:41
All right. So, Yoni, you have this observation that the white middle class people moving out to the suburbs in the 50s, 60s, 70s — the people we associate with white flight — were — quote — the children and grandchildren of European immigrants who had seemed ineradicably, unassimilably different, unquote. That might feel like a kind of banal point, but I found that it hit harder, backed by the context of the rest of the book and with all the time spent on how irredeemable those European immigrants had been viewed in past generations. Giselle said in part two that this book about American mobility is just as much a book about immigration, and we talked with Attorney General Bonta about whether a people can be pro-immigrant without being pro-migrant. As a sort of baseline, I'm sure that putting immigration front and center in Stuck was intentional. So what can you tell us about that choice? Was that always part of the vision for the book or did it really evolve into that during the researching and writing process?

Yoni Appelbaum 00:29:45
It's a great question, and really two things here are true at the same time. One is: whatever level of immigration to the U.S. you think is most appropriate, it remains true that internal migration within the country is absolutely indispensable. So I think that's really important to take the two apart and treat them on their own terms, so you could be an absolute immigration restrictionist. And everything in the book remains equally true about the historic sources of American values and prosperity. That said, it's also the case that in communities that are growing and thriving economically, with large numbers of new arrivals, a society in which the population is constantly mixing, there is both a general openness to living alongside people of other backgrounds and, simultaneously, a better ability to absorb those people and to put them on a trajectory for success, so that, if you have a highly mobile society, you can do something that, frankly, the old world has often struggled to do, which is successfully absorb and integrate large numbers of people from other lands into your society as integral members of that society. If you have high rates of immobility, you end up with something like French banlieues, right? Like, you end up with concentrated, intergenerational, poverty-stricken neighborhoods in which economic opportunity is scarce and cultural division is high, and so, if you are pro-immigration, I think the book's message becomes even more important, because this is how you successfully engineer a society that can turn the diversity of its population into a strength, that can accept the strivers and the dreamers from around the world who want to come here and make it. It doesn't matter how big their ambitions are. If they can't move to a place where they can turn those dreams into reality, they're going to be frustrated and disappointed. Their kids will grow up deprived of opportunity and the society will have a mess on its hands. And so I do think that this is a story that speaks directly to the immigration debate, and that one of the things about mobility that I really found as I was writing is that, you know, this was how America sustained such high levels of immigration for so long — was that it was constantly taking these immigrants and mixing them together into the population, and the places where you tended to see the greatest extent of intergenerational poverty in immigrant communities were places where the immigrants arrived. They remained densely segregated in their communities and lived there for one generation after another. That tended to be a recipe for failure.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:32:21
Can I ask a follow up on that, Yoni? So there's been a lot of really good political science research recently about the effect that the Great Migration had on land use laws in America. So Alexander Sahn at University of North Carolina has a really good paper from a couple of years ago about how you can sort of show directly how large influxes of African-Americans moving from the South into the North, the West, the Midwest et cetera sort of correlate with more restrictive land use laws. And I mean, here in California, Tyler Reny from Claremont Graduate and Ben Newman from UC Riverside have a really awesome paper about you can track vote share that a repeal of California's Fair Housing Act got in the 1960s to how many African-Americans moved to that jurisdiction. So when we talk about immigration from other places, yeah, the big example that everyone points to is waves of migrants from Europe starting around, like, I don't know, late 1800s, 1900s et cetera. But we have this huge internal migration that really affected our ideas about mobility. I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about that.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:33:25
This is such a great point. The Great Migration happens because we close the doors to immigration. World War I cuts off the flow of immigrants from Europe, then we put in the Johnson Act and really restrict immigration, and suddenly all of the industrial cities of the North and the Midwest, and then eventually on the West Coast, are starved for labor, and they're willing to do something that to that point they have steadfastly refused to do, which is to hire people from the American South. And so once we shut off the flow of immigration, those jobs become open to Southerners. They actively recruit, they send labor agents down there and something like 20,000,000 white Southerners and 8,000,000 black Southerners will move up over the course of the 20th century to take those jobs, after almost a century in which there was virtually no mobility in the American South. It's this enormous influx. They go on different trajectories. They arrive there. The first generations of white and black migrants do fairly similarly. But then this backlash, the advent of widespread zoning tends to trap the black migrants in the places where they first land when they come up, and the white migrants are allowed to continue moving. So if they all wind up in the same tough inner city neighborhoods living in substandard housing conditions that are nevertheless, I should point out, much, much better in general than the housing conditions they have in the South. The white migrants are able to move out to the suburbs in the next generation.

Shane Phillips 00:34:49
And not just by a lack of restriction, but actually enabled, incentivized by things like FHA loans that allowed them to purchase homes at pretty low prices and engage in that white flight in the first place.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:35:01
There's a whole policy apparatus behind this. We make home ownership really really central to federal policy, then we only allow certain people to get access to the tools that are going to enable that, and we end up with a really inequitable system where that initial Great Migration is terrific for almost everybody who moves. They will have better outcomes. Their kids will have better outcomes than their siblings who stay behind in the South. As closely as you can match the demographic characteristics of the people who stay and the people who move, they do well in the first generation, they do better in the second generation. But that trajectory does not continue for the Black families. Because of this backlash in the North, because of the various tools that restrict mobility and also because of the inequitable access to the tools that promote mobility, what you see is people of similar economic backgrounds, Black and white, who come up from the South end up on very different trajectories by the end of the 20th century.

Shane Phillips 00:35:54
And this is sort of a similar idea in some ways, pulling from chapter 10 here, but you had this really interesting passage about how the children of immigrants do better than native-born Americans and how that really comes down to the fact that, by definition, immigrants are migrants. So, put another way, because native-born people are born in the U.S., there's a good chance that they never leave the area that they're from, and for some people that's going to make them worse off. Immigrants necessarily have to choose somewhere in the U.S. to move when they arrive, and the act of having to choose leads more of them to end up in places with better opportunities. This was another one of those ideas that never occurred to me but, you know, in retrospect made a lot of sense. So could you tell us a little bit more about that study and what they found there, because I think this is really really important and just very surprising to me.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:36:48
I love this study so much. I love good social science research that just totally inverts my expectations. This is Leah Boustan and her colleagues. She wrote a book called Streets of Gold, building on this work, which I strongly recommend, and what they, you know, they went into it sort of expecting, I think, to find the kinds of things that are woven into the immigrant narrative. Right? If you'd asked me before I read this work why do immigrants succeed in the U.S., I might have said: well, you know, they're self-selected. They're, you know, by definition, they're people who, like, are risk takers and willing to start over, and that entrepreneurial spirit helps. Or maybe they have, you know, more traditional values, like hard work. Maybe they really place an enormous emphasis on the education of their children. And the study is just really elegant. It tries to adjust for each of these factors and to weight them, and what it finds is really a hundred percent of the difference is the place they're actually living. You know, when you migrate, you tend from abroad, you tend to land someplace where you've got economic opportunity. Maybe it's in a chain of migratory decisions where you're moving into the same neighborhood that other members of your family have found that opportunity. But you can study migration flows over time, and with the notable and somewhat sad exception of our refugee resettlement program, which follows the opposite logic, immigrants to this country tend to move to the places where economic opportunity is greatest, and then they thrive there. And if you match them against Americans who move to the same places at the same times, the kids of the Americans do just as well as the kids of the immigrants. Like, that is actually the immigrant secret to success is they're putting themselves in the path of opportunity. They're going to the places where jobs are abundant, where the economy is growing, where opportunities will be available to them and to their children. And if Americans do the same thing, they end up with the same outcomes.

Shane Phillips 00:38:30
Can you expand on that comment about the refugee resettlement? I think I know what you're talking about there, but I think it's worth actually saying explicitly.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:38:38
In the main, the U.S. sends refugees to communities that will have them, which tend to be economically depressed, places that are desperate for any kind of federal subsidy dollar — and not, coincidentally, places where the housing is really cheap, because then you can stretch the federal refugee budget a little further. And so we have tended to take refugee populations and to put them into places that are economically depressed, where, unsurprisingly, they often struggle economically because there are few jobs and few opportunities. And so you know, it's an example of where trying to do a very good thing sometimes leads to suboptimal outcomes. You know, if we instead prioritize putting refugees into places which are really growing and thriving economically and desperately needed labor, that would probably lead to faster absorption and less resistance.

Shane Phillips 00:39:21
You sometimes hear this as a proposal to kind of lower the temperature on immigration debate and opposition where — well, what if we specifically send people to places that are economically depressed, where they're not putting as much pressure on the housing market or competing for jobs or whatever? And I think that's generally well-meaning, well-intentioned, it's not trying to make the lives of immigrants worse off, but it is an interesting kind of a different perspective on that issue and highlight some of the drawbacks of it.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:39:53
Let me just jump on that for one second longer, because often when I start talking about the book — and I think we'll circle to this later — people ask me a version of: well, you know, it's sort of terrible that people are forever leaving behind communities. Why don't we move Americans to the places that are struggling and revive those places? And in fact the refugee resettlement program is a pretty good test case of what that looks like in practice. If you settle a large Somali population in a city like Lewiston, Maine, that has no industries anymore to speak of, it does not do that much for the city, it does not do that much for the people who move there. If you flip that perspective around and ask if these people could live anywhere in America, where would they live? It is striking. People who voluntarily migrate to this country and have the ability to choose where they're going to live don't move to Lewiston. And so you know you end up with sort of a useful test case for why a government place based policy that tries to use a variety of policy tools to steer people to places that are economically depressed, on the theory that is the key to their revival, seldom actually pays off in a way that the policymakers intend.

Shane Phillips 00:40:58
Stan, you had a comment here about — we've talked about books like Silent Spring and Unsafe at Any Speed and a few others, but you have a particular one that you feel is under commented on and deserves more hate.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:41:13
No, definitely. So I mean, you know—

Shane Phillips 00:41:16
In a way that I should say, I don't think the intent of talking about Silent Spring and books like that is actually to say they're bad books. Just they're representative of something versus, I think, the one you want to talk about is just genuinely a bad book.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:41:29
No. So I mean you know, reading your book and the other sort of triumvirate of books about why, you know, America is — why nothing works, to use the title of one of those books, right? The titles that keep coming up over and over are Silent Spring, Unsafe at Any Speed. Paul Sabin goes right into Nader's Raiders and that whole history, and you have a section on that as well. But you know, in reading these books there's always one title that's just lurking there in the background and I've yet to see anyone really go into it, right? And that book is The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich. There's just sort of this Malthusianism that infected thinking around the 1970s or so that really, I think, influenced a lot of people of that generation. But still, you know, given America's gerontocracy, a lot of people today. And I wonder if you had any thoughts about that, if you had any opinions on the book or anything you'd like to share.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:42:27
Good, let's hate on Paul Ehrlich for a bit.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:42:29
If you want to hate on him, that's what this podcast is for.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:42:33
The zero population growth movement is literally misanthropic. Right? It is a movement built around the belief that people are what's wrong with the planet Earth and if we had fewer of them it would be better. That may sound crazy when I say it like that, but there was an entire generation that bought into that, looked around and, for very good reasons, came to that conclusion. Right? This is the generation of the environmental movement of the first Earth Day. Right? Like, they looked around and like the Cuyahoga River is on fire, and it's like looking at that and think like that's a problem. Probably. Maybe we shouldn't have clear cut all of the forests. Maybe acid rain is something that we should get around to fixing. In fact, pollution was rampant and out of control by the mid 20th century. Government wasn't doing enough to defend against it, and there were certainly places where the human population was expanding beyond the resources that were available to safely sustain it. All of that said, everything that literature suggested has turned out to be empirically wrong. Right? Like, in fact, we were able to grow enough food and people are able to lead good and meaningful lives. I am, rather than a hater of humanity, something of a lover of humanity. I think it is good that there are people. 

Stan Oklobdzija 00:43:49
Controversial.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:43:49
You know, this is my controversial stand that I'll take today. Like, people on the whole, good. Mixed record, but on balance. And you know, a lot of the debates over migration, over housing, have this generational divide lurking in the background. Because if you think that adding people to your local landscape is fundamentally a harm that you are inflicting on your landscape and on your community, you will come up with a set of policies designed to do everything possible to keep them out and feel virtuous about that. If you think that people are fundamentally the objects of public policy, the thing that the policy is supposed to be supporting and benefiting, then you will look at those same policies and say: wait a second, that's insane. The other thing to add there is that the nature of the environmental challenges we face shifts over time. Right? We get the green revolution. We're able to grow enough food. That's no longer the thing that keeps policymakers up at night. We are much more worried about things like global warming now, and it turns out that the policies that were promoted in the 1970s and 80s often had a perverse effect on the greatest environmental challenges of the 2020s. Right? That if you are, for example, looking at somebody building new housing on a vacant lot next to you and thinking: my God, more people. People pollute. This is bad, but that vacant lot is next to a transit station. In fact, what you should be thinking is those people are going to live somewhere. Much better to put them next to mass transit in the walkable, dense community, where their carbon footprint will be low and their environmental impact will be low, than to have them plowing under some green field and erecting new houses on it, to which they will drive an hour each way as they go back and forth to their jobs. And so the logic of environmentalism has shifted, but people seldom change their minds. Political change tends to come about through generational succession, and this idea that people are what is fundamentally wrong with the world has had remarkable staying power in the cohort in America that actually votes still today, and also the cohort in America which has produced, like, save one, every president of my lifetime. So you know that, I think, is an amazingly persistent idea, even if it's one that people seldom publicly voice anymore.

Shane Phillips 00:46:01
I think it's important that at the time that book was written, at the time all these books were written, it was sort of the last time in history, in some ways, when there was just genuinely a direct correlation between population and pollution — at least much more direct, and those things are much more untethered now. It is possible to grow in ways that do not require destroying more, burning more fossil fuel, etc. And, as you say, I think a lot of people just have not caught up to that yet, and a lot of our policies — this is more the focus of Abundance, I would say — are really now standing in the way of that decoupling. So that's a great transition. Actually, I've mentioned in both of the last two episodes that I think Stuck fits very nicely with two other books that came out around the same time: Abundance and Why Nothing Works. Abundance is a little broader in scope and less historical than your book, and Why Nothing Works is similarly broad but a lot more historical and focused more on the political science side of things. But all three books draw attention to the disconnect between the things that political progressives say they value and what's actually available to the people who live in the cities and states that they govern. I think Stan mentioned this in one of the previous episodes as well, but Paul Sabin's 2021 book, Public Citizens, definitely fits in here as an important predecessor. I am sure you've heard this comparison a bunch of times at this point, so I'm curious to hear what you think about it now, you know, especially after a year and a half or so, when you've had some time to reflect on the book a little bit.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:47:38
You know this is one of the biggest surprises of the book. I knew these books were coming. Derek was a staff writer at The Atlantic at the time, on my team. Mark and I have been friends since college, and I thought that Derek was writing a book about his abundance agenda — an article that we had published — and that Mark was writing on Moynihan Station and why it couldn't get rebuilt, and I was off writing about land use law and zoning. And so three books that had nothing to do with each other. But you're right to point to Paul Sabin's book, which I think was influential for each of us and for us as well, and there was a certain convergence here. Each of us started tugging the thread at a different place. Derek wanted to know, like, why can't Americans have more good things? And Mark wanted to know why can't we build anything? And I wanted to know why can't Americans move toward opportunity anymore? And if you pull each of those threads, I do think you arrive back at a pretty similar place, which is—

Shane Phillips 00:48:30
They all end up at the same knot in the center.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:48:33
Exactly. You know, like, we used to have a legal and political culture that gave a broad ambit for people to build, and we shifted that, you know, to some extent 100 years ago in really profound ways about 50 years ago, without anyone quite understanding what it was that they were changing, and it's taken a while for the effects to ripple out. But now, really, any big problem you want to point to in America tends to have this at the root. So we could have been writing books about racial inequality in America. We could have been writing books about the problem with the American education system. Almost anything that you want to point to in America is going to come back to this at the core, because it is the profound change that hit our society about 50 years ago that I think undergirds a lot of other problems. I'll say one other thing about this. I set out to write a book about sort of like why we couldn't build, and the mobility piece of this became more and more important to me over time. It's not just a question of building enough, right? If we built a lot of housing and everybody just stayed where they were, one generation after another after another, our society would continue to be profoundly dysfunctional, because our political systems, our culture was really engineered for a society that allowed people the agency and the freedom to choose the communities to which they wanted to belong, and a society of permanent stasis is one where we deny people that sense of agency and we deny them that choice. And so, while I do think that the building part of this is where the three books converge and it's really, really important, I did find myself trying to say something in addition to that, which is that it's not enough to just solve the question of how to build. That's a means to an end. What I really found myself convinced of was that I wanted to live in a society where people had the freedom to choose who they wanted to be and that we were at real risk of losing that here.

Shane Phillips 00:50:20
And I do feel like the book really does stand apart in that way. The emphasis on mobility — it really hit home for me, definitely, and was kind of a framing on the issue that I was certainly familiar with. Mobility comes up in our work pretty frequently. But I think treating it as something to be prized and celebrated and to hold on to was particularly welcome now, when I would say for the past 15 years or so much of the emphasis on mobility has been on the downsides, on gentrification and displacement, and it is important to talk about and think about those things as well. But I do think we had kind of lost sight of the upside to mobility. And I think actually mobility is much more a positive thing than a negative thing in the vast majority of cases.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:51:10
I'm glad that's what you took away from it. I think that's a profoundly important point. You know, we in general society have tended toward — particularly on the progressive left, have tended toward — harm avoidance as our guiding principle and have spent a lot less time thinking about positive upsides. And there certainly can be harms to mobility and we should be cognizant of them and mitigate them. But the harms of immobility are so much more profound and hit those in vulnerable communities so much harder that to engineer a society away from mobility in the name of protecting vulnerable groups is sort of profoundly perverse.

Shane Phillips 00:51:48
And I mean, another through line of these books and a lot of other work and scholarship, I think, is just how the harms of the status quo, of stasis, are much easier to overlook than the harms of change.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:52:03
I think that's right.

Shane Phillips 00:52:04
So I had a follow up on this, actually. Last episode with Giselle, we briefly mentioned the recent Ezra Klein show episode with Ezra and Derek Thompson and Mark Dunkelman, where they reflected on the response to their books, including things that they felt like they missed or that they undersold the importance of. So what fits into those categories for you with Stuck? What did you feel like you missed or didn't focus on as much as you maybe should have?

Yoni Appelbaum 00:52:30
I wish I'd spent much more time on the cultural impacts of mobility. It's something that, as I've gone around the country talking about the book over the last year, keeps coming up, and there was, in particular, a study that I only stumbled across after the galleys were out that has really shaped my thinking on that aspect of mobility. Because one of the questions I get from folks is: how do you know that the people who move aren't just more entrepreneurial, weren't bound to succeed anyway? So I'll say, in any decade in the American past, if you match the people who moved against the people who stayed where they were, the movers did better economically and their kids did even better. Right, that's true, but maybe that's just a selection effect. So they went and they looked at the folks who had moved and the folks who hadn't moved, and what they found was that the folks who had moved, yeah, they did better economically, but that was just like the tip of the iceberg. They grew more optimistic, more future-oriented in their statements, more involved in their communities, more likely to see their successes bound up with those around them, and the success of those around them is boosting them in turn. Whereas the people who had wanted to move and couldn't — which was the interesting thing about the study — that they had only been talking to people who had the intention of moving, but the people who tried to move and couldn't make it work, they ended up embittered and alienated and withdrew from their communities, and they grew more hostile to people coming into their communities, whether migrants or immigrants, because they had started to see the world as a zero-sum game in which others' gains came at their own expense. And they may not have been wrong about that. In a community in decline, that can be literally true, and so if you look at the country, I wrote in the book as sort of a strong economic case for mobility, but I think it's really much more profound than that. It's something I didn't, I think, pay enough attention to in the narrative is the way in which being a mobile society made Americans more open, more accepting, more pluralistic and tolerant. Like, these were outgrowths of a specific pattern of behavior that changed people's views at a psychological level, and that I really think I didn't explore nearly profoundly enough.

Shane Phillips 00:54:31
There was one kind of corollary to that, I think, in an earlier chapter, where you talked about how people just having the option to move away from a community if they were unhappy could actually make them feel better about the choice to stay. So even if they ended up staying in place, the fact that they knew they had made that choice, rather than having it made for them, could actually make them more comfortable with it, despite the costs and whatever downsides might come with it, willing to accept that decision. So I feel like that is related to what you're talking about here, just maybe a specific instance of it.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:55:05
And I'll give you a specific example of that which I think many Americans will know from their own lives. This country, throughout its history, has been more actively religious than most of the old world, which has large, established churches. Right? It was the fact that in America, once people could move and join the communities they wanted, they tended to start switching religions. This is the only country on earth where, for 200 years, a majority of adults no longer belong to the faith or confession to which they were born. Like, that's how long we've been switching religions, switching denominations. Americans can make that choice, but it didn't lead to the enervation of American religious life. The agency that it conferred meant, you know, if you adopted a new faith, you had done that as an act of choice. But, much more profoundly, even the people who stayed with the faith of their fathers, who committed to the church into which they were born, did so, as you know, an individual exercising agency. They needed to have some account to themselves of what it was they found meaningful about this community. They needed to make the active decision to spend their time engaging with that community and being part of that community of faith. And so, you know, the American church remains much more vibrant even to this day than most European religions. It was specifically the ability to stay in the faith that you're born, but to have that be an act of choice, that leads to the cycles of American religious revival and the levels of activity. And that same pattern holds true almost no matter what you want to look at, whether it's the town in which you were born, the church in which you were born, the fraternal order that your grandfather belonged to and you belong to, whatever that communal affiliation is. The fact that you have to decide actively rather than passively inheriting your identity means that Americans are able to forge a kind of community that is not only sort of more open and inclusive, but also more active and vibrant, and you don't have to switch to do it. Even staying where you are in a culture of mobility allows you to be a much more active participant.

Shane Phillips 00:57:06
This is actually reminding me. I was just in Janesville, Wisconsin, giving a talk a few weeks ago, and several of the people I met there were people who had grown up there, moved away for some amount of time and then come back to kind of work on revitalizing the city building there and were, you know, some of the biggest champions for the city. And it does strike me that they might not have had that same attitude if they had never had the opportunity to leave and make the choice to come back.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:57:37
I think that's exactly right. I love that story. I'll say one other thing. People often look at me crazy when I start talking about the benefits of mobility, particularly this notion that it leads to really vibrant communities to which people actively commit. And then I'll ask: when was the time in your life that you felt like you were most part of a community? So let me ask you guys that. What was the life stage where you really felt surrounded and engaged by other people?

Shane Phillips 00:58:01
I mean the most recent one that comes to mind is — this fits very much with what you're saying, I think — was when I moved to Los Angeles for grad school and had a whole community of classmates that I was close friends with during that time.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:58:13
I'd probably be moving to Sacramento after college for me, because just so many people I went to undergrad with were there as well. It's a really dense social network.

Yoni Appelbaum 00:58:21
I usually get either one or both of those answers, right? Like, a college campus is a place where in your freshman year, particularly in a four-year residential school, pretty much everybody else there has just arrived. Right? Like, you're all starting over, you're all trying to forge the social connections. The life is particularly intense. People form lifelong relationships in a very short span of time. They find communities. It's often a place of self-definition where they decide like: oh, you know, my parents always expect me to do X, but I'm actually — actually I do Y, I'll try this out because one of my friends is going there. And then you find a new hobby or a new passion, and the same thing where they're just starting out in adult life and moving to a city for the first time. And so I think many people have actually had an experience of mobility — whether or not they think of it that way — where they arrived in a situation which had sort of like 19th century levels of mobility, where everybody was sort of new, where most folks have moved there from someplace else, and that's often sort of a profoundly satisfying experience and something that they grow nostalgic for as they grow older and try to hang on to. And then later in life, they often wonder why they don't have the same kind of intense friendships they had when they were young, without quite drawing the line between those two things.

Stan Oklobdzija 00:59:36
How much of that do you think is just the built environment of a college campus? I mean, yeah, there's a big selection effect of you're around a bunch of people that are pretty similar to you, but I mean, you're in these, you know, sort of dense housing arrangements. It's not, I mean it's zero car centric. Most college campuses ban cars entirely. And how much is just, you know, this sort of mobility aspect of it?

Yoni Appelbaum 00:59:58
You know, I think they've got to both play a role, right? College campuses still have legalized many of the types of 19th and early 20th century housing arrangements that almost every place in America has banned. The college dorm is an SRO. It's a place where you know there are often shared bathrooms or you know single units coming off a long hall. You can't do that anymore. You can't necessarily, you know, live three to a room the way you might in a college dorm, right? The kind of enforced closeness that those residential arrangements have can lead to much tighter social relationships, and people often want that. There's a whole sort of cottage industry now trying to get around zoning rules by building various kinds of co-living spaces for young professionals, but they're typically marketed as pretty high-end spaces, and that same opportunity is often not available to Americans who are lower down the income spectrum, whether in college or elsewhere. So yeah, the built environment plays a role. I think by far the larger role is the simple experience of relocating and needing to start over and build those relationships, because even colleges that house most of their students in off-campus housing, in apartments, in frat houses, in even those places with very different kinds of housing modalities, will still achieve very, very high levels of organizational activity and lifelong friendship. So yeah, the built environment plays a role, but I think the dominant role is still the actual act of mobility.

Shane Phillips 01:01:22
And I think it's not just that you have this large population of people who are new and looking for connection with people, but just that you don't have a large population of people who are already established and not looking. When I went back to — I dropped out of high school and didn't go back to college until several years later, and when I transferred to the University of Washington to finish my bachelor's degree, I was not that much older than the other students, but I was, you know, four years older maybe, and I already had a close group of friends lived a ways away, and so I just like made no effort really to make new friends while there for the most part. And so I think that, you know, two sides of the same coin, definitely. So let's go to California here for a little bit. This is something I had never heard about before your book, but in 1971, the Ralph Nader Group produced a 1,200-page report titled Politics of Land: Ralph Nader's Study Group Report on Land Use in California. This is something I intend to get my hands on, despite the 1,200 pages, because it does sound like a sort of skeleton key for understanding the origins of NIMBYism in the state. But I bring this up because you mentioned tax policy. We're not going to talk about this whole saga of this report, but you mentioned tax policy as one of the strategies that they identified for stopping development and specifically there were two policies or kind of approaches mentioned. One was to share government revenue across the state so that there was not as much incentive to build housing within your own borders, and then the second was to change taxes to make development unprofitable for cities, just in general, regardless of how revenues are shared between jurisdictions. The latter sounds a bit like Prop 13, which passed seven years after this report came out and made me wonder if this report had any role in inspiring the law. So definitely tell us if you know of some secret connection between Howard Jarvis and Ralph Nader, but more generally, you sort of teased these ideas about using tax policy to discourage development, and I'm very interested in this. You didn't really delve into it any further in the book, but I'm wondering if there was any more details that you came across that you're able to share here.

Yoni Appelbaum 01:03:41
That's a great question, and let me just start by setting the scene here, which is that there is this emerging consensus, particularly within the environmental movement in California, that the problem is people and the solution is to have fewer of them. And the proposals that are like literally floated in the state assembly are sort of amazing to read today. There's one proposal to like just not produce any more electricity in the state as sort of a hard cap on population and industry. Or maybe what you can do is have a law which prohibits replacing any existing structure with anything larger, because if there's no room to put the people, they'll stop coming and people will stop having kids. That's not a wingnut proposal, that's from the Sierra Club, that's where the consensus was. And so California policymakers are looking around for some sort of lever that they can pull to freeze the population where it is. And this is where tax policy comes in, because part of the Naderite critique, Ralph Nader and his acolytes fervently believe in those years that all bad public policy decisions come from corrupt moneyed interests pursuing profit. That is their diagnosis of what's gone wrong in America. And so if the problem is that people are moving into California and that there's real estate development in the state, then obviously what underlies it is that the developers are making money. And if local public officials keep on approving, if they say, like, it's okay for people to join my community, it is okay for people's kids to move back in to the community where they were raised and live near their grandparents, like, if they keep making these terrible decisions like that, right, then what you need to do is to clean up the nexus of corruption between the developers and the public officials, and what they hone in on is like: oh, now I get it. The public officials are harvesting increased tax revenue from this real estate development, and so this is the fundamental diagnosis of the report.

Shane Phillips 01:05:35
As though the public officials are putting the money in the pockets themselves.

Yoni Appelbaum 01:05:39
And of course, to some extent they are right. They're taking salaries and they're taking campaign donations from developers. It's — there is a thread of truth that runs through this, right? There is a growth machine in many cities where it is in the interest of public officials to continue to promote economic growth and development and population growth. They will do better and the city will do better. The innovation of the 1970s was to look at that, and instead of being like, well, thank God, there's an alignment of interests, to look at that and think, oh goodness, that's what's going on with the world. We need to stop. And so I do think that the tax revolt of the 80s does have its genesis in some sense in this perspective of the 70s that it is bad for cities to want to grow their revenues, that this is a mechanism of corruption, because that was a perspective that conservatives had for a long time, and the countervailing force was that those on the left had said: no, it is actually good for cities to grow their revenues and provide better public services and welcome new inhabitants. Like, there was always sort of this push and pull there. Once the left swings against development, once it comes out against the provision of municipal services through enhanced revenues. Then you're kind of screwed, right? Because there's lots of conservative folks in the community who say, well, you know, the smallest government is the best government. Now there's lots of progressive folks in the community who say, well, a smaller government would be a better government, and what you get is sort of a broad-based political movement that crosses the aisle and garners large electoral majorities to promote policies that will discourage further growth.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:07:15
You mentioned growth machine just there, and I was wondering, like, what do you think causes this horseshoe theory between right and left, right? So I mean, you know, growth machine comes out of that classic work by John Logan and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place, which is still extremely influential amongst academics who study housing, right? Do you think it comes from that Naderite sort of turn in the 1970s? Or is this something that was sort of percolating maybe in academic circles before then?

Yoni Appelbaum 01:07:46
You know, I think that it traces back even further. You know it's something that the Naderites are building on, but a lot of this traces to — I mean, progressivism in its original form in the early 20th century is two things at the same time. We remember it today often as a reform-oriented movement. That right progress is right there in the name. It was also a reactionary backlash by native-born Americans against high rates of immigration, immigration and cultural change that was eroding their authority over a culture that they felt belonged to them. Like, progressivism from its inception is both of those things at the same time, and the belief that cities were cesspools of corruption in which people who weren't really qualified to be making democratic political choices were easily swayed or corrupted by money and interests, in a sort of bad bargain between nefarious business interests and urban machine bosses. That is right there at the heart of the progressive reform agenda from the beginning. And progressivism pushes in a variety of ways to strip immigrant voters of power. This is where you get many California institutions, like the referendum and the recall, which were intended to be checks against the power of politicians who came out of corrupt machines. It is also where you get innovations like the adoption of the Australian ballot, which meant that people would vote in secret, which was a big innovation in American electoral law as a way to break communal solidarity. These were two halves of the same coin, and many of those may be good reforms, but I don't think you can disentangle the two. There was a real sense that cities were places of immorality and of corruption and that good, honest, native-born Americans needed to reassert political control over their country. That basic perspective turns out to be enormously self-defeating. If you're looking at the cities of the late 19th and early 20th century and thinking to yourself: God, this is what's wrong with America. You haven't really understood America. Those cities will be the sources of economic growth, of the enormous influence that America is able to project around the world. Those cities are raising the people who, in the next generations, will have the same fear about the new arrivals. Right, so there's a cyclical aspect to this. But yeah, when I look at the fear and suspicion of growth in America, it does date back to that era, and it's deeply rooted in an anti-urban, anti-immigrant set of politics that still courses through much of the contemporary progressive movement in ways that are simply less visible.

Shane Phillips 01:10:24
For the last chapter rather than do a summary. I wanted to just have you, Yoni, talk about these three principles that you propose for solving this housing crisis, which is also a mobility crisis. The title of chapter 10 is Building a Way Out, and you have these three principles of tolerance, consistency and abundance, and I would say you also talk about — on page 252, I think it is — humility, which might fit in there as a fourth principle. We can go through these one at a time, but I'd love to have you just talk about each of those and how you see those being integral to solving the problems that we're facing and that you're discussing in this book.

Yoni Appelbaum 01:11:07
I thought a lot about what to put in the last chapter, and there's lots of specific prescriptive proposals that I could have offered there. But more than any specific proposal which is going to respond to the circumstances of a particular geography or a set of emergent policy problems that will change in five years or in 10, I wanted to go for bigger principles that are good metrics by which to measure any specific proposal, and that's what I tried to do here. So the first one of these was tolerance, and this is to say we've wound up with an approach to land use law which is basically like things should only be built if I like them. I think that's a really bad principle of how to regulate the built environment. I know that at different stages of my life I've needed different kinds of housing. Like, I grew up in a single family home, I was fortunate enough to do that, but I was not born in one. I was born in an apartment, which is what my parents could afford at the time, and when I first graduated college, I lived in the only studio that I could afford to rent on a municipal worker salary in New York. That was on the subway that would get me to my job. It was 150 square feet, which is not large. But it was enough, right? Like, it put a roof over my head and I had, like, a mini fridge and a two burner stove and could, you know, cook a meal on Monday that I could take for lunch all week and stretch the budget a little further. Like, it did the trick for me.

Shane Phillips 01:12:27
And you could have chosen to live, you know, 10 miles down a rail line or further out in a larger place, and something about that mix of characteristics, amenities. Whatever you decided, that was the best choice for you.

Yoni Appelbaum 01:12:42
That's right. And it was a good choice. They let me take a job that didn't pay very much before I could do a lot of good. And you know, let me live in the city, and you know I had constraints. I had to live in the city as it happened to have the job, and so I didn't have great options. But that 150 square foot studio was great for that year. If I tried to raise my kids in that studio that would be bad, you know. And similarly, I'm in a single family home now. It's great. It also has a lot of stairs. I don't know that this will be the last place I'll live. My mobility, my physical mobility, will decline with age, and there may be, there's likely to be, a time when I can't shovel the walk and I can't climb the stairs, right? Like, at different life stages, we all need different kinds of housing. People at different income points need different kinds of housing, and being able to tolerate a much wider variety of housing types, I think, is really, really key. So that's the first principle.

Shane Phillips 01:13:34
And before we move on, just not just housing types, but even just basic aesthetics, right.

Yoni Appelbaum 01:13:38
You know, I am for ugly housing. I'm for ugly housing because I am not, like, I should not be able to decide what is pretty and what is ugly. You know, there's really good work being done now which shows that a lot of opposition to housing comes from the fact that a lot of housing developments are actually pretty ugly and they're not contextual. Chris Elmendorf and some of his colleagues have done good polling on this, that's true. But one reason for the ugliness is lots and lots of efforts to regulate design that squeezes building forms into particular molds that meet the design guidelines and simultaneously meet the cost and affordability guidelines, and the project that pencils at tends to be ugly. If we back off of that and we say people generally want to buy and rent housing that is attractive, if we legalize building lots of housing types and back off the design guidelines to some extent, I think we'll end up with much more attractive housing on the whole. And I think that because in the times and places where we haven't tried to regulate that, the actual housing that gets produced has been much more attractive than in the times and places where we've tried to very tightly regulate aesthetics, and so this gets to the humility point that we'll be sort of running through all three of these. When we get overly prescriptive, we usually don't like the results, and then the solution to that is to add another, more detailed prescription, which usually also produces results that we don't like, and you wake up 20 years later and it's not only impossible to build, but when you do build, nobody's happy with the results, and that's just a trap. So backing off some of this, I think, will really help. The second principle is consistency, and again, this is something which this podcast has talked about a lot, but one of the things that makes it really hard to build in America is that the rules are different almost everywhere. They're different within a single city. You can have, you know, 30 zoning designations and 150 overlay districts and mix and match ad infinitum. This causes like multiple problems at the same time. One problem it causes is enormous inequities and inequalities. Affluent suburbs are incredibly skillful at rigging their own zoning codes to disallow the things they don't want. If you simply had, say, 10 zoning designations that every community in your state could use and they could apply them wherever they wanted, but they're limited to those 10, you'd end up with something that was much more equitable than the present system, which allows each jurisdiction to sort of rig it for themselves, and I know that because that's what they do in Japan and it's worked really well there. Their most restrictive zoning designation interestingly still allows for a multifamily home with street-level retail. You can't go tighter than that and that actually has benefits. Right? It says, hey, you know, it's also easier to sell politically, it's like everybody's playing by the same rulebook rather than I'm taking away your right to do what you want. We're going to have a single, consistent set of rules. But the other benefit that comes out of this is actually in the process of development. If you can know when you buy a lot, that there is a specific kind of building that just meets all the rules and could just go forward without tight review, without five rounds of changes in order to get the variance you need, that is just a much cheaper proposition at every level. It's cheaper because it builds much faster and you have to carry the costs for a more limited amount of time. It's cheaper because it's less risky, so banks will loan to you at a lower rate. It's cheaper because you can devise a solution one place and apply it someplace else. One of the things I found when I was writing this book and talking to developers across the country is that many developers their actual substantive comparative advantage and market expertise is not in plumbing or electric wiring or facade design. It's in navigating the local zoning and building regulation bureaucracy. Like, that is what they do. They are very, very good at getting a plan through. There are jurisdictions like New York City where there's a whole occupation called expediters. 

Shane Phillips 01:17:29
We have those in LA too.

Yoni Appelbaum 01:17:30
This is a whole, right, a whole intermediary level. And like what do they do? You pay these people to go to the government and get the government to do its job in terms of approving the designs that you have filed. That is literally insane. We've all grown sort of acclimated to it so it's a little hard to see how insane that is. You could just have rules and then tell everybody that if you follow the rules, you can build. And when you standardize the rules over a really wide geography and say the following things will be legal, it allows people to compete on the quality of the construction or the innovation of the design or the aesthetics of the development, instead of competing on, I can get this through the building permit process three months faster, so you don't have a prayer, right? You change the axis of competition and when people come up with good design solutions, they're scalable. I live in a house that's a Sears house. That came out of a mail-order catalog and Sears could do that at the time. It could offer houses and you could order them from anywhere in America and they'd ship it to you like a giant Lego kit and a couple of boxcars. Every piece you needed plus a manual to assemble the damn thing. You couldn't do that today. I know this because there are manufactured housing companies that are trying and what they find is they have to customize most of their builds for each jurisdiction to which they're shipping them, because the rules are just slightly different everywhere they go, and so you don't get housing innovation. The solutions that people devise aren't scalable. So consistency in the rules, predictability in the rules, being able to build as of right and being able to get the thing through on a predictable timeline would just make an enormous difference. And that's without actually changing any of the rules. Right? Like, even if you could just establish that and make it clear, like, okay, this is what we said you could build all along, but now we're going to change the process so you can just go ahead and build it. That alone would make an enormous difference.

Shane Phillips 01:19:13
For me, there's two aspects of this. There's the standardization, or consistency, of the rules themselves, and then there's the consistency of application of the rules, where two developers proposing the same project in different locations, that has the same zoning and everything, have the same outcome, which is far from guaranteed right now, based on who shows up to oppose it, who the council member is representing the district. All those things add a lot of uncertainty. That just is unfair. It's inconsistent.

Yoni Appelbaum 01:19:43
And we don't tolerate it in other aspects of our political legal lives, like where we see, you know, really unequal sentencing depending on what the defendant can offer back to the court. We would look at that and say that's a gross travesty. But somehow in zoning it's become normalized, and so that's the second principle, is getting to that kind of fairness and consistency. And the last — and this is a word that has already come up — is abundance and I mean it here in a very specific way. You know, I think housing is one of those areas where we routinely ask people not to believe their own lying eyes. We'll say to somebody like the problem with the prices in your neighborhood is that there is not enough housing. And then somebody will put up an 80 unit condo building and the next year the housing prices are higher. And we say to them: you know, like, building that housing will lower or decrease the rate of increase in your rent. And instead they have the opposite experience. Right? The new housing goes up, and then they're still paying more. And in fact they'll look at that and say that new housing development is what is escalating my rent, because there's luxury housing that went in down the street and now I'm paying even more than I did. And that is because we keep trying to use a teaspoon of cure for a bathtub of need. You know, unless we build a lot of housing, really a lot of housing, the solution doesn't work, and people will actually turn on housing production and say: well, we tried that and it failed. In those communities where there have been genuine building booms — and Austin, Texas, is a good example of this — so much so that the supply temporarily saturates the market and prices come down. People are like, oh wow, that worked.

Shane Phillips 01:21:17
And then it's framed as a bad thing, oftentimes as well.

Yoni Appelbaum 01:21:20
My gosh, we overbuilt, yeah.

Shane Phillips 01:21:20
Like: oh, the markets crashed. You know? Like what did you think affordability meant?

Yoni Appelbaum 01:21:25
Exactly, but it doesn't have to result in a housing crash, although housing is cyclical and there will be housing crashes, but we really need a lot of it. And I think one of the things that I say in this book that has gotten me a little bit of blowback is: I don't think America actually exactly has an affordable housing crisis. There is a lot of housing that is very affordable in places where people do not want to live. What we have is a mobility crisis, and what that means is that the housing is not where people want to raise their families, it's not where they want to find jobs, it's not where they want to pursue opportunity. I think most of the estimates we have of how much housing America needs are sort of gross underestimates. If we really started building again the way we did for the first 200 years of this country, if we reverted back to that pre-1970s pace of development, what we'd find is that there is a pent-up demand for millions and millions of new housing units, even for people who are presently living in perfectly adequate housing. That gets back to that Tocquevillian critique of Americans, right. It's not simply a question of: can we put a decent roof over everyone's head. The question is: can we give people a chance to imagine a better life for their children than they were able to enjoy themselves? And that's going to take a genuine abundance of housing.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:22:39
You know, one of the things that makes America really unique compared to other economically advanced nations is just how much power local governments have in our country. Do you think, you know, like in researching this book and sort of talking to people around the issue, that maybe this was kind of a bad thing? You know? I mean, we talk about land use all the time, but you know there's equally compelling cases where governments, local governments, have mishandled, for example, policing to a commensurate degree. So would it just be better if we decided these things at larger levels, just given that these issues transcend boundaries, rather than just letting every sort of ad hoc tiny jurisdiction come up with their own playbook?

Yoni Appelbaum 01:23:20
You know it's a great question, and I guess what I'd say is this: in general, I am a fan of allowing decisions to be made at the most local level where they can be made. The thing about housing is that level is probably roughly the state level, because housing is such a profound determinant of everything else that matters in public policy that if you delegate it down to local jurisdictions, it is almost invariably going to be the case that residents of those local jurisdictions will try to maximize their own advantage at the expense of those who have less. And I think that because that's what happened in colonial America, right? Like, where we had sort of sovereign towns and they would warn out people who wanted to move in. It wasn't that they were more or less virtuous than their grandchildren who followed a different path. What happens is that in Ohio in the early 1800s, and then subsequently in many other states, the state legislatures intervene and they say, if we're going to be a state that is growing, if we're going to be able to attract residents, if we can make this into a viable proposition — right, like, if Ohio can turn from a territory into a state — we're going to have to let people come, and that means taking away the power of local communities to exclude as they happen. That was a profound turn in the American story, and if there's one thing that people take away from the book, I hope it's that this was the invention of a profound right that has really undergirded most of the other freedoms that we enjoy, and then over the last 50 years, we've rolled back that right. We've delegated back down, like, literally delegated. Every zoning statute in America comes out of a zoning enabling statute passed at the state level that pushes this power down to local municipalities. It is a state level legal question that states have voluntarily ceded to local jurisdictions. It's not as if this came down graven on tablets from Sinai or even in the US Constitution. It was never contemplated that local municipalities would have the kind of authority they presently exercise over land use law, and so reclaiming some of those state powers to have fair and consistent rules across the state is probably a really good move, and there may be other categories of law for which that's the case too. I'm not a universal fan of local government and I'm not a universal opponent of local government. I think it works really really well for some purposes. It can be a comparative strength in America, but I do think that there are some cases where we've taken things that are properly matters of state or national interest and delegated them down too low, and the result is invariably really really thick political dysfunction.

Shane Phillips 01:25:50
In both of the previous episodes, our guests expressed a little discomfort with the book's emphasis on mobility as a pathway to economic and social mobility, so I want to make sure we talk about that while we have you here. A.G. Bonta and Giselle pointed out how staying in place is often what gives a person or a family the best shot at success, and they felt like that was a bit underplayed in the book. You do address this a little in chapter 10, pointing out in one section that moving also comes with costs and that moving is not helpful if you're just bouncing from one impoverished area to another or getting displaced from a higher opportunity place to a lower opportunity one. In the last few pages you have this passage, which I want to read in full. You say, quote: the goal of policymakers shouldn't be to move Americans toward the coastal megalopolises, even if that's where opportunity is most concentrated today. It shouldn't be to move people into single family homes or into townhouses or into apartment towers. It shouldn't be to move people anywhere at all. Instead, they should aim to return to Americans their own agency, allowing them to pursue opportunity wherever they might find it and to choose the housing that works best for them. So I think we see you kind of embracing that critique here at the end, but I just wanted to give you the opportunity to respond, since I think you listened to the earlier episodes and heard that critique for yourself. Tell us what you thought about that and kind of how you think about this distinction between choice and agency versus mobility or stasis as well.

Yoni Appelbaum 01:27:29
The last time I went to see my doctor, she told me I needed to get more exercise, and I told her that I was more comfortable on the couch. Which is true. I don't particularly like physical exercise. I like playing games. I'll go out and shoot hoops, but I'm not a big jogger, not a big gym rat. And yet I know that empirically it is the case that exercise is good for me, that the things that I do want in my life are likely to be a product of exercise, despite the fact that when I run it hurts. And I really want people to think hard about this, because this is a tough message of the book. What it says is most of the things that we really value about this country have come out of the willingness of people to relocate in pursuit of them, and that's as true of the people who stay as it is of the people who go. A society that is mobile on the whole yields benefits both for the people who remain and for the people who move. It's a tough message because this is a country, specifically because of its incredibly high rates of mobility, that has been a pioneer of nostalgia. This is the country that invents homecoming. It invents it actually in Vermont, which by like 1900, Vermont has lost as much of its population as potato famine Ireland has, and it's so desperate to get people to come back that it literally invents the concept of homecoming. But you can't have it in countries with high levels of stasis, because what does it mean to have like a weekend where everybody comes back to the high school? They're all still there, they never left, right? Like, the prototypical European novels about the stifling nature of village life and all of the harsh judgmentalism that goes with that, the prototypical America novel is about, you know, you're paying for that idyllic Ohio town you grew up in, right? Like, we indulge in the nostalgia precisely because people always long for what they don't have, and what we always had in this country was the ability to exercise agency in our own lives, to choose our communities, to embrace economic dynamism, and then we could grow nostalgic for the things that we had traded off in order to get there, because the trade is real, and so I don't want to sort of soft pedal this. It is actually important for Americans to have not just the ability to relocate in pursuit of opportunity, but that some large number of them do so. The reason that the China shock was so much more devastating than previous waves of economic dislocation? Because American history — you know, I used to teach American business history, like, the entire history of our country is one economic dislocation after another. Right? Like, I used to teach transcripts of congressional hearings of mill workers in Fall River who were talking about, you know, the fact that all the mills had closed. What were they supposed to do? And the answer was not, you know, everybody, stay in Fall River. In fact, Fall River, I think, is not even back to its peak population. The answer turned out to be for those people to have the chance to make decisions in their own lives, and many of them chose to move to places that were growing economically, away from an industry that was dying. The woolen mills never came back, and if they'd stayed in Fall River waiting for them to come back, they would still be there. My prescription is like that of my doctor, right? I'm not telling Americans what I think they want to hear. I respect your guests, who are in politics for a profession and very, very skilled at telling people what they want to hear. I am instead acting as a diagnostician and saying this may not be what you want to hear, but I think it is what you need to hear. Because the things that you tell pollsters at least you value about this country were outgrowths of an astonishing rate of mobility, and you probably can't have those things without some willingness for people to move. When the China shock hits, Americans don't move because they can't, and those communities that are devastated with job loss are still devastated today. That is what changes, not the industrialization — that's not new — but the inability for people to relocate away from the industrializing areas toward places that are producing new jobs. That's really new. It is unprecedented in American history that people are moving away from the most prosperous communities. That is just profoundly weird and dysfunctional. It has always been the case that people moved toward prospering communities because that's where the economic opportunities lay. Now they're moving to where the housing is cheap, or they're not moving at all. They're staying where they are because they can't afford to go anyplace else, and so I guess that's my best response — and it's not something that, I know, believe me, because I've said this to audiences around the country, it's often not something that people want to hear. But then I'll ask a question. I will ask how many of the people sitting in this room tonight are still living in the home or apartment in which their parents were living the day they were born. I've only ever had one hand go up, and that person later told me that actually moved in when they were about a year and a half old.

Shane Phillips 01:32:04
Liar.

Yoni Appelbaum 01:32:06
Well, I mean, like, I get it, right? Like, we all think of ourselves as deeply rooted in our communities. But the fact is that there are many parts of the world where you could ask that question and most hands in the room would go up. And America is a society that built itself on voluntary communities, on the ability of people to make these choices for themselves. And we could become a society which is deeply tribal, where any new arrival is inherently an outsider to be distrusted and treated with suspicion. We could turn ourselves into a society where the most we can hope to aspire to do is to redistribute what we have rather than to grow economically so that everyone has more. Like, we could make those choices, and in some ways, by default, we are making those choices. I'm just struck that, you know, just like what my doctor says, you know your choice is, like, you can exercise or you can get a heart attack. You know, I fundamentally don't want the heart attack, and so I jog. Similarly, what I'm saying to Americans is: we can re-engineer our society to enable for higher levels of residential mobility, or we can lose those things we really cherish. And I wish that weren't the choice, having written the book, I profoundly believe that, but it is.

Stan Oklobdzija 01:33:12
Do you think there's a new urgency these days? And your book really just hammers on the economic aspect, that sort of Raj Chetty moving to opportunity sort of line of thinking. But just given how many other outcomes are curtailed based on where you live, right, your franchise, your reproductive rights, maybe even your very life, depending on who you are, is there a new urgency for states where civil liberties, personal liberties, are more available to sort of avail themselves to newcomers these days?

Yoni Appelbaum 01:33:43
You know, I was talking about this book once and somebody said: you know, this book resonated with me because I was — she said I was living with my wife and our kid in a community that was really accepting of us until I could no longer afford the housing, and then I relocated to a southern state where our rights were comparatively curtailed and where I faced more day-to-day harassment with my wife, and I felt as if that was the choice that I had to make. I think that many Americans want to live in progressive cities. I know this because America's cities, almost without exception, have elected Democratic mayors and, almost without exception, the housing prices there are really high. Right? That is the market telling us that the demand far exceeds the supply. And there are many things that progressive governance offers that people seem to really value: robust social services, a high level of tolerance of diversity, the ability to stretch a safety net wide enough that people can take risks, including economic risks, and that is why many of America's most prosperous industries are located in blue jurisdictions as well. And yet all of those states are bleeding population, almost without exception, either in relative or absolute terms, and the states that are really growing and capturing electoral votes and congressional seats are not states that offer for those things. That, again, is really really weird. So, you know, there are many reasons, I think, Americans keep moving. I think it's good for them economically. I think, in a moment where we're really worried about social isolation, about political polarization, about the death of our communities, it's really really important to revivify the things that have always made America distinctive. And if you happen to be a Democrat, if you are a progressive, the reason you keep losing elections is because you won't let the people who want to move in, to be your neighbors, move in next year. Like, you are every day shooting yourself in the foot politically. You have elected Donald Trump to the White House twice by the pursuit of these policies, and you have somehow turned democratic congressional dominance into a House and a Senate that are controlled by Republicans. That is what 50 years of progressive governance of America's most prosperous areas has yielded. It is not a winning strategy for progressives, and if that happens to concern them, they may want to consider switching their playbook.

Shane Phillips 01:36:03
So I wanted to get to just a few of our listener questions before we go. One comes from Paul, who's sort of asking about the flip side of mobility — and not the lack of mobility, actually, but more the downsides of it, I guess — and he raises Flint as his example. And the point he's basically making here is: you know, if people weren't so free to move, Flint wouldn't have lost so much population, wouldn't have become a ghost town, and so maybe things would be better there if more people had stayed. And so you know if you can respond to that. And also a related idea: if places like Los Angeles and New York and other high demand, high cost cities that are not building enough housing suddenly passed all of the YIMBY policies and built thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of homes, that would probably depopulate other parts of the country, and you know what are they to do. I'm sure you've kind of heard these concerns before. What's your response to them?

Yoni Appelbaum 01:37:08
You know Flint is there in the first place because in a very short period of time a very large number of people moved there, mostly from the American South, depopulating the communities that they had left behind, and I would not have begrudged them the right to do that. They found much greater political liberties in Flint, particularly the black migrants, but also the white migrants, who were able to unionize and to secure better and more secure jobs for themselves and a better future for their families. So everybody is in Flint in the first place because they flock in there during the early years of the auto industry. Nobody's, like, almost nobody you'll meet in Flint can go back, you know, more than three generations and often less, so you know that's where it came from. I spent a while walking around census tracts that Raj Chetty had identified as being in the first percentile for American opportunity. These were the places in America where somebody as an adult, if they grew up there, is likely to be doing worst, and talking to the people who live there about why they were there. Right? Like, why would you raise your kid in a place where the odds are that they are going to do worse than you did when they grow up? And I got all kinds of answers, most of which, you know, people cited lots of positives. There are always good reasons to stay where you are. They cited the presence of family and their attachment to their church community, the sports programs at the local rec center. Like, they had a million explanations for things that they loved about Flint. And that's great, because I think Flint has a lot of strengths. And almost invariably they told me at some point in the conversation about an attempt that they had made at one point to move someplace else until they could no longer afford the housing and wound up back in Flint. I don't know, to your listener's question, how I look one of those people in the eye and say, although you would give almost anything to be able to take your kids someplace else and raise them in a place they would have more opportunity, I would like you — I'm going to incentivize you — to stay right here in this census tract which empirically has the least opportunity in America, because it makes me sad when cities empty out. That's a hard conversation to have. And I think if we switch the lens here from some abstract theorizing about communities and the distribution of population on a map and take it down to the individual level and think about what it means to say: look, you know, I'll give you a tax incentive, but only if you stay here. You are trying to bribe somebody into staying someplace where their kids are going to be screwed. That is not, I think, a wise public policy for us to be pursuing.

Shane Phillips 01:39:36
And I do think that a pushback to that response might be, well, I'm not talking about making the poor people who are left behind stay. I'm talking about making the, or encouraging the people who had options and maybe have higher, better opportunities, who can ensure that this community stays a little more economically strong. And I get that. I think your same response still applies where that's a very hard argument to make to someone and it might be very costly to get them to stay. But the other part of that for me is just that if Flint used to have 150,000 people and now it only has 30,000 jobs and 80,000 residents, if you forced all 150,000 people to stay but you've still only got 30,000 jobs or maybe it goes up to 40,000, it's not clear to me that the people who were left behind originally are going to be better off with a whole bunch more people living there. But the economy is what it is. I think the idea might be that by keeping those people the economy will be stronger and there are more jobs, but I don't think the evidence for that is all that strong.

Yoni Appelbaum 01:40:41
You know, I met people who had moved back to Flint after having amazingly successful careers elsewhere because they love the community and they're hoping to revive it, and I hope that works. Flint has great bones. It has amazing local communities. I met wonderful people in my time there and I hope that Flint will thrive again as it once did. But we have at the governmental level a really lousy track record of moving population through incentives to places that we are targeting and having that work out well and a really good track record of enabling mobility and allowing Americans in aggregate to collectively make those kinds of decisions. Flint will revive at the moment that the people who believe in it and believe in its future are able to rebuild the kinds of opportunities that attracted folks there in the first place, and I happen to believe that they will. But trying to move the population back or to pin it there until that happens amounts to writing off entire generations of Americans while you're waiting for something to change, and that's not a price I'm prepared to accept.

Shane Phillips 01:41:45
Hey, Shane here, jumping in after the interview because while editing I realized there was one other thing to say in response to this question, and thank you again to Paul for asking it. My other response to this is that Flint and cities like it might actually be better off if they emptied out more, not less. Part of what's happening when cities depopulate is they're adjusting to their new economic reality. If your city used to have a hundred thousand jobs and now it has 30,000, then it cannot support the same population. If no one leaves, then you have the same number of people chasing a third as many jobs, and that's not just going to be bad for the people who can no longer find work. It's also bad for the people who stay employed but face lower wages and worse working conditions because labor is oversupplied. The argument here is not that people should be pushed out of cities like Flint, obviously, any more than they should be discouraged from leaving. But if more people felt that they could move away and find better opportunities elsewhere without housing eating all of their gains, then that could be better for the people who go and for the people who stay behind in a community where the population and economic base are in better alignment. All right, back to the episode. And the other question I wanted to raise here was from Stephanie, who actually — you're probably aware of this — wrote a whole 10-part Substack series reviewing each chapter of the book, and so I'm going to make sure I link to her series in the show notes. But she had a question basically about this. Book is largely about the historical precedents for taking away, restricting mobility. What precedents or cases do you look to for inspiration, for the possibility that things can change where these exclusionary institutions were dismantled? Obviously early in the book, that's kind of the direction things are going. But is there — maybe the question here is what is giving you hope today that we're going to be able to overcome these challenges?

Yoni Appelbaum 01:43:45
I'm so grateful to Stephanie for asking that. I think there has always been a push and pull in America for mobility, because it is uncomfortable, because folks do feel unsettled by it, and we've gone back and forth several times. You know racial covenants were not only widespread but actually a matter of federal policy. The New Deal sort of says we're not going to do mortgages unless there are racial covenants on the land, and then the Supreme Court steps in and strikes them down and opens up a possibility for residential mobility. That has profound effects on the country and they are positive, and you know you can find many such moments where restrictions fall. And the really cool thing about this story is I'm not asking Americans to change who they are. I'm not looking for some sort of utopian fantasy of the future. All I'm saying is: you know we have dammed up demand, just pent up behind those dams, and if we remove the barriers to mobility, I'm actually really confident that people will resume moving toward opportunity, because that's what they've always done. That's part of my hope, is, like, we have periodically peeled back one of these layers and then the pent up demand flows out. The other reason I have for hope is that most political change is not a matter of persuasion. It's not people changing their minds, but a matter of generational succession. Generations tend to be formed when they are young with a set of political beliefs that they will largely carry with them to the grave, and it's very, very hard to get somebody who believed profoundly in something when they were 25 to believe something else when they are 55. When I go around and attend local zoning hearings around the country, I routinely see a generational divide in the people who are testifying. Those under the age of roughly 40 have grown up in a world where they didn't have the same opportunities as their parents did, with great environmental challenges at their time, with a lack of density — not a surfeit of density — where they come to see housing policies as often an agent of racial exclusion and inequality rather than as a bulwark of white community. And those beliefs inform the way that they approach this. You can see already, even though the average municipal voter in America is something like 60, but as those younger generations get energized, engaged in the political process, more and more municipal campaigns are being waged on the basis of abundant housing, and housing is rising as a political issue throughout the country. The political system is starting to pay attention to this generational shift, and that will only roll through over time. As more and more voters who have these views age into the electorate and enter the generational cohorts that tend to vote at higher levels, we'll see the political system grow more and more responsive. So in some ways I have fortunately timed this book for a moment when the crisis is really, really acute, and it is so acute, in fact, that it is ushering in a wave of political change, and I think that wave is far from cresting.

Shane Phillips 01:46:47
Well, you've been very generous with your time. I did want to end here with a comment, a note of gratitude, I guess. You talk at the end of the book, the very end of the book, about this cookie cutter six story apartment building that's being built across the street from your home, and you make the point that it's not a design you find particularly attractive. But you're choosing to focus on the positive aspects of the project, things like how it will set off a chain of moves that allow people to move up into better housing, how it includes units for seniors and for low-income households and, more personally, how housing abundance and the mobility that it enabled made it possible for your great-great-grandfather to immigrate to the U.S. and to give his children a better life. And what I came away with was a really sharpened sense that a core difference between NIMBYs and YIMBYs — just to pick some categories, generalizing here — is what each tends to focus on when faced with changes or specifically changes to their, our built environment. And, more importantly, I just came away with this feeling that what we focus on is a choice that we make. Without brushing aside potential negative consequences altogether, it's our choice whether we focus on the shade created by a new building going up next door or the extra traffic it might cause, or on the dozens or hundreds of people who will get to call that building home, whose lives are likely to improve and some of whom might become future friends. It made me sad in a way, and continues to make me sad for the people who can't see past the cost to themselves and who choose to be angry or fearful about change, because I do think it really is a choice to be unhappy about those kinds of things. But I just thought this was a really great way to end and made me reflect on how we choose, how to respond to the changes that come to our community. And I think there's really a beautiful simplicity in choosing to focus on the positive things that come with change.

Yoni Appelbaum 01:48:44
Thank you for that. So well put. At the end of the day, our communities are made up of people. One of the oddities of the zoning debate is that it tends to be about things like floor area ratios or setbacks. We spend a lot of time debating physical structures, but those physical structures, in my view, are only a means to an end. They could be the lever that somebody uses to transform their life and to give their children the opportunities that they want their children to have, and if we can remain focused on the people who will inhabit those structures, we will have, I think, ultimately a much healthier political conversation than if we spend our time thinking about cornices and setbacks.

Shane Phillips 01:49:26
All right, Yoni Appelbaum, thank you so much for joining us on the Housing Voice podcast and thank you for writing this book.

Yoni Appelbaum 01:49:33
Thank you both.

Shane Phillips 01:49:38
You can find our show notes and a transcript of the episode on our website, lewis.ucla.edu. Talk with us and other listeners at uclahousingvoice.substack.com. The UCLA Lewis Center is on the socials, I'm on Bluesky and LinkedIn at @shanedphillips,and Stan is on Bluesky at @stano. Thanks for listening, we'll see you next time.

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Michael Lens

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Michael Manville

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Paavo Monkkonen

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Shane Phillips

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