How Jane Jacobs got Americans stuck

Yoni Appelbaum on the real villians behind our housing and mobility problems

Over the past few decades, an astonishing pattern has taken place: Americans no longer migrate. From a peak of roughly one third of the country moving cities in a single year, today, migration rates have declined and are now in line with the Old Continent of Europe. The dynamism of the American economy was predicated on all kinds of people seeking out work and building families, but now that mobility is gone — and we need to find out why.

Yoni Appelbaum, a senior editor at The Atlantic, just published his new book, “Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.” In it, he explores the critical implications of a country that is no longer seeking fortune, from the decline of job growth and opportunities to the high prices of housing, and ultimately, the immiseration of the American dream. He lays down the blame on many, from Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses to communities that have made exclusion their modus operandi.

He talks to me and Laurence Pevsner about why Jane Jacobs has gone from hero to villain in a generation, why the history of zoning portends further challenges to reform, how the abundance movement is changing the tenor of this debate, how Covid-19 acted as a natural experiment for mobility, and finally, some solutions on how to help Americans live where they want and build a more prosperous future.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For more of the conversation, listen to the episode and subscribe to the Riskgaming podcast.

Danny Crichton:

Yoni, you just published a book called Stuck, and what you're describing is not glue, but rather the American people. Why don't you talk a little bit about the book's purpose and what you found?

Yoni Appelbaum:

I started thinking about this book when I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts more than a decade ago in an apartment that was already a little too small for my family and already cost a little bit more than we could afford.

For more than 100 years before, my neighborhood had been a place for the children of immigrants, for strivers who were trying to better their condition. And it had somehow managed to occupy that niche through wave after wave of immigration and internal migration. But suddenly, it wasn't doing that anymore. It was turning into a neighborhood of young professionals.

That same story has played out in many American cities, the places that once got people on to the first step of the ladder of American success.

I wanted to see what went wrong. Part of that story is that, for the last 50 years, we've had an extraordinary slide in mobility. In 1970, one in five Americans was moving every year. It's now down to one in 13. That’s maybe the largest social change of our time. It has a huge economic impact. It also has a huge social and cultural impact.

What the book tries to tell is how central mobility has been to the American economy, to American political culture, to the things that most Americans will tell you they really value and cherish about their country.

Danny Crichton:

One of the core messages of the book is that it's not so much that people don't want to move, but that they're not able to.

Yoni Appelbaum:

Yeah. And that has left an enormous number of Americans feeling as if something has gone wrong in their lives. They know that this is not how things were supposed to go in this country. They were supposed to get access to opportunities. They were supposed to have a sense of agency and self-determination. And even if they can't quite put their finger on it — they may not say, "Single-family zoning has made it prohibitively expensive for me to move to a different metropolitan area that offers me better economic opportunities" — they are going to be able to tell you that something has gone badly wrong.

Laurence Pevsner:

I had no idea how much our ability to move had been a competitive advantage for America. You had these great quotes from Europeans and others observing Americans and talking about how shockingly ambulatory they were, which I really enjoyed. So we were a country that moved, and then we became a country that we didn't. How did we get there?

Americans know that this is not how things were supposed to go. They were supposed to get access to opportunities. They were supposed to have a sense of agency and self-determination.

Yoni Appelbaum:

I'll start by taking a step back and thinking about where our mobility came from, because, as you say, it was really different than in Europe. It was a right Americans invented. They literally put into law for the first time in human history, the right for people to decide which community they wanted to belong to.

For much of early American history, communities had been functioning like members-only clubs, where you needed to be admitted. The community had a right to reject new arrivals. But then there's an American legal revolution which says, "You can move where you want." And Americans really lean into that. At the peak, probably one out of three Americans is moving every year.

And so, that was the tremendous, vibrant culture of mobility that still existed when Jane Jacobs moved to the West Village in 1949. She was moving during one of those great surges of American mobility after World War II, as people are reinventing themselves, and she can see a menace to everything that she values about cities.

I should start by saying this: Jane Jacobs is right about almost everything. She was right about what makes cities vibrant and vital. She was right about the ballet of the sidewalk. She writes brilliantly about needing to treat cities as living things, that if you try to centrally plan them and assign all of their functions, it doesn't work very well. They need to evolve over time. They need a diversity of peoples, of uses.

She was right about all of that, and she sees great menace in the urban renewal schemes of the time, where the experts of her age looked at cities and saw disorderly places that needed rationality. In all of that, she was exactly right, but her solution was to reassert the original right of communities to define their own boundaries.

She said individuals, activists should have the right to veto new developments in their neighborhoods. And so you get the sort of endless processes of community hearings and reviews, and she's quite explicit that the goal of these reviews is not to gauge the actual opinions of the neighborhood or to balance the good of the community, but to empower activists like Jacobs to step in and say “no.”

She wants “right-thinking people” like her to be able to stop the government from doing bad things. It is a revolt against government from the left, and it is amazingly effective. But the new rules don’t just get exercised by right-thinking people, and one of the things about right-thinking people is they're often wrong about the things they're thinking about. And so, she imagines this as the ability to veto lots of destructive changes. But in practice, it emerges as a simple collective veto of almost all change, and it has had tremendous costs for Americans as a whole.

Danny Crichton:

Your book comes out at a time when there's open conversation on both the left and right about the future of cities, the future of the suburb, of America. To your point, Jacobs and Robert Moses were sort of in this war, and it was won by Jacobs. Moses has had a negative reputation. But over the last, I would say, 10 years, you've seen this slow rebalancing: this idea that Moses actually built stuff and Jacobs sort of locked the city in.

How do you think that narrative is changing?

Yoni Appelbaum:

You're 100% right about this. There's been such a change in the way this stuff gets discussed, because there's a broad understanding that something has gone terribly wrong — and there's consensus on that across the political spectrum. People look around and they say, "This is a country that used to build things." It's also a country where people used to be able to move up in terms of social and economic class, and a country that left people much more in control of their own lives than many people feel today.

The best stuff that Robert Moses did was building infrastructure in places where it was needed. Not where he leveled entire urban neighborhoods in order to put in a highway, but where he acquired a vacant lot and put in a large swimming pool.

And so, people are looking around. They want to understand what happened. And you're right that we've set up these two poles, Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. I think there's a natural impulse to say, "Well, if Jacobs’ cure ultimately proved worse than the disease, what we should do is tack back to the opposite pole with the single, strong, empowered central bureaucrat making unilateral decisions."

One of the things I can see in this conversation, though, is a desire for a different approach entirely. To think about the things that each of these figures got right is more constructive than thinking of them as polar opposites. The best stuff that Robert Moses did was when he built infrastructure in places where it was needed. Not where he leveled entire urban neighborhoods in order to put in a highway, but where he acquired a vacant lot and put in a large swimming pool. That was really good.

On the other hand, Jacobs wasn't wrong to say that it's really bad to put in the hands of unelected bureaucrats the power to bulldoze entire communities. That was really bad.

Laurence Pevsner:

I hear you on the need for synthesis. We need a Jane Moses, a Jacoses, or something like that. This seems almost obvious in retrospect, and I'm wondering if you have identified places where they have done this.

For example, there have been comparisons of red states versus blue states. It is harder to build in California than it is in Texas. Do you think that they're capturing some of these good ideas in Texas? Is that why people are moving there?

Yoni Appelbaum:

It's a great question. The first thing I'd say, though, is that although we are supposed to have laboratories of democracy on zoning and land use rules in particular, by the mid-20th century, we had actually created a remarkable amount of national uniformity. What really forces zoning nationwide is that FDR's New Deal says you can only get access to federal home loans if you zone your community and also racially segregate it. We didn't really have a laboratory of democracy on this.

But we're starting to get one. Even despite the national-level rules, there were always a few holdouts. Houston is a notable one. It went a different way in its land use law. Meanwhile, you can absolutely see that the more liberal the jurisdiction, the more restrictive its land use law.

There's a great study of California that shows that for every 10 points by which the liberal vote share increases in a jurisdiction, the number of new housing permits it issues falls by an additional 30%. So as jurisdictions get more and more progressive, they get more and more restrictive about what they're willing to allow. And the flip side of that, of course, is that the redder jurisdictions have taken traditionally a much more permissive approach.

And yet, the places that have had the fastest economic growth in America over the last half century have been progressive. There is a very tight correlation between the cities that are growing really, really fast and progressive politics. They're growing fast in terms of economies. They're growing fast in terms of job opportunities. But they're not growing fast in terms of additional housing.

So you get this split where you're looking at a small subset of places that fit this Venn diagram. The economies are growing fast, and yet they also have liberal housing policy. Wherever you see that, you see absolutely explosive growth, and Austin, Texas, is the best example I can think of right now.

They went through and really liberalized not just the zoning, but the building permitting and the building codes. And as a result, the economy is booming, and yet rents are falling. They've added so much new housing capacity that they're getting the best of both worlds.

Laurence Pevsner:

At Riskgaming, we like to think in terms of experiments and scenario planning. It strikes me that we had maybe a mini-experiment of this kind with COVID. We had a remote-first workforce for six months to a year, and a lot of companies were very open to remote work. It seems, though, that there's been a snapback.

I'm wondering, was there anything about that remote experience that you think would have eased the “stuck” problem, and why do you think we're all going back anyway?

Yoni Appelbaum:

This was a fascinating natural experiment, and one of the things we learned was that a ton of people are not living where they want to live. And when they thought they had the chance to strike a different balance in their lives, they did.

There are all these trade-offs. People would like to have a house that's large enough for their family and access to good employment. Over the last 50 years, America has kind of told them, "You can't have both." But during COVID, they were like, "Oh, well, maybe I could have that house that actually has a bedroom for each child and work remotely."

And so, I think we got a really good sense from COVID how misaligned people are at the moment with what they actually want. We're not putting the housing where people want to be.

At one level, it might be nice if we were living in the metaverse, and physical location no longer mattered. I think another thing we've learned over the last five years is that physical location does still matter a lot. For one thing, some of the people who relocated, relocated to cities. They actually used their freedom of flexibility to seek out other kinds of amenities that were available in urban places.

The bigger lesson, though, is that urban areas are a fantastic engine of economic progress and individual upward mobility. You can't replicate that very well over Zoom. I like to think that people had banked a lot of social capital in the years ahead of COVID. So if you were in a job, had been there for a number of years, working in an office alongside your colleagues, you had developed in-person relationships. You had gone out to happy hour. When you needed to draw down that social capital during COVID, if you had banked it, you could do that. But eventually, it starts to wear thin. There's turnover within your workplace. You haven't developed those relationships with the new people. Now you decide you're switching jobs. You're joining a company where you only know people via Zoom, and you don't get to establish this kind of relationship.

People found it much, much harder, harder to switch jobs, harder to keep up over time. So as they spent down their social capital and the bank accounts started to run empty, they tended to move back to urban areas or to the places where there was really good job growth in order to keep their careers on track. It turned out that we're not going to be freed, at least in the short term, from the constraints of physical geography by videoconferencing. Ultimately, we're still going to have to solve the problem that we're not building housing in the places where Americans actually want to live.

Danny Crichton:

One of the curiosities I've always had is New York rents. They continue to go up, where now, for one bedroom in some neighborhoods, it's like $5,500 a month. This blows people's minds, and I'm always like, "No. People pay high prices for this." Clearly, there's demand. People are willing to pay an extraordinary premium to be in certain places. But why are there not more of these cities? At a fundamental level, if we're trying to unstuck, why not build more of these amenities?

I guess we've sort of identified Austin as one example. Why are there not four more Austins all across the country?

Yoni Appelbaum:

It's a particularly great question, because until about 1970, the history of American municipalities was hopeful boomtowns. Right? The local boosters would explain to you how they'd bought this lot at the edge of town, but one day, that was going to be downtown, and there was a sense of almost infinite possibility. And most of those boomtowns went bust, or they were modest successes, and people relocated.

As the population has ground to a halt, I think it's gotten much, much harder for new centers of economic growth to emerge. Silicon Valley was a literal manufacturing site half a century ago. It was not about pixels yet. It was still about wafers. It had grown up in large part out of post-World War II defense contracting and manufacturing, and then turned into an enormous magnet. San Francisco starts as a port city. That is no longer how it is making its living.

You can have places that emerge in new economic roles provided your population is fluid. And that was the American story for most of our history. I think one reason you're not seeing the emergence of these new places is, although policymakers are willing to give it a shot, what they usually want to do, to borrow a phrase from the movies, is make fetch happen. They'll say, "Over there, this declining industrial city. What I'm going to do is bring it back by designating an opportunity zone, by striking a deal to bring in a new factory."

It's both really hard to pull off good place-based policy, and also, it's singularly perverse. You're saying to somebody, "Look, I know you're living in a community where your kids' odds of success are in the first percentile, but I'm going to give you a tax incentive to pay you to stay in this community, because I'd like to revive the community," maybe that makes sense at a 30,000-foot level. We can argue about that, but it's a really lousy thing to do to that parent who's sitting there with their kid and trying to figure out, "What do I do now?"

We used to have that mobility, and it was good for everyone. It was good for the places that were booming. But I really want to stress this: it was good for the places that were in decline, too. Many places in America have had recurrent cycles of boom, bust, boom, bust. Those places did better with high rates of labor mobility as well.

Think of international migration. People who leave a poorer country for a richer one send remittances back to their homeland. The remittances enable the people back in that community to invest in productivity gains and education that will lift them in turn.

That's the American story too. When somebody moved from rural Alabama to New York or to San Francisco, they were doing all of those things. They were sending money back to help support their families. They were tightening the labor market in the small Alabama town they left, and that pulled more people into the workforce and got them higher wages, and that community did better and was more able to invest in education. That was how America grew.

Instead, what we're trying to do now is plop the factory back in the small Alabama town. That tends not to work very well. What you get is a stultified economy with stagnant cities, where the people who are at the top stay at the top, the people at the bottom stay at the bottom, and the same is true of ranking urban centers too.

Laurence Pevsner:

Let's say it's 2040, and we didn’t learn the lessons that you're promulgating now. How much worse can this get?

Yoni Appelbaum:

I've got bad news for you here. The American economy, from an international perspective, is still relatively dynamic. Our mobility has collapsed down to European levels. So it can get a lot worse.

There's a great study by some University of Chicago psychologists who asked people, "Do you want to move in the next year, in the next three years, in the next five years?" Then they went back to talk to the folks who did and did not move, the ones who were and were not able to act on that desire. The ones who did move ended up more optimistic, more future-oriented, more involved in their communities, more welcoming of outsiders, more likely to see others' success as promoting their own success.

But the ones who didn't move ended up with an entirely different perspective on the world. They grew embittered, more alienated from their communities. They withdrew from social contacts. They saw the arrival of immigrants or new folks in town as a threat, that they would take their share of scarce resources, and they weren't entirely wrong about that.

And so, this is what happens in a country that stops moving. You get much greater political polarization. There's a narrative out there that we sorted ourselves out politically. There's very little evidence for that. In fact, the best social science points in exactly the opposite direction. The 50 years of increased American polarization are the 50 years when we've stopped moving. What happens is, the longer you live in a community, the likelier you are to adopt the views of those around you. It's not bad to have political arguments. It's healthy, in fact, to bring people together with strongly divergent views and force them to live together. It's really bad for a country if you're living in a community where everyone agrees with you.

Further, there's an estimate that our geographic immobility is already costing us about 2 trillion a year in GDP. That can get a lot worse too. I mean, the entire American economy basically relies on labor mobility. It relies on people moving to where the jobs are.

People always used to remark when they met Americans, "Oh, you guys are so optimistic. You think you can solve every problem." And often, it led us to do lots of crazy things that we shouldn't have done as a country, but there was something fundamental about that American spirit of hope and optimism. That is what is being crushed by the lack of individual agency that the inability to move presents us with.

Danny Crichton:

I always want to end on a happier note. So to close out our conversation, there are people who are trying to work on things. Your book is part of a slew of works that came out this year, including Abundance by your colleague Derek Thompson at The Atlantic alongside Ezra Klein.

We also recently had on the podcast the Abundance New York City folks, who are on community boards and are dealing with YIMBYism at the local level. I'm curious, when you think about the solution side of the equation here, where do you start?

Yoni Appelbaum:

I should say I'm actually tremendously optimistic about the future. I wanted to paint the downside risks; they're real. But I actually think things are trending in the right direction. And for solutions, there are three basic principles I think people should follow.

First, we need much greater consistency in the rules. The rules should be clear, simple and direct about who gets to build what, where. As long as you've read the rules and you're following the rules, you can just go and build.

If you give people predictability and allow the same simple rules to apply over the broadest possible geographic areas, you get all kinds of benefits. You get more competition among builders, because they no longer specialize in navigating a local bureaucracy. They can specialize instead in building a particular kind of house. You get the ability of people to go into a process, knowing how long it will take and how much it will cost, which unlocks a different kind of lending. There's all kinds of benefits that come from clear, consistent rules. So that's step one.

Step two is tolerance. We tend to write the rules to produce the kind of housing that we ourselves would want to live in, but people are inconsistent over the course of their lives. My first New York City apartment was 150 square feet. It cost me a third of my salary, and I was really grateful to have it. I would not want to raise my family there today, nor do I necessarily want to retire in my single-family home with its stairs, which will get increasingly difficult to navigate as I age.

At different moments in my life, I've needed access to different housing types, and people at different places in the income spectrum also need access to different housing types. Our building codes and our zoning codes are much too prescriptive in this way. Why can't we legalize a much broader variety of building types? And if somebody on their own property wants to build something that works for them or for the people they're renting to at that stage of their lives, great.

I'm optimistic in part because these are problems that were largely caused at the state and local level, which means we don't need congress to fix them and we don't need the president to fix them.

Third is abundance — an overused word at the moment, but we've spent 50 years not building. The conservative estimate is that we're short 4 million homes, but that's only if you want those homes to be in places where people don't actually want to live. If you're trying to put the homes where people have demonstrated that they want to move to, it's something more like 30 million homes. It's a lot. It's not going to happen overnight. And you don't get the cost benefits of much more housing until you build much more housing. You can't do it with just a building.

So those are the three principles, but I'll tell you why I'm really optimistic. I'm optimistic in part because these are problems that were largely caused at the state and local level, which means we don't need congress to fix them, which is really good news, because congress can't fix anything right now. And we don't need the president to fix them, which, again, is really good news. People can do this in their own local jurisdictions. They can do it at the state level.

The other reason I'm really optimistic is that there's an enormous generational change here. The baby boom generation came of age believing that America's greatest challenge was excessive growth. There was going to be a population bomb, and yet that's not how it worked out.

Today, we can take a look and say a lot of the rule changes we made in the 1970s have had a perverse effect. We tried to protect the environment through restrictive environmental laws, and it encouraged sprawl by making it impossible to build next to anyone who was already living there. A younger generation sees this really differently. They see that the real challenge is not the disease of growth. It's that the places where they want to live are not growing fast enough to accommodate them and their families.

If you ask people, "Do you want an apartment building down the block?" they usually say no. But if you ask them, "Do you think that the nurses and the day care workers and the firefighters who serve their communities should be able to raise their own kids here? Do you think that when your kids want to move back home and raise the grandkids, they should have a place that they could afford in your community to do that? Do you think that your community should be diverse?" overwhelmingly, Americans will say yes.

They want these things, and a younger generation sees how an outmoded set of rules has threatened all of that. It is really committed to changing things, and they can do it at the local level. That’s why I leave this conversation with a lot of optimism.

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