For more than a century, American progressives have argued that the costs and conditions of American housing prove that the private market has failed. In the early twentieth century, the often-rough tenements of New York’s Lower East Side were deemed the work of rapacious “slumlords,” while small single-family or duplex homes that sprouted in cities were “crackerbox” firetraps. Reformers such as Catherine Bauer, whose book Modern Housing made the case for public housing, asserted that without government involvement as many as two-thirds of households would be unable to afford decent housing. More recently, progressives have looked to the “rent-burdened”—those paying more than a third of their income in housing costs—to demonstrate the need for subsidized “affordable” housing.
Yoni Appelbaum, deputy executive editor of The Atlantic, does not directly criticize the assumptions behind such long-standing public policy in his new book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Back the Engine of American Opportunity. But in a remarkable break from left-liberal orthodoxy, he points his finger clearly at progressives for distorting the housing market in a way that has undermined the American tradition of economic mobility, leaving many “stuck” in places where that opportunity does not exist. That he is willing to use the label “progressive” as a term of opprobrium is notable.
“American mobility,” Appelbaum writes, “has been slowly strangled by generations of reformers, seeking to assert control over their neighborhoods and their neighbors. . . . Their chosen tools were building codes and restrictive covenants and zoning ordinances, designed to segregate land by use and class and race.” He sees Herbert Hoover as a progressive who sought to impose restrictive zoning across the country and rightly identifies rent control and voucher-subsidized housing as impediments to mobility. He links the progressive tradition of city planning to immigration restriction, and government involvement in housing markets to racism. Nor does he spare environmental regulation—such as the landmark 1970 California Environmental Quality Act, which he brands a tool for the wealthy to protect the value of their properties.
In making these arguments, Appelbaum aligns himself with such right-of-center thinkers as Edward L. Glaeser, who has written in these pages about how “incumbents” use zoning to protect the value of their homes by excluding new construction and standing in the way of those who would move from Cleveland to California; Bernard Siegan, whose 1972 book, Land Use Without Zoning, links Houston’s growth, prosperity, and affordability to its decision not to adopt a zoning code; Bernard Friedan, whose 1961 book, The Future of Old Neighborhoods, celebrates lower-income neighborhoods as pathways to upward mobility; and Robert Ellickson, whose 2022 book, America’s Frozen Neighborhoods, criticizes single-family zoning. My own book, The Poor Side of Town—and Why We Need It, shares his defense of so-called slum housing and the importance of a variety of housing types beyond single-family. It’s unfortunate that Appelbaum does not acknowledge these and similar works.
Nevertheless, Appelbaum’s willingness to take on progressive conventional wisdom makes his book an important contribution. His guiding principle—“we need to turn housing from a scarce asset back into an abundant resource”—is exactly right. He even concedes that the “bitterness” of Donald Trump voters is related to progressive housing policy’s collateral damage.
Most of Stuck, however, is about how we got into this mess. Appelbaum’s skill as a historian shines here. He gradually tells the story of how zoning laws expanded from Modesto, California, where they were originally used to exclude Chinese laundries from white neighborhoods. The laws spread to localities across the country, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 1924 ruling in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. The Euclid court accepted an expansive definition of nuisance (“merely the right thing in the wrong place”) to justify zoning that separates different types of housing, as well as industry and commercial property. The decision drew the support not only of the conservative justices but also of the arch-progressive Louis Brandeis.
Stuck also digs deep into the historical roots of today’s obstacles to housing abundance, from the expansive understanding of localism in colonial New England to the creation of the city-planning profession. Applebaum unearths some fascinating social history along the way, such as the venerable tradition of “Moving Day,” an annual occasion when rental leases expired and tenants moved to new and often better quarters. “As late as World War II,” he reports, “a million New Yorkers found new addresses each May 1.” By 2022, only 315,000 New Yorkers moved at any point during the year, including a mere 94,000 residents of the city’s nearly 1 million rent-regulated apartments.
To his credit, Appelbaum includes rent control among the impediments to mobility, as it keeps Americans frozen in place with their superficially good deals. He also mentions housing vouchers along these lines in his profile of a low-income resident of economically depressed Flint, Michigan.
It’s worth questioning Appelbaum’s argument that a decline in geographic mobility is a key cause of the decline in American civil society, as described in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. Per Appelbaum, when new communities filled with new arrivals emerge, they have a strong impetus to form Tocquevillian civic groups; more stagnant communities lose such groups over time. But he overlooks other causes of civil decline, such as the growth of the federal welfare and social service states, which have obviated the apparent need for mutual aid.
Moreover, Appelbaum could have been more specific in his proposals for breaking our housing logjam—which, as he makes clear, is more of a political problem than a technical one. Ultimately, no obvious path exists around the impediments created by local zoning and planning boards. Advocates for more housing and more varied types of housing will have to find arguments that carry the day in local public hearings. They will have to make the case to incumbents that they should be open to permitting starter homes for their own children and grandchildren.
Such concerns aside, Stuck is both a strong work of popular history and an important marker in our long-running debate about government’s role in housing markets. That Appelbaum consistently finds fault with progressives is both a surprise and a helpful spur toward better policy.