How Jane Jacobs got Americans stuck

Danny Crichton:
Yoni, thanks so much for joining us.

Yoni Applebaum:
Oh, so happy to be here.

Danny Crichton:
So, Yoni, you just published a book called Stuck, and what you're describing is not glue and the history of glue, but rather the American people. Over the last couple of decades, migration has declined all across the country as people who used to go west, go south, looking for jobs, looking for new opportunities, marriage, kids, retirement has sort of been upended, and the book really starts by kind of confronting this problem and addressing it. Why don't you talk a little bit about what the book's purpose was and what you found?

Yoni Applebaum:
Yeah. I started thinking about this book when I was living in Cambridge 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 actually afford to spend, and I knew something about the neighborhood in which I was living, which is that for more than 100 years, it had been a place for the children of immigrants, for strivers who were trying to better their condition and give their children more opportunity.
And it had somehow managed to occupy that same niche through wave after wave after wave of immigration, of internal migration, and suddenly, it wasn't doing it anymore. It was turning into a neighborhood of young professionals. And I wanted to know, because that same story has played out in many American cities, that the places that once gave people sort of that first step on the ladder of American success were getting raised beyond the reach of people who were seeking that chance to move up.
I want to see what have gone wrong. And so, that was the purpose of the book. And as you say, part of that story is that for the last 50 years, we've had this extraordinary slide in mobility. In 1970, one in five Americans was moving every year. We just got new numbers from the census. It's down to one in 13. So it's a huge change, and maybe the largest and least from our social change of our time. It has a huge economic impact. It also has a huge social and cultural impact.
That story I sort of knew when I set out to write the book. What the book tries to tell is what I discovered, which is how central that kind of mobility had long 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, how much of that was built on the constant, ceaseless migrations of the American people and how much is being lost and eroded by the fact that we're no longer able, on the whole, to move to where we want to live.

Danny Crichton:
I think one of the core messages of the book is, it's not so much that people necessarily don't want to move, but they're not able to.

Yoni Applebaum:
Yeah. Over that same half century, that number has increased by 45%, and what that's done is 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 control and self-determination in their lives. 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."
But they are going to be able to tell you that something has gone badly wrong, that their community is not thriving, that they are being acted upon by forces that are beyond their control. And so, there is something fairly profound that has shifted in the country as people have lost that opportunity to decide where they want to live.

Laurence Pevsner:
Yeah. I was really struck reading your book. I had no idea how much our ability to move had been, for so long, 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. I was wondering, can you tell us a little bit more about how we... Okay. So we were a country that moved, and then we became a country that we didn't. How did we get there?
I mean, you, for example, portray in one of your chapters Jane Jacobs kind of as an accidental villain in this story. Back when I was in college, I took a class on the city, and Jane Jacobs was the hero describing the ballet of the street, and you capture that, but then you also kind of show a very different side of what her activism led to. How did that come about, and why is this a kind of new view that people are having on her as an activist?

Yoni Applebaum:
Yeah. Thank you for asking that. I think 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 Europe. It was a right Americans invented, literally put into law for the first time in human history, the right for people to decide which community they wanted to belong to. So communities had been functioning like members-only clubs, where you really needed to be admitted, for much of early American history. The community had a right to reject new arrivals.
And instead, 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 exists when Jane Jacobs moves to the West Village in 1949. She was moving in one of those great surges of American mobility after World War II, as people are reinventing themselves and their lives, and she can see a menace to everything that she values about cities.
And 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 this great menace in the urban renewal schemes of the time, that the experts of her age looked at cities and saw these disorderly places that needed rationality. They needed sorting out, and she said, "No, stop. You're killing the goose that lays the golden egg. This is a terrible idea." In all of that, she was exactly right, but her solution was to reassert that original right of communities to define their own boundaries.
She said individuals, activists should have the right to veto new developments in their neighborhoods, both the legal right that there are new rights of legal action that go into effect because of Jacobs and her fellow activists who pressed for the right of people who are not being directly harmed by developments to sue to stop them on the grounds that they haven't followed the right procedural rules in order to be approved, and also sort of a moral and political right.
You set up 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 goods of the community. The goal is to set up a process in which empowered activists like Jacobs can step in and say no where they see something dangerous happening. She sees this as a good change. Right?
She's very skeptical of small-D democratic politics, very skeptical of politicians, that elections can yield good outcomes. 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 an amazingly effective revolt against government. What comes out of the 1970s is a whole set of legal changes which give ordinary Americans, public interest groups, nonprofits, activists the right to challenge almost everything the government does, and generally, the ability to stop it if they're willing to fight for long enough and have sufficient resources.
But that's a right that doesn'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 laws of destructive changes. But in practice, it emerges as the simple collective veto of almost all change in American places, and that was not something she had really anticipated, and has had tremendous costs for Americans as a whole.

Danny Crichton:
Yoni, I think your book comes out at a time when there's a really open conversation, I think, left and right around what's the future of cities, the future of the suburb, growth, prosperity, America. To your point, Jacobs and Robert Moses here are sort of in this war, and that was won by Jacobs, and Moses sort of has this negative view. But over the last, I would say, 10 years, starting with... I went to a museum exhibit in San Francisco, maybe 2013, that was Unbuilt SF.
I was looking at all of these projects, that some of them were just fanciful, but others were like, "God, why couldn't we have done this?" There's a fight for 20 years to put in a bus lane on Van Ness in downtown SF or 14th Street here in New York City. And then over the last 10 years, you've seen this sort of slow rebuilding around... Well, Robert Moses has actually built stuff throughout this period of time. Jane Jacobs sort of locked the city in if you look at the infrastructure today versus 50 years ago.
The Power Broker's 50th anniversary was just a couple months ago. You had Straight Line Crazy, a play that sort of regalvanized folks around Moses and Jacobs down here at The Shed, on and on and on, and I also think it dovetails with Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law and Matthew Desmond's Evicted. So there's a whole new literature coming out, I think, left and right in the last 10 years saying, "God, something really broke," that we put all these constrictions in.
You've seen the calcification of a lot of communities. A lot of folks have this nostalgia of, we're sort of locking in amber a community that looks like the '80s, and it's not dynamically changing with either the workforce, with the way people want to live, et cetera. Obviously, you've contributed, I think with your books Stuck, right to the middle of this, but how do you think that that narrative and genre is changing? I know you started this project a while ago. You just published the book a few weeks ago. Do you think it's still continuing? Is it running up against barriers, and how do you want to continue forming that narrative going forward?

Yoni Applebaum:
Yeah. You're 100% right about this. There's been such a change in the way this stuff gets discussed, because I think 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, with much greater fluidity than they can today. It's a country that left people much more in control of their own lives than many people feel today.
And so, people are looking around. They can see the political anger. They can see the dysfunction. They can see the decline of public goods and the decline of individual mobility, and they want to understand why that happens. And you're right that we've set up these two poles, Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. And so, I think there's a natural impulse to say, "Well, if maybe Jacobs, ultimately, that the cure proved worse than the disease, what we should do is, is tack back to the opposite pole of the single, strong, empowered central bureaucrat making unilateral decisions."
And one of the things that I can see in this conversation is a desire for a different approach entirely. To think about the things that each of these figures got right, I think, 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. So not where he went in and 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.
We used to do things like that. We used to say there are certain public goods the private sector is really unlikely to provide, like park space. And if we want to have them in places where lots of people are living, we will all get collective benefits. Individual benefits, your real estate prices can go up. Collective benefits, there's better recreation, healthier communities. It is good to build parks. Moses built a lot of parks. That was good.
On the other hand, Jacobs wasn't wrong to say, it's really bad to put in the hands of unelected bureaucrats the power to bulldoze entire communities, simply because they make a different set of aesthetic choices than the members of those communities have made, or because they're racist. That was really bad. And so, there is something that each of them is giving us. Jacobs was talking about the benefits of organic growth, the dangers of wholesale planning and central direction for the growth of cities.
Moses was reminding us that we actually need some public goods that are provided. And what's interesting is, instead of drawing on the best of their insights, what we've actually arrived at is the worst of both worlds. The revolt against government that Jacobs and her ilk helped lead led to crippling of state capacity too. And so, in many, many places, we've essentially ceded the public domain, parks, train stations, bus shelters on the sidewalk.
Instead of saying these are collective public goods that ought to be maintained, that ought to be policed, that ought to be accessible to a broad range of the public, that we should be making enormous public investments in, we've ceded both the existing ones to disorder and the ability to build any new ones. And so, we're not taking the best of Moses. We've abandoned that. We've set up too many veto points that prevent our construction of anything like that anymore, and neither are we taking the best of Jacobs.
Instead of looking to her insights on organic growth and the ability of cities to maintain a diverse mix of uses, we've instead taken her insights about the need for a lot of veto points, and that is yielding neighborhoods that look nothing like what she venerated and everything like what she detested. And so, somehow, we've ended up with the worst ideas that each of these thinkers promoted when we ought to be taking the best.

Laurence Pevsner:
So I hear you on this need for a 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. The whole point of having lots of states and lots of cities is that we have these laboratories of democracy where we can try different things out.
In some of the conversations that, in general, the kind of abundance movement, which I see your book as being a part of or contributing to, there's been comparisons of red states versus blue states. In California, it's harder to build 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 Applebaum:
Yeah. It's a great question. So the first thing I'd say is, although we are supposed to have laboratories of democracy on zoning and land use rules in particular, we actually, by the mid-20th century, had created a remarkable amount of national uniformity that starts with a set of efforts spearheaded by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, not a name you usually associate with great public policy initiatives, to create standard state zoning enabling statutes.
So most states in the country adopt versions or literally identically the same law in order to enable zoning, which is a radical new innovation in the world. There was lots of land use law before them, but not the idea that things could be okay in one part of town but not in the rich part of town. That was a legal innovation, and that spreads nationally. But lots of communities, to your point, want to go a different path. They want to prioritize growth and development. They want to prioritize opportunities for their residents.
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. Those were the preconditions for getting FHA loans. And so, we really forced one straitjacket on the entire country in terms of its approach to land use. It was not done volitionally by local communities. It was not done because people saw that the communities that adopted this were more successful by any metric than the ones that hadn't.
It was done because the federal government was getting into the home loan business and wanted to minimize the risk of change. And so, there was no policymaker who sat there and said, "Is this a way to build communities?" There were instead a bunch of bankers who sat there and said, "If we're going to start ensuring home loans all across the country, how do we freeze everything in place so that nothing will change over the course of this new extended mortgage we've just invented?" We went from five-year loans to 20- or 30-year loans, and they needed to freeze everything. Right?
So we didn't really have a laboratory of democracy on this. We're starting to get one. Even despite these national-level rules, there were always a few holdouts. Houston is a notable one, that went a different way in their land use law. 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.
It is not that conservatives never say, "Not in my backyard." There are tons of single-family communities in this country that are deep, deep red and want no multifamily housing and nothing like that anywhere within their boundaries. 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. 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 of this that I can think of right now, where they went through and they really liberalized not just the zoning, but the building permitting and the building codes, and, I mean, these are tough problems. They have a lot of aspects. But Austin basically went with build, baby, build. 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 sort of the best of both worlds, which is offering lots of people the chance to come and take part in what is emerging as one of America's tech capitals, and a vibrant cultural scene, but to do that without sort of freezing out anyone who lacks the economic resources to move there. That is what American cities used to strive to do. They were all competing against each other to attract people. We have relatively few entrants in that race anymore, which means that the places that are willing to get in the race and to try to compete on this basis are really running away.

Danny Crichton:
I mean, on the last piece there, that was always what surprised me about the Bay Area, 100 different cities, three major metros with San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland, and yet there's not a single one that's like, "We're just going to be the Manhattan." And parts of it like the CEQA. There's a bunch of local laws and rules, but it is fascinating that you would think that someone would break through out of 100 cities and were like, "No, no. We're just going to do it ourselves. We will make the money. We will build up the real estate. We will become the skyscrapers," et cetera, et cetera, and it's interesting to see the uniformity.
Now, I think you bring up a really interesting question here around Austin, which is, obviously, there's a lot of local action. Steve Adler, the former mayor, the current mayor, who've worked together to try to rebuild the zoning code, redo transit, and others in Austin, and Laurence and I were just there a few weeks ago, obviously, and I had last been there maybe seven or eight years ago. And so, you can imagine looking downtown, being like, "I don't remember all these buildings here, and they're all here now." And you don't get that feel of almost like a China-like feel in the United States very often.
But I have a question on federalism, because most of these rules are done at the local level. Obviously, state policy has an implication here, and then at the federal level, I mean, you do have a cabinet secretary in terms of housing and urban development, which is nominally designed to do some of this, although more in inner cities than maybe suburbs and smaller cities, but federalism with environmental laws and different policies.
How do you start to think about that construction from the viewpoint of Stuck? Because I think one of the arguments you really make in this book is this is an historic continuity across American history. It doesn't just show up in the last couple of years. There's antecedents going back to the Chinese Exclusion Act and others all the way to the present day that's designed to be like, "This is my community, not yours."
And so, you have this sort of closure of a lot of these communities. They don't want others coming in. How do you sort of optimize for that? Because, to your point, what's interesting is it's actually the progressives who theoretically are the most open to change, open to dynamism. I'm thinking of just literally the classical definition of conservative as conserving the community I already have. And so, that irony locally, and how do you sort of route around that?

Yoni Applebaum:
Yeah. It's a great question, and I think maybe the way to do it is to take the feds off the table. There are positive rules for federal policy here, and we can talk about them later, but the place to really focus is the states, because zoning is a power that the states create and delegate down to municipalities. It is not something that any local community in the country has the right to do in 1910. It just doesn't exist. The law is very, very clear about this, and the people who draft the initial zoning statutes are acutely aware that they are doing something that is unconstitutional.
Their hope is to spread it so far and wide that by the time it gets up to the Supreme Court, it'll be ruled retroactively, a legitimate use of local power, and that's what happens. They spread it so far in 10 years that by the time it gets to the Supreme Court, it gets legalized. But they're starting with a brand-new novel power, and it is a state power that is delegated down to local communities.
One of the stories, one of the arcs I trace in the book, as you say, is that wherever you get a polity which gives a local community the power to police who gets to belong to that community, over time, it will tend toward exclusion, and there's a very good reason for this. Even if it is populated by a band of angels, the politicians who are running that community, the members of that community will prioritize the interests of long-term residents over the interests of prospective residents.
If you might move to a community, you don't have a vote in that community yet because you don't live there yet. You literally don't count. If you're living there in the short term, you may not switch your voter registration. You may not have made the kinds of connections with local electeds that can shape public policy. And so, always, communities will privilege the interest of their long-term members.
In American electoral democracy, this is particularly acute. If you think about it at the municipal level, you're lucky to get 20% turnout of eligible voters. Those voters, the median age, I mean, the study varies, but somewhere between 60 and 65, the median age of a voter in a local election, and they're preponderantly homeowners. They're whiter, richer, better educated than the populations of these places at large.
That's who votes in local elections. So it's not even sort of prioritizing the interests of long-term residents. It's really about the political power of a very small percentage of long-term residents who are older, whiter, richer, and better educated than the population as a whole, and they're not the ones who are going to drive economic growth, and they're not the ones who are going to fill the schools. Right? It's not actually the basis on which cities are competing. They're not competing for 65-year-old retirees. They're competing for young residents.
And so, you've got this sort of radical divergence between who is electing city governments, and what the city officials can see is in the long-term best interest of their communities, and a lot of very good officials try to navigate that tension, but it's a tough tension to navigate. And so, one of the things you see is in places like the Bay Area, where state-level laws have sort of rigged the deck, made it almost impossible to build locally. It's really, really hard for even well-intentioned local officials to overcome that set of political incentives.
So really, you can see a tug of war persistently over the course of 200 years of American history between state policymakers and local policymakers. At the state level, states have persistently been able to pull back and say, "Hey, although it may be in the interest of each individual community to protect that small core of local primary voters against the kinds of change they fear, it's not in our collective interest as a state. We're bleeding population. We're losing business. We can't generate the tax revenue to do the things that the voters tell us they want to do. We got to change something here. We've got to set a set of guardrails around the power that the local communities are exercising."
Where states do that, they tend to thrive, where they empower the local communities. Our system of mixed constitutional government was based on the Madisonian insight that men are not angels. They have incentives and that you need to design governmental processes that account for that. I don't think our local zoning processes do account for that. They basically rely on communities to take that broader perspective, and it's not what happens.
If you think about a zoning hearing, it's the least democratic thing that you can do. What you're basically saying is the decisions about whether or not somebody from a poor community in America can move to a richer one are going to be taken by the subset of people who happen to know that there's a hearing on a particular Wednesday night in June. They're not working a variable shift schedule. They don't need to arrange for childcare.
They have the education to know how to talk about the public policy matters that are before them on an agenda, and can stand up and give a cogent, one-minute public statement in a way that an official will find compelling. By the time you put all those constraints on it, it's not democratic. It's about the most antidemocratic process you can possibly come up with.

Laurence Pevsner:
So we like to think about, and the Riskgaming podcast, in terms of experiments and scenario planning. It strikes me that we had maybe a mini experiment of this kind with COVID. We had this remote-first workforce for six months to a year, and then a lot of companies were now very open to remote work, which would allow... A lot of what you described in your book is the brutality of the commute and how people don't get to live near where their jobs are, but this was kind of a potential opportunity for people to live elsewhere, to live where they wanted to live, and then work apart from that.
It seems, though, at least my impression is that there's been a snapback. A lot of people are asking for back into office work again. Certainly, if you're a firefighter, you have to still go into work in person. But a lot of the white-collar jobs, which you would think would be able to be remote, have stopped being remote. 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 Applebaum:
So you're right that it was this fascinating sort of 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 in COVID to strike a different balance in their lives, they chose to do that. There are these trade-offs they have. People would like to have a house that's large enough for their family and access to good employment.
America has kind of told them over the last 50 years, "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 of the pent-up demand, how misaligned people are at the housing market at the moment with what people 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 still matters 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.
So it wasn't just people moving from urban centers to exurban country homes. There was a lot of movement in a lot of different directions. 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 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.
You decide you're switching jobs. Now you're joining a company where you only know people via Zoom conference, and you don't get to establish this kind of relationships. You don't get to socialize into the mores of the new work environment. People found that 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. And so, 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 this problem that we're not building housing in the places where Americans actually want to live.

Danny Crichton:
Let me project forward. I mean, obviously, in the post-COVID world, people are returning... To Laurence's point, this sort of snapback, and to your point of people are looking for different types of amenities. I mean, one of the curiosities I've always had is New York rents continue to go up, where now, for one bedroom in some neighborhoods, it's like $5,500, which 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, in certain cities. Why are there not more of these cities? At a very fundamental basis, if we're trying to unstuck, and I understand there's all these... Okay. I mentioned the Bay Area, but it's sort of one region. Across the country, 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 that are building up amenities, that are saying, "Look, even though New York has grown population for the first time in 20, 30 years, clearly, there's a bunch of folks who want to come back to the cities"? There are also retirees who would live in cities if there were better amenities for them that don't often exist. And so, they tend to go to retirement villages and communities all across the country. Why is there just not more competition between cities to get access to that growth and prosperity?

Yoni Applebaum:
It's a particularly great question, because until about 1970, the history of American municipalities was hopeful boomtowns. Right? You couldn't locate land somewhere, and 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. And so, 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. Right? 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 like that, provided that your population is fluid, provided that people can move away from the places where the jobs are not and to the places where the jobs are, and then they can try there and fail and move to a third place, 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 film, is to make fetch happen. Right? 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. It makes sense at one level to try something like this, but if you're saying to somebody, "Look, I know that you're living in a community where your kids' odds of success are like 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. Places that were in decline, and many places in America have had recurrent cycles of like, they boom, they bust, they boom, they bust. Those places did better with high rates of labor mobility, and we know this in terms of international migration. Right?
We have this, I think, as a mental model that you can have a country which has out-migration to a richer country. The people who go to that richer country, they send remittances back to their homeland. That enables the people back in that community to invest in productivity gains and education that will lift them in turn. The tightening labor market in the countries they've left behind pulls more people into better occupations by soaking up surplus labor through migration, and those countries do better in addition to the migrants themselves doing better.
That's the American story too. Right? 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 really well. And so, you're not seeing the emergence of these new centers, I really believe, because we've made it too hard to move from one place to another. Without trusting people to make their own decisions, without empowering people to build the housing where the demand for the housing is high, you don't get the boom-and-bust cycle.
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. Really, really hard. The exceptions are places like Austin, which have liberalized their policy to allow people to move there, and then they're booming. But on the whole, it gets really hard to do that if people are not moving from one place to another.

Laurence Pevsner:
You brought up the international example, and I was reminded of a book that we've mentioned a couple times in the Riskgaming podcast before, similarly powerful one-word title, Kaput, Wolfgang Münchau's look at the German economy and trying to understand that there were choices that they didn't make, that they kind of saw down the pike, but didn't make the right calls, and then ended up with the sort of, not collapse, but real slowdown of the economy today.
I'm thinking about that and thinking about, okay, let's say it's 2040. If, let's say, we don't unfortunately learn the lessons that you're promulgating right now, and Austin is really the only example, and there aren't other examples, and we don't get de-zoning, how much worse can this get? Do you see political polarization going totally off the rails? Do you see much bigger productivity slumps? Are there potential regional collapses? How bad can you envision a 2040 if nothing goes well?

Danny Crichton:
I have to say it's amazing. We finally turned Laurence into a glass half empty. The world is coming to a close. Everything is negative, and everything is terrible. How bad can it get?

Laurence Pevsner:
I've been here almost a year now, Danny. So you've started to convert me to your ways.

Danny Crichton:
I am very good at getting people to my side of the table.

Yoni Applebaum:
It can get really bad. I've got bad news for you here. The American economy, in international perspective, is still relatively dynamic. Our mobility has collapsed down to European levels. Right? So it can get a lot worse. We don't appreciate how much of the American model relied on this kind of geographic mobility. And so, the things that are breaking as it declines include politics.
I read about this in the book, but there's a lot of research on this. Often, people look at immigrants and they say, "Well, that's a self-selecting sample." Right? The people who have the initiative and the entrepreneurial spirit to pull up stakes and go someplace new, no wonder they do well. But there's a great study of this by some University of Chicago psychologists who take a look at... They went and just asked people, "Do you want to move in the next year, in the next three years, in the next five years?"
So they were only looking at people who had that entrepreneurial spirit, and 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 in turn, like, "I'll do well if my whole community is doing well."
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. Social bonds atrophy over time when people are stuck in place. Communities grow less vibrant, and they started to regard the world as a zero-sum game. 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 do get as well much greater political polarization. There's a narrative out there of the big sort, 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, most of us.
There's always one guy in every community who does exactly the opposite of everyone around, but most of us just start doing what everyone else does. We want to fit in. And so, in a culture that is sedentary, you get sharp geographic polarization. In a country that is highly mobile, that's constantly mixing people with different views and backgrounds, you get a greater degree of forced tolerance, also more clashes, but yet people that's not necessarily bad.
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. And so, it could get a lot worse in terms of polarization. There's an estimate that, currently, our geographic immobility is 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 as opposed to a more German-like system, which sort of assumes the population is going to stay in place and you got to redistribute from the places that are growing to the places that are not. You've got to do everything you can to avoid job loss, because once the job is gone, it's never coming back. Right?
You get very different social policy tuned for a culture of stasis. On the whole, Americans, throughout the economic spectrum, have done better by betting on growth and dynamism than they have by betting on stasis. And so, our economy can get a lot worse. Our politics can get a lot worse, but what really scares me is that we as individuals will be a lot worse off.
The thing that I kept finding as I wrote the book, but also as I went on tour, and people will come up to me at the end of talks, and they'll say, "I identified with this book, because I've moved several times in my life. My parents, my grandparents moved." That sense of agency and hopeful opportunity. People always used to remark about this 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 on autonomy that the inability to move presents us with.
When we could move someplace new, it wasn't just about getting a new job. It was about, all of the key affiliations in your life were up for grabs. You could decide to attend a new church, to meet a new partner, to decide who you wanted to be, and that is the most fundamental American promise, that our identities are not defined at birth, that each of us has the chance to decide who we want to be in the world, and that whether you are born rich or poor, it does not consign you to die that way. And if we go back on the American promise, I think things get a whole lot worse, and dramatically quickly too.

Danny Crichton:
I'll add in real quick on the glass half empty. In New York, statistics from last month showed that more than a quarter of all homes were inherited in New York. They don't even hit the market in the first place. 28% were handed over in 2024 through a trust, which generally is within the family. And so, I mean, to me, when we talk about social mobility and the mobility of classes, being able to move up, sort of the classic American dream, as you sort of limit housing growth, particularly in cities, you would expect to see this in a more European style where homes are just handed down through families.
If you don't have access to that, there's really no way in, because there is nothing to be built to purchase in the first place, and the market shrinks a lot. But I always want to end on a happier note. So to sort of close up our conversation, obviously, a ton of negative things could be coming up, but people are trying to work on things. Your book is part of a slew of works that came out this year, your colleague Derek Thompson at The Atlantic alongside Ezra Klein, obviously, with Abundance.
We had the Abundance New York City folks on who are on community boards and are dealing with sort of the YIMBYism at the local level just a few weeks ago. I'm curious, when you started to think about the solution side of the equation here, where do you sort of start? There's a lot of ways to go about it, but if you were to say, "This is the right angle and lenses where I would begin to unstuck the stuck America," what would it be?

Yoni Applebaum:
Yeah. I should say I'm actually tremendously optimistic about the future. I wanted to paint the downside risks of continuing our algorithm path. They're real, but I actually think that things are trending in the right direction right now. There are three basic principles that I think people should follow here. I think we need much greater consistency in the rules. The rules should be clear, simple, direct about who gets to build what, where, and we should let people build, the technical term for this is, as of right. As long as you've read the rules and you're following the rules, you can just go and build.
That's how it used to work. And if you give people predictability like that 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 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. Right? 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 today in a 150-square-foot apartment. That's actually really small, 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 need access to different housing types. Our building codes and our zoning codes are much too prescriptive in this way. And so, it's like, if I want a single-family home, I'd like everyone around me to have a single-family home on a half acre lot that's 30 feet back from the street. And why? Right? Why do we need to do that? Why can't we say we can 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. We actually need that in our community. We need more opportunity. And the third is abundance, an overused word at the moment, but we've spent 50 years not building. The conservative estimate is 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. This is where I ask people not to believe their own lying eyes. Housing policy is weird like this. Many of your listeners have probably, at some point in their life, been told, "There's a housing crisis. We got to build here." A new building goes up. The next year, their rent goes up. The local housing prices go up, and they say, "Aha." New construction led to higher housing prices, or at the very least, new construction was not the answer to higher housing prices.
And that's the observed personal experience of a tremendous number of Americans, and that's because it's a teaspoon out of a bathtub full of need. You don't get the 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 that 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. It is possible to change it at a moment when not a lot of change is possible in American public policy. And then 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. We were having too many kids, and there was going to be a population bomb.
We're denuding the natural environment, and there would be no wild places left. And there were good reasons to be afraid of that in the 1960s and 1970s, 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. CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, did this particularly. Most of those cases are brought in dense urban areas.
That was a law that the lawmaker said was going to protect the last wild places in California, but it's actually used to block new housing where you'd want to put the housing, which incentivizes people to build that housing in the last wild places in California. It's had exactly the opposite of its intended effect. A younger generation sees this really differently. They see protecting the environment as building dense houses next to transit. That's good.
They see 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. It's a society that is stratifying itself. And if you ask people this, if you say, "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 and is really committed to changing it. So they can change it at the local level. They seem inclined to change it at the local level. And so, that's actually why I leave this conversation with a lot of optimism.

Danny Crichton:
Well, Yoni Appelbaum, author of Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, thank you so much for joining us.

Yoni Applebaum:
Thank you.

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