Is America’s “housing crisis” really a “mobility crisis”?

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DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. In the late Eighteen Hundreds and early Nineteen Hundreds in the United States, there was a holiday in cities around the country that you might not be familiar with.

YONI APPELBAUM: Moving Day.

DAN RICHARDS: That's Yoni Appelbaum. He's a historian, deputy executive editor at The Atlantic magazine, and author of the new book, Stuck, how the privileged and the propertied broke the engine of American opportunity. And as he describes Moving Day, while it happened on different days in different cities around the country, the story was often the same.

YONI APPELBAUM: All unwritten leases in a particular jurisdiction would expire on the same day, and people would get up and move a quarter or a third, half the inhabitants.

DAN RICHARDS: Half the inhabitants.

YONI APPELBAUM: In some cities, in some years, yes, would pick up and move between sunup and sundown. They'd pile all their belongings by the curb. They'd flag down a cartman, stow it all in the back of the cart, try to keep everything from falling out, arrive at some other house or apartment, jostle past the family that was in the process of moving out, and move into their new residence.

DAN RICHARDS: Moving was and continues to be a giant pain. And as he writes, a lot of the people who moved on Moving Day maybe didn't have to. So why did so many people move so frequently?

YONI APPELBAUM: The magic of Moving Day was that almost everybody who moved ended up better off than they had started because new units were constantly being built. The rich could move into new luxury homes as we think of them today, vacating their old residences. The upper middle class could move into those houses and so on down the line.

Historians can trace 10, 12, 15 moves in a chain, each family moving into a unit that one family slightly above them on the income spectrum had vacated. And so you find Americans, as they get up on Moving Day and move, ending up better off than they had started that morning.

DAN RICHARDS: And it wasn't just better houses with nicer amenities that compelled people to pack up their belongings and try something new.

YONI APPELBAUM: Sometimes it was leaving a declining region in favor of a thriving one. Sometimes they're pushing west. They're also looking at urbanization. They're looking at all kinds of opportunities. And so there's this extraordinary burst of mobility, and along with it comes a kind of social mobility. You know, you can move from one side of the tracks to the other side of the tracks and change the trajectory of your life.

DAN RICHARDS: Americans still move, of course, but not as frequently as they did back then. In the 19th century, approximately 1 in 3 Americans moved every year. In the year Twenty Twenty-Three, it was 1 in 13 Americans. And as Yoni argues in his book, this change has had profound and negative consequences, not just for individuals and families looking for opportunities, but for our economy and society as a whole.

So why did we stop moving? And how really does this shape our society today? And if it is as big a problem as Yoni claims, what might be done to make America a more mobile country once again? To answer these questions, Yoni tells a story that spans centuries and crisscrosses the continent, and I guarantee it will make you see our country's history and the place you call home in a new light.

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Yoni Appelbaum, thank you so much for coming on to Trending Globally.

YONI APPELBAUM: Oh, I'm delighted to be here.

DAN RICHARDS: So your book explores, you know, why fewer Americans are moving today like geographically moving than they have in much of our history, and why this is also so devastating for American society and our economy and just people's well-being.

And so I wonder if we could start with, historically, why is being able to move to change your house or your city such an important part of America's social and economic kind of promise for its citizens?

YONI APPELBAUM: It's such a great question, and I think to really grasp it, you've got to take a step back and start actually not on the shore of the Atlantic but on the other. In the old world, most identities were inherited at birth. You were born into a place, a spot in the social hierarchy, a physical geographic location, generally where your family had resided for generations. You expect it to live there your whole life. You expected your children and your grandchildren to live there after you. You had a fixed place in society. And for most people, it wasn't a terribly good place in society.

When people come to the New World, they expect to recreate the same sorts of social hierarchies that had existed in the old. And in some ways, they're successful at that. But that act of moving, the physical relocation to this side of the Atlantic changed the possibilities that people had in front of them. They were redefining their own identities. They were creating new associations. They were able to join new kinds of groups and organizations to take on new roles, instead of their identities being inherited.

Slowly, over time, they gained the agency to construct their own identities. That became the motive force of American society. It was the thing that people who came over from Europe noticed first when they got here, and it was the way that Americans came to define their own identity, that we were a migratory people, that through our ceaseless relocations, we were creating a new kind of society in which people, at least some of them, were able to forge for themselves their own identities instead of simply being stuck with the ones that they had inherited.

DAN RICHARDS: Right and, you know, of course, there were many people who came to America who did not have the sort of ability to move that many Europeans did. And there were many people who lived here long before Europeans arrived. But what Europeans coming to the US experienced was a real change, and it was new compared to the European societies that many American immigrants had come from.

YONI APPELBAUM: Yes, like most American liberties, it was unevenly enjoyed at best. And you can see the importance of mobility through the ways in which those who enjoyed it strived ceaselessly to deny it to others. So mobility itself becomes one of the key axes of inequality in America.

But like other American liberties, it gradually enlarges over time, unevenly, hesitatingly, sometimes moves in the wrong direction. But people can test for the freedom to move because they can see how central it is to success in America.

DAN RICHARDS: There's so much wonderful history and data that you kind of unpack in the book as you paint this picture of a mobile America and what's gained from it, including Moving Day, the holiday of yore. But there was really-- there was one example that really stood out to me in the book. You recount of a young child who was born in Kentucky in Eighteen Oh Nine.

YONI APPELBAUM: Yeah, he's right at the cusp of this revolution of mobility. He's got a one parent from Virginia, another from New England.

DAN RICHARDS: So already they had moved.

YONI APPELBAUM: They're moving and they go out and claim land in Kentucky. The land was there just as fast as you could dispossess the rightful owners. And they lay this claim to land in Kentucky. But it doesn't work out for them because everybody's filing their own claims and the title is contested. So they go and they settle on another farm in Kentucky, and the title is wiped out there, too.

The young boy follows his father out to Indiana, and they thrive in Indiana. And here's where it gets interesting because in Indiana, they're thriving and they move anyway. This was the thing that really drove the Europeans nuts. They said, how come you're not satisfied with what you have? What is wrong with Americans that you always think you can get something more?

But Americans didn't see it that way. They saw the relocations as a chance to reach, to strive, to attain something more than they had been given. And they really thought that that was how the world ought to work. So they move one more time to Illinois. And it is in a small town in Illinois that this boy, Abraham Lincoln, comes of age, and he'll move to Springfield and then ultimately to Washington.

His life would not have been possible. We would not have President Lincoln except for the extraordinary mobility of Americans of his era.

DAN RICHARDS: So it's an incredible portrait you paint of this country on the move. But I want to move now towards what began as kind of the backlash against this mobility. And you write how in many ways that started towards the end of the 19th century.

And one figure you focus on and who had really tremendous effects on this is an architect living in and working in California in the early Nineteen Hundreds named Charles Chaney. So who was Charles Chaney and what role did he play in beginning to kind of clamp down on American mobility?

YONI APPELBAUM: Charles Chaney is an architect in Berkeley, California. He's living in a state which for 150 years was remarkable in America, that most of its residents were born elsewhere in the United States. So California is this magnet for people who are moving toward opportunity.

Berkeley starts thriving. People discover that they can live in Berkeley and commute back to San Francisco. At first, it's relatively affluent people who do this. Soon, working men want in on this too, and Chaney is a little bit horrified.

DAN RICHARDS: As Yoni explained, this transformation of Chaney's beloved Berkeley, California was symbolized by the new types of housing being built to accommodate these new residents, specifically apartment buildings.

YONI APPELBAUM: He does not want Berkeley to be a city with apartment buildings. Specifically he's horrified because somebody has built an apartment building just down the street from him.

DAN RICHARDS: Cheney believed that people like him, people living in single family homes in neighborhoods made up of single family homes, should be able to refuse the construction of apartment buildings in their communities. However, that wasn't really how things worked in the early 20th century.

YONI APPELBAUM: In Nineteen Ten, if I put a tannery or a brickyard next to your house, you can file a complaint and say, you're harming me, and you can demonstrate the harm that is coming from that industrial use.

DAN RICHARDS: Like pollution or you messed up the water.

YONI APPELBAUM: Yeah, exactly, right? This has a deleterious effect on my health, and you need to either mitigate the harm or relocate the activity. That's how land use law had worked. It had worked so that it was the same everywhere within a municipality, and it guarded against actual harms.

And so he has a problem, which is that there is nothing wrong with apartment buildings. They're not a legal nuisance. But Cheney sees that zoning can guard against things that are not harms, merely dislikes.

DAN RICHARDS: Zoning. The word might conjure in your mind a collection of arcane rules and legalese. But bear with us because, as Yoni explains, the rise of modern zoning, the highly detailed, prescriptive rules in municipalities that govern exactly what can be built where in a town or city, the formation of these types of rules and laws plays a central role in the story of America's declining mobility and prosperity.

Now, the first experiment with modern zoning occurred in another part of California a few decades before Cheney became interested in the power of this legal tool.

YONI APPELBAUM: In a small town called Modesto, where residents were looking for a tool to force the Chinese out of town, and they hit on land use law as a convenient way to get around the federal courts, which won't let them discriminate on the basis of race.

DAN RICHARDS: Instead of creating laws segregating Chinese residents into certain parts of the city, they identified a type of business that many Chinese residents ran, laundromats, and made those illegal to operate in most of the city. A few decades later in Berkeley, Charles Cheney learns about the kind of rules implemented in Modesto.

YONI APPELBAUM: And says, you know, we could really do something with this. And he gets the state legislature to pass a new law, which enables Berkeley to drop its own zoning ordinance. And when Berkeley does that, he creates a new kind of zoning ordinance, an ordinance that says there will be neighborhoods in Berkeley that only allow single family homes. Nobody else had done this because the other people who have been drafting zoning ordinances were lawyers, and they knew that it contravened all manner of precedent.

DAN RICHARDS: The US government historically had little say over what types of buildings you could put on your own property. However, cultural tides were shifting in California and the US, and through some legal wrangling--

YONI APPELBAUM: Cheney goes for broke here, and ultimately he's successful.

DAN RICHARDS: Starting in Nineteen Sixteen, parts of Berkeley, California could be zoned exclusively for single family residences. Soon, zoning laws like those in Berkeley become a standard feature of cities and towns across America, despite the fact that many experts were still arguing that such zoning was unconstitutional.

YONI APPELBAUM: It becomes so pervasive so quickly that the courts are reluctant to strike it down. So you have this sort of remarkable effect where something which is now a ubiquitous feature of the American landscape, comes into legal legitimacy in just the span of a decade.

DAN RICHARDS: So by the Nineteen Thirties, as you write, cities, and towns across the country have adopted zoning, often as an effort to segregate people under the guise of sort of segregating different types of housing and building uses. And it makes it a lot harder, especially for new buildings, to get built in wealthier, whiter communities. And then this segregation gets sort of turbocharged.

And, you know, what's really surprising about this next sort of chapter you explore in this story is that it comes from, of all places, the New Deal, specifically the work of the Federal Housing Administration. You write in the book that the Federal Housing Administration, which was established by FDR's part of the New Deal in Nineteen Thirty-Four, you wrote that it, quote, "Declared a war on diversity, on mobility and on change itself, and as having an effect on American life as profound as that of any program the federal government has ever undertaken."

Make the case for us. Why is the creation of the Federal Housing authority the most important government initiative that most of us don't know anything about?

YONI APPELBAUM: Yeah, and it's not our popular image of FDR, and in part it's unintended. What happens here is that there is a banking crisis with the Great Depression. And one reason that banks are failing is that people are defaulting on their mortgages, and so people are walking away from the mortgages en masse. Unless FDR can stop them from walking away from the mortgages, he can't solve America's banking crisis.

So his new dealers take a look at the problem. And they say the fundamental issue here is that it's cheaper for people to rent houses right now than it is for them to pay their mortgages. But we need to do is to lower the monthly mortgage payments down to the level that they're less than rent. So they do that. They do that by stretching out the terms of the loan to 20 years to 30 years.

By lowering the down payment, they make paying your monthly mortgage cheaper than renting the same house. It's a clever solution, but it comes with a critical flaw. Congress isn't actually appropriating a lot of funds for this. You can't afford to lose on these mortgages that are now going to be federally refinanced and then federally insured.

And so the federal government says we're going to be on the hook for the whole housing market, but housing in America has always been extremely volatile. Neighborhoods rise and neighborhoods fall. Cities boom and they go bust. We don't want that. That's going to leave us holding the bag on tons of mortgages that are worth less than the borrower originally took out.

What we need to do is to stabilize housing across the whole country, so that won't happen anymore. But that meant, as I write, stabilizing change, right? It meant freezing people in place.

DAN RICHARDS: The FHA decided what neighborhoods were mortgage worthy and what neighborhoods were not. Neighborhoods would no longer rise and fall quite like they had. The ones on the rise would keep rising, and the ones that were falling would, well And this freezing of a neighborhood's fortunes was particularly destructive for Black Americans. The FHA, after all--

YONI APPELBAUM: They're distilling the wisdom of the local real estate community, which had already been discriminating in its lending. But it is one thing for a local bank or a local realtor to discriminate. It is something else, again, when it becomes a matter of federal policy because it ossifies these changes. They get very, very difficult to push against. And it means that even as other aspects of our society change, this kind of spatial segregation is going to prove incredibly stubborn.

In some instances, the FHA practiced a much more explicit form of segregation. The FHA is quite explicit about this that they weren't going to loan unless you put a racial covenant on the property, keeping the property permanently within the race that then occupied it.

DAN RICHARDS: Despite the creation of single family zoning laws, racist lending practices, and many other tools of exclusion that were invented by the well-off and propertied in the 20th century, in the first half of the Nineteen Hundreds, Americans still moved in increasingly large numbers, even among historically marginalized and geographically restricted groups like Black Americans. It was seemingly a force that could not be stopped. And then it was.

YONI APPELBAUM: In the 19th century, probably one out of three Americans is moving every year. As late as Nineteen Seventy, it's one out of five. We just got new numbers from the census. It's down to 1 out of 13. It's been a continuous 50-year slide in American mobility, and if anything, it is accelerating.

DAN RICHARDS: So what happened in the Nineteen Seventies?

YONI APPELBAUM: There is a sharp turn against big government, and that will be familiar to many listeners. But the turn I'm actually talking about is a turn that the left takes against big government.

DAN RICHARDS: Yoni is talking about a new wave of progressivism that swept across the United States in the Nineteen Seventies, focused on fighting corruption and collusion between big business and the government.

YONI APPELBAUM: So Rachael Carson writes a book called Silent Spring about how the chemical industry has run roughshod other regulations is poisoning all the birds. And Ralph Nader writes a book called Unsafe at Any Speed about how the same thing has happened with auto safety regulation.

And that perspective that government has sort of gotten away from advancing the public interest is a good diagnosis of a real problem. The solution that the left applies to this though is to empower local communities and local activists to challenge government decisions they don't like. They put in place a wide variety of community hearings and procedural reviews that are necessary to issue permits that are intended to help government balance the harms against the gains. And they think that they are making the world a better place.

But the sum total of all of those new regulatory requirements is that activists who are trying to defend the public interest, instead hand a veto to anybody with the education and the money and the time to object to something that the government has done and because all real estate development is a matter of government approval because of zoning, it makes it almost impossible to build.

DAN RICHARDS: Why were progressives so opposed to building things, you might ask? Often, blocking the construction of houses, of developments, of infrastructure projects was seen as a strategy for obtaining more familiar progressive values.

YONI APPELBAUM: The goals that these activists had were things like reducing overdevelopment in green spaces. The actual outcome of their changes has been to make it almost impossible to build in dense downtowns, which has pushed development out into green spaces. So they have accelerated sprawl, which was exactly what these legal changes were intended to constrain. It has had the opposite of the intended effect.

They thought that they were going to drive a big blow for equity, but they're actually making neighborhoods less equitable because it's the richest neighborhoods that have proven most effective at using the tools and keeping people out. The poorest neighborhoods were the least desirable land uses tend to concentrate.

You can go right down the list like this. The changes in the Nineteen Seventies were intended to advance progressive goals, and I happen to think those were good goals. But the tools that they used to do it, those were fundamentally mistaken.

DAN RICHARDS: But they were effective. As Yoni described, a smaller percentage of Americans are moving today than they have at any time in our country's history. American social and economic mobility has declined in that same period, and income inequality has grown. Increasingly, the data is starting to confirm something that many Americans have long known.

DAN RICHARDS: If you ask people where they want to live or you observe the choices that they're making, they are preponderantly going to places which offer them economic opportunity, which offer their children better prospects in life. It's the most important thing you can choose as a parent. It's more important than how you sleep, train your kid or what books you read to them. The single greatest determinant of their odds of success in life is geographic location, where you choose to raise them.

Parents intuit this. They want to move to places with opportunity for 200 years. That's what Americans did. Americans are now priced out of those places.

DAN RICHARDS: But it's not just a housing affordability crisis.

YONI APPELBAUM: Really what we've got is a mobility crisis. Reporting this book, I spent a lot of time in Flint, Michigan, walking around talking to residents. The housing is really affordable in Flint. It's so affordable that they are tearing down homes. They, in fact, don't have enough money to tear down the homes fast enough. You can move to Flint and move into one of those abandoned homes tomorrow. It's not where people want to live.

DAN RICHARDS: According to Yoni, this hasn't just changed the economic prospects of many Americans. It's also changed our politics and our culture. And even, by some measures, our collective psyche.

YONI APPELBAUM: There's a great study done by some University of Chicago psychologist who went and they asked people, do you intend to move in the next year or the next five years? And then they went and followed up. The ones who moved grew more optimistic. They reached out and invested in their communities. They joined organizations. They formed new friendships. They moved up economically, but they also saw their own economic success as advancing in tandem with that of those around them.

The people who were stuck, they had a very different reaction. They grew more cynical, more alienated. They withdrew from many of their associations with others, and they started to see the world as a zero sum game, where other's gains came at their own expense.

Immobility gives birth to a politics of grievance, to an orientation toward life that sees outsiders as threatening. And it tends to breed a kind of a cynicism. I think you can see these forces strongly at work in the contemporary United States.

DAN RICHARDS: Something I'm curious how you think about too is that, you know, there are European countries that have higher levels of social mobility than the United States without having the amount of geographic mobility we have had at other points, which makes me think, you know, could the US find a way to social and economic mobility without this geographic mobility? Like, do we have examples for that?

YONI APPELBAUM: Yeah, maybe we could pull that off. You know, there are two basic ways to structure an advanced economy. One way is with the assumption of stasis. You sort of assume that if a worker loses their job in Stuttgart, they're going to stay in Stuttgart.

DAN RICHARDS: Germany.

YONI APPELBAUM: Yeah. So Germany has really robust employment insurance. It tries to keep workers from getting laid off in the first place. It then takes economic gains from thriving parts of Germany and redistributes them to the economically struggling regions because it assumes that people are going to stay roughly where they are born, and that you have to do this in order to achieve an equitable society.

But there are real downsides to that approach, too. Most of the countries that try that end up with relatively high rates of unemployment, relatively lower rates of technological innovation, many of the things that Americans say they prize about their own society are at odds with that approach.

America traditionally pursued the other option, which was to build a really dynamic society, knowing that it would create dislocations, knowing that there were real trade offs here, but that people who lost their job in one place could move toward a new opportunity, an industry that was rising instead of falling.

So America opted for economic dynamism and a weak social safety net. Europe opted for a greater degree of economic stasis and a stronger social safety net. What we have presently produced in the United States is the worst of both worlds. We have European levels of stasis and American levels of penury. Like, we do not provide a strong social safety net.

DAN RICHARDS: I want to talk some about what this all looks like today and where this kind of history has brought us. And one way you do that in the book is by looking at one particular proposed development in Takoma Park, Maryland, just outside of Washington, DC that has been in process for a long time. And it kind of shows how so many of these strands of zoning issues and environmental issues have woven together to make it hard to create the type of housing you think Americans need, this country needs.

But you also sort of look at how maybe we're seeing the seeds of a transformation more recently in this particular development battle. So could you describe a little bit of the saga that has been occurring in Takoma Park, Maryland?

YONI APPELBAUM: Yeah, this is not far from where I live. When they built the metro station in Takoma Park, they thought it was going to be the end of the line, and they built an enormous parking lot next to it so that commuters could come in and park there. Then they extended the red line further out, and so they had an enormous parking lot that almost nobody was using.

And some clever executive for the metro said, you know, this would be a great place to develop and put some housing. It's right next to a transit station. The developer can come in and build housing that people really, really want. That proposal was 25 years ago.

I went to a recent hearing about the latest iteration of this proposal, which a woman stood up and said, you know, I was here to testify against this proposal for the first time in 25 years ago, and I'm still here today to testify against it. She looks at this and says it's out of keeping with the character of our community. We don't want dense development. We're mostly a neighborhood of single family homes. Developers are going to get rich off of this, and she has many reasons for opposing it.

DAN RICHARDS: Her opposition to the project object echoed some of the arguments that have been made against similar projects since the Nineteen Seventies. However, recently new voices have come out in support of the project.

YONI APPELBAUM: A new generation of local residents showed up that night to testify in favor. And you really see a big generational split, even among or maybe especially among progressives on these issues. The activists of the baby boom generation saw growth as America's greatest problem.

Those of younger generations tend to see a lack of growth as a bigger problem. Both generations care about the environment. The baby boom tended to see development as despoiling the environment. Younger generations tend to see global warming as the greatest threat to the environment and transit oriented development as a potential solution.

The baby boomers worried about greedy developers coming in and profiting off their communities. Younger generations tend to worry about the lack of affordable housing in their communities, and so it's the same set of values that both generations are embracing. But you see this big generational split about how to go about implementing those values.

DAN RICHARDS: And the effects of this generational shift are starting to be seen in places like Takoma Park.

YONI APPELBAUM: That development is ultimately now 25 years in going to go ahead.

DAN RICHARDS: A phrase that has been used to describe this sort of opposition to building that many listeners might be familiar with is nimbyism, which stands for not in my backyard. And kind of what you're pointing to here is a newer development or movement that has entered into sort of these debates in the last decade or decade and a half, which is nimbyism, yes, in my backyard, to vote in favor of development and push against people who oppose it.

I wonder, what do you think of that phrase and that concept of, yes, in my backyard?

YONI APPELBAUM: What I like about the yimby movement is that it is fundamentally oriented toward a hopeful vision of the future, a vision in which allowing people to move into your community leaves everybody better off. I write in the book about a house I used to pass every day, which had two lawn signs. One said, everyone is welcome here. It said in like three languages. And the sign next to it said, no new development.

DAN RICHARDS: On the same house, same property?

YONI APPELBAUM: Same house, same property, right? And I think lots of people have had that experience of driving through a neighborhood that says we're welcoming. We're tolerant. We're diverse. Don't build. And there's a fundamental contradiction there. There are a lot of downsides to new construction. There are trade offs inherent in these choices, but I think that we need to think about those trade offs, not in terms of building but in terms of people.

If you say, do I want an apartment building built next to my single family home? No, I'd rather that didn't happen. There would be a lot of construction noise. I would lose some sunlight. Parking would be a pain in the neck. I would lose a lot, right?

But if you ask the same question a different way, if you say, would you like American politics to return to normal? Do you want to live in a community where the daycare workers and the firefighters who are serving people in that community can raise their own kids in that community?

Do you want to be in a community, which is open to people of diverse faiths and backgrounds, or do you want to be in a homogeneous community? Do you want young families to be able to move in, or is this a community only for people who are lucky enough to buy 20 years ago?

Ask Americans those questions, and I know this because pollsters have asked them those questions, and you get a radically different set of responses. When the conversation ceases to be about buildings and starts to be about people, Americans say, yeah, I want all of those things, and I'm willing to trade that.

DAN RICHARDS: So, how should we think about achieving this balance, though? Like, should we just declare a nationwide mobility emergency and abolish zoning and historic preservation and anything that makes it hard to build anywhere? And, you know, if you want to build a skyscraper right in the middle of a historic neighborhood, like go for it? It needs to be allowed?

And if not, what do you think are the sort of steps we need to take? And how do you think about the trade offs that might be involved in them?

YONI APPELBAUM: I think that if you look at places which are developing enough housing to house their workforce to keep it affordable, to allow people to move to opportunity, they tend to apply much simpler rules over much broader geographic areas. Japan, for example, has a dozen zoning designations that apply over the whole country.

Local communities can choose which of those labels to apply to which places, but the rules are set at the national level, and it does two really nice things. One is it places some boundaries on local flexibility. A rich community can't just say, look, all the homes need to be on 10 acre lots. They need to be set back this much from the street. You can write lots of rules that effectively say you have to be a millionaire to live here.

But if you're setting them at the state level or at the national level, you can place guidelines that don't allow wealthy communities to do that. And that would be really, really beneficial. The other thing we need to do is get a lot more tolerant of diversity in housing types.

The housing that worked for me when I was fresh out of school is really different than the housing that works for me today. I have a lovely single family home. It works for me and my family right now. It may not work for me in 20 years when the stairs become really challenging. So we need to legalize a much greater variety of housing.

We keep trying to ban relatively poor housing as a way of addressing poverty, and all that it has done is produced an enormous homelessness crisis. And, you know, it would be good to tackle poverty, but at the very least, you have to give people some secure housing options, and that is actually often the most effective way to tackle poverty, to allow people to be housed securely and to climb their own way out.

And then the last principle we need to solve is abundance. We have spent 50 years digging ourselves into this hole, and we're going to have to build an awful lot of housing to get out of it. And I say that because I think many people have had the experience of seeing a new building go up in their neighborhood and being told, this will help with housing prices.

And then the next year, that new luxury condo building opens and the housing prices go up even more. And they say, well, that didn't do anything, right? In fact, building luxury housing, I can see with the evidence of my own eyes, has only driven up prices and further gentrified my neighborhood. Let's stop building entirely.

It's like a game of musical chairs. If you add one chair to a circle which is crowded with way too many players, there still isn't enough place to sit. People will still dash for the chairs that are most attractive to them. But if you put out more chairs than there are players, suddenly the equation changes.

And so we're in an atmosphere 100 years ago where there was abundant housing. We've gone to a place where housing has become a really scarce asset, and we need to get back to a place where housing is abundant.

DAN RICHARDS: These types of changes would require a real change in how many Americans over the last 50 years have come to view their homes and communities. But Yoni makes a compelling case that while we may dislike some of the changes a more mobile America would usher in, we would get even more in return.

YONI APPELBAUM: Mobility is part of what gave us many of our defining American creeds. It's part of what made Americans inveterately optimistic. It's part of what gave us an orientation toward the future, a belief that tomorrow could be better than today, and a willingness to live alongside others of diverse other backgrounds, and to see their gains as part of a broader American project in which we were all gaining.

So I want to restore mobility, not just because it gives the people who exercise it better lives, but because it gives all of us a better country to live in.

DAN RICHARDS: Yoni Appelbaum, thank you so much for coming and talking with us about your book.

YONI APPELBAUM: Thank you.

DAN RICHARDS: This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards, and Zach Hirsch. We had production assistance from Eric Emma. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. Additional music by the Blue Dot Sessions. If you like this show, be sure to leave us a rating and review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps others to find us.

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