Stuck, by Yoni Appelbaum

You can't move to opportunity when you can't find housing

Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Yoni Appelbaum, February 2025.

So how were zoning restrictions established in the first place?

In Stuck, Yoni Appelbaum describes the 19th-century restlessness of Americans in perpetual motion towards greater opportunity, and how it’s now been blocked by restrictions on housing. It’s an interesting perspective: I usually think of solving the housing shortage in Vancouver as allowing people to stay, instead of being pushed out by unbearably high housing costs.

Appelbaum is both a historian and an excellent writer, with a talent for vivid description. He summarizes: “On average, Americans moved far more often, over longer distances, and to greater advantage than did people in the lands from which they had come.” And they understood that this restlessness made them distinctive, a “migratory people.” In the late 19th and early 20th century, there was an annual Moving Day when huge numbers of people would all move at once, a cross between a chaotic festival and an instant moving chain. (This tradition continues in Montreal.)

For most of our history, a highly mobile population moved toward opportunity. When a place prospered, it quickly swelled with new arrivals.

Of course this mobility depended on an expanding supply of housing:

So long as speculators erected new buildings, so long as aging buildings were turned over to the rental market or split up into flats, so long as immigrant entrepreneurs built new tenements, renters in every segment of the market could reasonably expect to find a new home each year that in some respect exceeded their old.

What happened?

Throughout American history, American restlessness has coexisted with the desire to keep undesirable would-be neighbours at a distance, enforcing economic segregation by restricting or banning cheaper housing.

Appelbaum quotes Lawrence Veiller, a supposedly progressive tenement reformer who disliked apartments and sought to make them too difficult and costly to build for the working poor, under the pretense of fire safety.

“If we require multiple dwellings to be fireproof, and thus increase the cost of construction; if we require stairs to be fireproofed, even when there are only three families; if we require fire-escapes and a host of other things,” then, he continued, each of the rules could stand up in court, “and at the same time we have made it difficult to build apartment homes.”

Just in case anyone thought he was genuinely concerned about saving families from the threat of lethal conflagrations, he added one more piece of advice: “Allow our private houses and two-family houses to be built with almost no fire protection whatever.”

Appelbaum tells the story of how people battled to establish the institutions currently strangling housing supply in California and New York. In Berkeley in 1916, Charles Cheney (another opponent of apartments) created zoning restrictions to keep districts from being redeveloped for apartments.

In New York City in 1913, Edward Bassett created regulations to limit the height and size of buildings, and strategized to try to convince the courts to approve them despite their unconstitutionality. In 1922, while serving on a national committee appointed by Hoover, he produced draft state-level legislation (a “state enabling act”) to delegate land use decisions to local governments. This was the backdrop for the 1925 Supreme Court decision that Euclid, Ohio restricting the use of 68 acres of land was constitutional.

In the US, institutions are difficult to set up, but once they’re in place, they last a very long time.

I was more familiar with the final tightening of the screws that Appelbaum describes, the 1960s suspicion and mistrust of government (what Marc Dunkelman calls “Jeffersonian”) that resulted in government being paralyzed by protracted public consultation and judicial review. It’s difficult to remember that California being unaffordable isn’t a law of nature, it’s relatively recent:

No state embodied the promise of American mobility better than California. Throughout the twentieth century, most people living in California had been born someplace else. In the 1920s and 1930s, California was the fastest-growing state in the country. “California may keep right on urging homemakers to come here,” the Long Beach Press urged in 1921, “in full assurance that if millions of them came, this commonwealth would not be overcrowded.” And millions did. The state’s population increased by more than half in the 1940s, by nearly half in the 1950s, and by a quarter in the 1960s. Over the half a century between 1920 and 1970, California’s population quintupled, from 3.4 million to 20 million.

Construction boomed to keep pace with the new arrivals. Between 1950 and 1960 alone, California increased its housing stock by more than 50 percent, constructing nearly two million new units. All that development kept the state affordable, despite the surge in population. By 1970, the median house in California sold for $24,300. That was roughly in line with the national average, and just two and a half times the median income. Adjusted for inflation, that translates to about $197,000 today.

Appelbaum describes how Robert Fellmeth, a young law student who was one of “Nader’s Raiders,” led a group that attacked local governments and state agencies in California, producing a lengthy report aimed at halting development. When Appelbaum talked to Fellmeth 50 years later, he had no regrets.

Recommendations

So what should be done?

America faces not an affordable housing crisis—houses remain remarkably cheap in economically depressed regions—but a mobility crisis. The loss of mobility is experienced as a loss of agency, a loss of opportunity, a loss of dignity, a loss of hope. Building subsidized housing in a place with few jobs will help solve the problem of affordability, but it will only worsen the loss of mobility.

Appelbaum identifies three guiding principles:

• Tolerance, instead of micromanagement.

• Consistency. “Rules work best when they apply uniformly and predictably over the widest possible geographic areas. Zoning’s original sin, in Modesto, was to announce that a specific use of the land was odious in most of the city but perfectly fine in one particular neighborhood” - the logic of confining people to a ghetto.

• Building more housing where demand is highest.

I thought this capsule history of housing policy in Japan was particularly interesting:

Japan passed a raft of laws in the late 1960s and early 1970s tightening environmental review and delegating planning authority to local communities, just like the United States, and citizen activists turned to the courts to defend the public interest, winning significant victories. By the 1990s, rising demand to live in prosperous urban areas was inflating housing prices and rents. To that point, New York City and Tokyo were on parallel trajectories.

But zoning works differently in Japan. Although local jurisdictions decide which zoning designations to apply where, the 12 categories they can apply are defined by the national Building Standards Law (BSL). Japan’s economic struggles convinced the national government that the lack of affordable housing needed to be addressed, even if that meant overriding local objections to development. It made a series of technical changes to the BSL categories, beginning in the mid-1990s, that loosened restrictions. Since 2000, the housing stock in Tokyo has expanded roughly four times as fast as in New York, even as new units have grown larger, slowing the rise of prices in the central city while limiting it even more sharply in the outlying areas.

More

• How Progressives Froze the American Dream. “The U.S. was once the world’s most geographically mobile society. Now we’re stuck in place—and that’s a very big problem.” A long excerpt published in the Atlantic.

• D.C. needs housing. Why has it taken 25 years to build on this parking lot? Aaron Wiener, Washington Post, April 2025.

• Stuck! The Law and Economics of Residential Stagnation. David Schleicher, 2017.

• Marc Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works.