Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity

How did America cease to be the land of opportunity?

LONGLISTED FOR THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD

We take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are only accessible to the wealthy. But in America, this wasn’t always the case.

Though for most of world history, your prospects were tied to where you were born, Americans came up with a revolutionary idea: If you didn’t like your lot in life, you could find a better location and reinvent yourself there. Americans moved to new places with unprecedented frequency, and, for two hundred years, that remarkable mobility was the linchpin of American economic and social opportunity.

In this illuminating debut, Yoni Appelbaum, historian and journalist for The Atlantic, shows us that this idea has been under attack since reformers first developed zoning laws to ghettoize Chinese Americans in nineteenth-century Modesto, California. The century of legal segregation that ensued—from the zoning laws enacted to force Jewish workers back into New York’s Lower East Side to the private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in Flint, Michigan to Jane Jacobs’ efforts to protect her vision of the West Village—has raised housing prices, deepened political divides, emboldened bigots, and trapped generations of people in poverty. Appelbaum shows us that these problems have a common explanation: people can’t move as readily as they used to. They are, in a word, stuck.

Cutting through more than a century of mythmaking, Stuck tells a vivid, surprising story of the people and ideas that caused our economic and social sclerosis and lays out common-sense ways to get Americans moving again.

About the Author :
Yoni Appelbaum is a deputy executive editor of The Atlantic and a social and cultural historian of the United States. Before joining The Atlantic, he was a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University. He previously taught at Babson College and at Brandeis University, where he received his PhD in American history.

Review :
“Appelbaum is a lovely storyteller, and in this gentle book he emphasizes how much the historical ability of Americans to change their circumstances has depended on moving somewhere else.”—The New Yorker

“Insightful . . . compelling . . . [Appelbaum] skillfully blends zoning history with his own reportage.”—Los Angeles Times

“[A] fascinating new account of the decline in Americans’ geographic mobility.”—The Economist

“Appelbaum’s skill as a historian shines.”—City Journal

“Engagingly written.”—Harvard Business Review

“Fascinating. In this riveting story of mobility from the Puritans to the present, Stuck reinterprets American history and offers a key to reimagining a vibrant, more egalitarian, future.”—Heather Cox Richardson, author of Democracy Awakening

“In this vivid and troubling history, Yoni Appelbaum offers a provocative account of how immobility has contributed to the inequalities of income and wealth that are devastating the United States.”—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths

“At once a fascinating history and a blueprint for change, Stuck unravels a powerful and urgent story about the hidden forces that have shaped—and constrained—American opportunity. With gripping historical insight and sharp contemporary relevance, Yoni Appelbaum delivers a must-read work for anyone passionate about equity and the future of American mobility.”—Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Devil in the Grove

“Americans have always treasured the joys of moving, but Yoni Appelbaum brilliantly shows how that freedom has been strangled by zoning laws, racism and the misuse of building codes. Housing, he writes, 'has grown artificially scarce and prohibitively expensive.' Public anger and social divisions have embittered our politics. With verve and passion, Appelbaum champions a nation not only with more affordable housing but also with stronger communities and richer social connections. Stuck should provoke clearer thinking, more productive debate—and action.”—E.J. Dionne Jr., author of Why Americans Hate Politics and Our Divided Political Heart

“Yoni Appelbaum offers readers an essential lens for understanding opportunity in America. In a rich and deeply researched tour of the country’s social and economic trajectory, he illustrates that geographic mobility is dynamism—change embodied—and without it, we remain mired in the status quo.”—Clayton Page Aldern, author of The Weight of Nature and Homelessness Is a Housing Problem

“Appelbaum’s masterful new book traces the history of American ideas about the freedom to move, showing how mobility finally triumphed in law only to be sapped of practical possibility by a growing morass of local restrictions housing development. The story he tells is rich with ironies, perfectly timed, and surprisingly fun to read.”—Christopher Elmensdorf, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, University of California, Davis School of Law