Americans were once encouraged to “Go West, young man.” Now, people are increasingly sticking to their own, familiar neighborhoods. Yoni Applebaum is deputy executive editor of The Atlantic and author of “Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.” He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss how a decline in geographic mobility has reshaped the last 50 years – and his theory that it’s affecting our nation’s ingenuity and prosperity. His Atlantic companion piece is “Stuck in Place.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] Most Americans are descended from people who picked up and moved to the United States in search of better lives. If they themselves aren’t the ones who immigrated. For a long time as a society, we maintained those peripatetic impulses. Americans frequently changed neighborhoods or cities or even states in search of better homes, schools, and jobs. As recently as 1961, out of every five Americans could be expected to change addresses in any given year. But by 2023, that number had plummeted to just 1 in 13. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think I’m Krys Boyd. There are multiple reasons why our geographic mobility has declined. And if you’re thriving where you are, you may see no reason to undertake the trouble of relocating. But millions of us are not thriving. Economic mobility is moving in the wrong direction for many Americans, and my guest believes that our falling rates of geographic mobility are both a cause and a symptom of these trends. Yoni Applebaum is deputy executive director of The Atlantic and author of “Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.” Yoni, welcome to Think.
Yoni Applebaum [00:01:09] So glad to be with you.
Krys Boyd [00:01:10] Everybody is familiar with the Nation of Immigrants way of defining this country, but for a long time we were recognized throughout the world as a society that embraced domestic migration. And it wasn’t just westward expansion, was it?
Yoni Applebaum [00:01:24] Yeah. We are a nation of migrants. People in America moved a lot in the 19th century. Probably one out of three Americans moved every year, and they moved in search of better opportunities, better housing and new lives. And that really was the key to the American character. At least that’s what Americans felt. That’s what the Europeans who came over and sort of gawked at our remarkable mobility felt that there was something very strange about America in that people had the ability to move to new places and to chart their own destinies.
Krys Boyd [00:01:58] How did all that geographic mobility shape American culture?
Yoni Applebaum [00:02:02] It really mixed things up. In the United States, people had the opportunity not to be defined as they too often were in the Old world by the circumstances of their birth. Instead of inheriting their identities. Not just the place they lived, but the religion that they adhered to, their occupation, their place in the social hierarchy. In the U.S., people had the chance to pick up and move someplace new and start over. And to decide what kinds of communities they wanted to join. And that mixing made America a uniquely pluralistic place because we were constantly mixing the population. Americans had to figure out how to live alongside people who were really different from them. And although that was often a painful process and sometimes a violent process, it created a remarkable degree of pluralism and diversity. It also made America a really dynamic economy. All that picking up and moving meant that we were a more entrepreneurial people, and that Americans climbed the economic ladder. It was for a long time, much more possible in this country for children to jump out income brackets or occupational brackets and do better than their parents had done.
Krys Boyd [00:03:17] You mentioned pluralism. Americans also had a way of defining individualism that sounded really different than the way we define it now.
Yoni Applebaum [00:03:25] Yeah, American individualism did not mean that we were an atomized society. The Europeans who came over and looked at us made two key observations over and over again. They said, gosh, these Americans are moving an awful lot, and we’re not really comfortable with that. They’re not content with their lot in life. They’re always trying for something better. And the other thing they said was American communities are really vibrant and we’re really jealous of that. But they decided not to put those two sides of the coin together. The reason that our communities were so vibrant was that we defined our individual identities through the communities that we chose to join to. For 200 years, America’s been the only place on earth where most people don’t grow up to be members of the churches into which they were born. We switch. And that’s true of many aspects of our identities. We’re individuals in the sense that we define our individual identities through our communal affiliations.
Krys Boyd [00:04:20] I had never heard of this holiday known as Moving Day, and now I’m kind of obsessed with it. Yoni, can you explain what this was?
Yoni Applebaum [00:04:27] You know, it was a day when when people in a particular place would swap homes. What happened was that all unwritten leases and almost all leases were unwritten, expired on the same day. It’d be a different day in different places. May 1st, April 15th, November 1st. Different cities, different rural areas observed it differently, but all the leases would expire and a quarter, a third, even half the population would move between the sun up and sundown. They’d pile their belongings on the curb. They’d flag down a cartman. They’d take their belongings across town and move into some new apartment. And the magic of moving day, the reason that Americans stuck to this ritual was that it gave the renters and and the purchasers of homes a tremendous amount of power. The landlords had to fill those apartments on moving day, and they could bargain with their landlords for repairs or enhancements to where they were living, or they could bump up a little bit. And and because we were always adding supply at the top of the market, the rich families would move into sparkling new town homes or beautiful apartments, and the upper middle class would move into the homes that they vacated and so on down the line. You can trace 10, 12, 15 moves in a chain, each family doing a little bit better than they had on the previous year.
Krys Boyd [00:05:43] And of course, in the 19th century, all this new technology meant all new comforts were available in rental housing with each passing year, right? Can you talk about the kinds of amenities that people felt like it was worth moving for?
Yoni Applebaum [00:05:55] You know, Americans used to look at homes not as their largest investment or something that should appreciate over time. They looked at them the way many Americans today look at a cell phone or a car. You know, you get the one that’s got all the latest bells and whistles, and then you upgrade in a couple of years. Our homes are still full of technological innovations, but as we become more sedentary, we often move into a home with a freshly renovated kitchen, for example. And then we’ve still got the same amenities 20 years later. We no longer regularly upgrade the homes in which we live, and and many Americans no longer are as well positioned to take advantage of technological innovation.
Krys Boyd [00:06:32] I have to say I find the prospect of moving across town exhausting, but people were doing this annually at a time when I imagine most people probably had far less stuff to haul around than we do today.
Yoni Applebaum [00:06:44] Yeah, some of them had less stuff. And there were other changes in the 19th century that made moving a little bit easier. You can find lots of people grousing about the 19th century. Moving, I’ve never found it fun. I’ve never wanted to move. But the question isn’t like, is this really fun? It’s a little bit like exercise. I never want to get off the couch and go for a jog. But the doctors tell me that I should be doing that so much more than I am. And when I do it, I feel really good afterwards. I get all these benefits out of it. And that’s what moving did for Americans. It’s not that they necessarily were really excited about the idea of piling all of their worldly goods in a wagon and going across town every year. It’s that they could see the benefits that they got out of putting themselves through the hassle. And as long as they had the opportunity to do it, they continued to think that trade off was worth it.
Krys Boyd [00:07:35] And I guess in terms of all this new housing going up all the time, it maybe helped that there were not a lot of regulations around zoning or around housing construction.
Yoni Applebaum [00:07:44] Yeah, that was the really key difference between theirs and ours. When people wanted to move to a particular village, town, city, they would relocate there and people would build housing to accommodate them. Because developers then and now wanted to make a profit, and if the demand was there, they would put up the housing to meet the demand. What has changed is that we’ve made it harder and harder over time to build in this country by giving neighbors the chance to effectively veto new development. And as we’ve done that, the prices of housing in the places that offer Americans the best opportunities keep going up. And I think many people have seen this in their own lives. Maybe they’ve tried to move someplace and been priced out. Maybe their kids want to move in to their neighborhood and can’t afford to. We’ve all seen the housing prices skyrocket in recent decades. And it’s happening because of the aggregate impact of a lot of regulatory changes.
Krys Boyd [00:08:41] If entire neighborhoods were changing and dispersing pretty frequently, as often as once a year. What did people do back then? To establish themselves in new places and get to know the folks around them?
Yoni Applebaum [00:08:53] You know, we often think of mobility as a kind of social asset that dissolves ties among people. In the heyday of American mobility. I think it was actually functioning more like a social glue. When you arrive someplace new, you feel lonely. And that’s actually a healthy reaction. It’s impetus to getting out there and doing uncomfortable things like joining an organization. Maybe you haven’t been to church in a few years, and you show up on Sunday to meet the other people in your neighborhood. Maybe you talk to the guy sitting next to you at the bar, even though that’s an uncomfortable thing to do. When people were relocating, our communities were much more vibrant. People who have recently moved into the community are much more likely to join a group or organization or take part in that civic life. And that tends to atrophy over time. The longer you stay in one place that the less impetus you have to do that. And as other friends move away, as organizations cease to be as active, the social connections we have to each other that we formed in those early years tend to atrophy over time. And so as they moved on a regular basis, they were constantly constructing new communities for themselves in a way that had real social benefits.
Krys Boyd [00:10:03] Why did moving day cease to be a thing?
Yoni Applebaum [00:10:06] It stopped because we made it really hard to build. After World War II, American housing policy shifted to emphasize single family homes. And much more importantly, we made these changes in the zoning regulations and in the way we enforced zoning regulations. That meant that anyone with enough time, money and resources could challenge a variance permission to build and hold it up in court long enough that it was no longer economical to construct, in most cases. That meant that we reversed something that had worked in America for 200 years, right? For two centuries, people in the poorer parts of America moved toward the places with more opportunity, and that was good for everyone. It was good for the people who moved. It was good for the people in those communities because the communities with thrive and everybody would do a little bit better. It was good for the country as a whole because it knit us together. These days, that’s no longer happening. Instead of moving toward the places with more opportunity, Americans are either moving to the places with cheaper housing or they’re not moving at all. We have reversed this key engine of social mobility and equality in the United States.
Krys Boyd [00:11:18] 1 in 13 Americans moving in any given year still seems like a lot, even compared with 1 in 5 back in 1960. What has changed, though, about who is moving and why?
Yoni Applebaum [00:11:29] The people who still get to move in America are disproportionately well-educated and affluent. They’re moving for the same reasons that Americans have always moved, which is they get a better job in another city, or they can see that their industry is declining and they go toward a growing industry somewhere else. They’re moving sometimes for family reasons. There’s lots of reasons that people move, but when you move something fundamental changes about your life. You turn more optimistic. You are likelier to see other success as reinforcing your own success. You’re likely or to think that the future is going to be better than the past. If you can’t move and the Americans who are no longer moving are disproportionately those who have had less access to education, those who have lower incomes, those Americans who want to move and can’t. And that number is up 45% over the last five decades. They tend to grow more cynical, more detached from their communities, and to believe that the world is a zero sum game where others gains come at their own expense.
Krys Boyd [00:12:29] When you talk about Americans who want to move and can’t, is this strictly for financial reasons, or are people not moving because they don’t want to be away from, say, family or people they grew up with.
Yoni Applebaum [00:12:39] Yeah, there are many reasons not to move. And there are many factors that feed into this. But the truth is that there have always been many reasons not to move. In the heyday of American mobility, people also had families. What has really changed is this question of affordability. And that is the really novel thing that we introduced. The fact that you can no longer build housing where people most want to live. Is a profound change. And it means that somebody who, 50 years ago moved out of rural Alabama to San Francisco and was working a service sector, jobs as a janitor. They would have made so much more in San Francisco, working as a janitor, that it would have more than accounted for their cost of living increase. More than that, they were much likelier in San Francisco to jump occupational brackets and get a better job than working as a janitor. Today, if that janitor from Alabama moves to San Francisco, he’ll still learn more. But he’ll pay so much more in housing that he’ll end up further behind with each passing month. And so he’s not moving. That is the profound change that the question of affordability is, one that is also a question of life prospects and opportunity.
Krys Boyd [00:13:45] Yoni, why would a decline in geographic mobility be correlated with a decline in productivity?
Yoni Applebaum [00:13:52] People who are able to relocate to where the jobs are moving into industries which are showing substantial productivity gains. Right. It’s the professions that are growing fastest that are likely to hire you if you if you move into a new town. So that’s one source of productivity gains. The other is that in many industries the gains are tightly concentrated. So if you’re a software programmer and you move out to Silicon Valley, you’re going to be interacting with lots of other software programmers out there. And those network effects make workers more productive. So when people move to Detroit to be auto workers autoworkers or Silicon Valley to be programmers, they’re able to do those jobs more effectively than they were in the places that they were coming from, and the whole economy gains as a result.
Krys Boyd [00:14:42] You mentioned network effects. Reading your work, I couldn’t help but think about the fact that now we may not even move between a home and a workplace right at all happens in our houses. Many of us are pretty dug in to where we are. We may never even physically meet our colleagues.
Yoni Applebaum [00:14:58] That’s true. And it may be that technology eventually replaces or erodes the importance of geographic mobility. So far, I’m not sure that’s what’s happening. The people who are likeliest to be working remotely full time are also overwhelmingly in the kinds of high paying, white collar jobs where workers are still showing substantial geographic mobility. And it’s the workers in other kinds of industries. Service sector, manufacturing, who could gain the most by relocating and are still not able to do it.
Krys Boyd [00:15:32] We should talk about the legendary urbanist Jane Jacobs. She is usually defined as a reformer, but it sounds like her influence is pretty complex. Why was her move to New York’s West Village so remarkable in 1947?
Yoni Applebaum [00:15:48] This is one of the dangers of doing research into your heroes, is that you may not know exactly what you thought you were going to. When she buys a new house in the West Village, she is going against the flow. Many Americans are moving out to the suburbs in these years. Jane Jacobs, to her everlasting credit, falls in love with the things that cities offer. And eventually she writes a book about all of the things that she appreciates about cities that most of the technocrats of her era did not. At a time when slum clearance was turning into urban renewal and city planners were knocking down entire neighborhoods. Jacobs sets up, you know, the thing that makes cities good. The thing that makes them attractive is the mixing together of populations of functions. It’s the crowds on the street. Don’t try to clear all that away and separate everything out rationally. Celebrate the organic growth of cities. And she was 100% right about all of that. The problem was her remedy. She looked at what government was doing to cities, which was leveling them and replacing them with these, you know, terrible large poured concrete buildings that were antiseptic. And she said, we have to stop that. Government isn’t doing what we want. We should empower ordinary citizens with the right to challenge government. We should require more hearings. We should arm them with the right to sue, and they can force government to act in the public interest with these tools. I think it was very well intentioned at its outset, but what it’s done over time is given anyone with enough time and money and resources the right to veto any government decision in practical terms, and that has made it very, very hard not just for government to get anything done, but for private builders to build because they still require government approvals.
Krys Boyd [00:17:39] Was Jane Jacobs a gentrifier?
Yoni Applebaum [00:17:42] She was, you know, this was another sort of sad discovery. She celebrates the importance of street front retail and diverse neighborhoods. But when she buys this house, what she does is take her home, which has an immigrant family living upstairs before she buys it, operating their own candy store on on the ground floor. That was a neighborhood hub of exactly the kind that she always celebrates. And she rips out the street front retail. She turns it into a single family home and and takes off the historic facade so that the Historical Landmarks Commission later finds it has no historical value anymore whatsoever. And she buys it for all cash. So she’s taking a mixed use rental property that was used by an immigrant family and turning it into a single family home occupied by two professionals. And she’s at the forefront of a large number of people who are doing this. There’s nothing wrong, by the way, with somebody deciding to buy a building and convert it to suit their family’s needs. The danger is when people do that and then try to freeze everything else around them. And that was how her individual choices about her own home ripple out. And the thing that she really loved, which was this very diverse neighborhood. She freezes all of the buildings, but they’re like taxidermied animals. They look as if they’re still alive. But the population that had made the neighborhood what it was empties out.
Krys Boyd [00:19:15] And she and her husband, we should note, made bank on the home when they ultimately sold it.
Yoni Applebaum [00:19:21] Yeah, they make a lot of money when they sell it that. They buy for 7. I think they sell for 55. It keeps appreciating though, because of the changes that Jacobs makes to her neighborhood, because of the way that she arms her neighbors with the ability to block further development. That home is now worth $6 million, and so it wouldn’t be possible for an immigrant family to move in there anymore. It wouldn’t even be possible for a couple of working professionals like the Jacobs is to move in there anymore. At this point, that neighborhood which was failed to build to meet demand, is the playground of the rich.
Krys Boyd [00:19:54] You mentioned that she wrote her seminal work. This was 1961. It was called “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Did city planners who took Jacobs ideas from that book to heart, somehow misunderstand the purpose of trying to preserve older architecture in urban neighborhoods?
Yoni Applebaum [00:20:13] I think they did. The original historic preservation ordinance in America is very specific. It’s in Charleston, South Carolina, and it tries to freeze a neighborhood of the city the way it looked in 1865. Which is a very particular year in Charleston, South Carolina. Preservation can be one of two impulses, and often it’s both at the same time. It can be a way to preserve the core of a community, the things that tie us together. And that’s great. But when you enable it to ripple out without any constraints, it very often becomes a means of preserving a particular group’s power and influence over the neighborhood. And that has very different effects. Charleston remains a remarkably white city. Even today, because it has frozen itself the way it was in 1865.
Krys Boyd [00:21:10] Ultimately, you write, and this is a quote, a nation that had grown diverse and prosperous by allowing people to choose their communities would instead empower communities to choose their people. How did that work? How does that work?
Yoni Applebaum [00:21:25] This was an amazing freedom that America really invents at the beginning of the 19th century. In the old World, you’re defined by the circumstances of your birth. In America, we make legal changes that say you can move into a community, whether or not the community wants you there. That was not the case in the colonial era. We have to change the law to allow that. And we do that. Americans move a ton, and they’re going into these communities in order to build better lives for themselves. Once we allow communities to set really rigid and restrictive rules around what can be built within the borders, the communities quickly figure out that regulating the use of land is a terrific way to regulate the population, that you can segregate your community economically, which in America usually means also racially and do it through land use law. And instead of building new housing, when a community is thriving, when they’re good opportunities there.
Krys Boyd [00:22:20] So just to be very clear about this, the people who are not chosen in this push for greater local control to be part of communities are the people who don’t have money or the people who are not white.
Yoni Applebaum [00:22:31] Yeah. And the processes that they set up are building small democratic right. They are going to set up more hearings, more public comment or feedback or opportunities for lawsuits. All of this is supposed to democratize the process. But we know a lot about the people who actually participate in those processes. They are disproportionately older, richer, whiter, more likely to be homeowners than the communities that they purport to represent. And so we set up all of these processes in the name of democracy. They’re not representing the current residents of the neighborhood, and there’s really no mechanism to represent the people who stand to gain the most from the new housing construction, because if you’re looking at a new apartment building on your block and there’s a hearing. The person who’s not at that hearing is the father who lives three states away and might move to your city if he had the chance, might be able to raise his daughter there. She might become your kid’s friend at your local elementary school. His life might change if he can switch occupations. But he’s not at that hearing. He can’t testify in his own behalf because the housing doesn’t even exist yet.
Krys Boyd [00:23:37] You write that the kind of zoning that Jacobs and others advocated for ultimately have the effect of stultifying cities, which is a strong claim. What does a stultifying city or neighborhood or block look like?
Yoni Applebaum [00:23:50] Remember that candy store that used to be there in Jacobson’s house? There’s a storefront there again, and these days it’s a rental agency and a realtor for recent college graduates with professional jobs. A typical city is one in which people are no longer moving around. It’s no longer welcoming new arrivals. It doesn’t get the benefits of diversity, of the infusion And of new talent. Instead, what you have is people who have already made it. Living in comfort and pulling up the ladder that they climb behind them.
Krys Boyd [00:24:24] What’s remarkable about this Yoni is I think these things can happen without the people who are inhabiting these neighborhoods quite comfortably having to, you know, being confronted with their role in all this. Like, I don’t know, the people are doing a lot of soul searching because they don’t necessarily think of themselves as choosing these neighborhoods because they are not diverse and not wealthy.
Yoni Applebaum [00:24:46] Yeah, I’d even take it a step further and say that often their motives are fairly laudable. Somebody who doesn’t want construction on their block might have reasonable concerns about the noise, about the dust of the construction, about the parking of their new residents, worried about the impact on their local environment, that changing the character of historic community. There’s lots of reasons, not a lot of construction. And as long as you are focused on the building, that’s where the story ends. But if you ask those same people, do you want to live in a community which still makes room for young families? Do you want to live in a community that’s diverse? One that has the firefighters and the nurses and the daycare workers who care for the community? It gives them room to raise their own families within the community. Then Americans give you a very different set of answers. They want all of those things. But I think most of us don’t see the trade off. Once they understand that allowing for that new construction is also a way to build the kind of society that they want to live in, they tend to become much more supportive. But so long as they’re simply thinking about the building, they’re unlikely to back.
Krys Boyd [00:25:51] We now find ourselves you only at this time when many Americans are actually moving farther away geographically from good jobs, just so that we can afford decent homes.
Yoni Applebaum [00:26:01] You know, there are a lot of downsides to this. People are no longer prioritizing their own opportunities. And there is something else that’s very special about geographic location. The most important choice that you can make as a parent for your child’s prospects in life, it’s not how you sleep train them, it’s not what books you read to them at bedtime. It’s where you raise them. We’ve got really good data to show that kids prospects in life are enormously shaped, not just by the zip code in which you raise them by the specific few blocks on which they grow up. It’s where they’ll find their peers. It determines, often in this country, the kind of education they’ll have access to. When people are no longer choosing those neighborhoods because they think it will improve their own prospects and those of their children, but instead moving where the housing is cheap enough that they can afford, the costs are intergenerational. It limits the opportunities for the individual, it limits the prospects of their family, and it limits our ability to be a country in which your prospects are determined by how hard you work and how you give voice to your talent, instead of to whom you were born and where you were lucky enough to be born.
Krys Boyd [00:27:17] Even those of us who live in other, more affordable places are aware of the crazy housing costs in the country’s most expensive cities. What I didn’t realize is how many lots in cities like Manhattan and D.C. theoretically could be developed into larger numbers of homes, but have been restricted from doing so.
Yoni Applebaum [00:27:36] I think often people look at cities and they say, well, you know, the problem here is there used to be a lot of free land in America that was undeveloped, and we built on it. And so the reason that housing has gotten very expensive is because there’s no place left to build. But that’s just not true. And I know it’s not true, because for 200 years, the cities grew and they grew up. So you might have, you know, a log cabin, you know, and then it develops into a village and then a town the individual homes get turned into townhouses and then apartment buildings and older apartment buildings. That was the usual progression. The housing was redeveloped to accommodate the increasing demand. We could still do that in most of these cities, but in many of these cities, the zoning doesn’t even allow for the current buildings like many or most of the buildings. And many of our larger cities don’t even comply with the current rules. You couldn’t build them today. If they disappeared tomorrow, you wouldn’t be able to put them back where they are, let alone continuing to build more intensively. And there are some really unseen effects of this. If you’re not building in dense downtowns, if you’re not helping people live close to jobs. The demand doesn’t disappear. It just pushes out. And so people who don’t want intensive development to the suburbs. Those pressures are mounting because we’ve disallowed it in the city centers and more people actually want to live. And so it’s hurting all kinds of communities, both the ones that are barring the construction, but it has a ripple effect that changes the character of of communities throughout a region.
Krys Boyd [00:29:11] Why do people in single family homes often really resist the idea of multi-family homes nearby?
Yoni Applebaum [00:29:19] Look, I live in a single family home and I love it. And I get why people find single family homes, really nice places to raise families. But what many people in single family homes are thinking when somebody proposes putting a multi-family home in is not just that it’s a little different than the other houses on the block. But that new development could make them lose things that they really value. It could change the mix of incomes in their neighborhood. It could degrade the local schools. It could make them feel less safe. What’s really interesting about multi-family development is that when it happens, those fears usually vanish pretty quickly. The people who move into those homes become an integral part of the community. They become your friends and neighbors, your fellow parishioners. You’re able to see that you get more stores in the area. Because there are more customers. And so you don’t have to go as far to shop. You have more active groups in the neighborhood because the new neighbors move in and join them. The prospect of multi-family housing can feel scary because change always feels scary. The reality usually becomes pretty popular pretty quickly.
Krys Boyd [00:30:35] Yoni, you define the loss of American mobility as a genuine national crisis. At this point, you’re one of the only ones talking about this crisis. Why has this not been more widely recognized?
Yoni Applebaum [00:30:47] You know, it’s a dog that’s not barking. And so the change unfolds gradually over the last 50 years, where we go from 1 in 5 Americans moving every year down to 1 in 13. It’s a huge change when you multiply that out, when you think about what it means in practice. But it’s happened slowly and it’s something that is not happening. And we tend to focus on the novel, things that suddenly start happening instead. When you start digging at our lack of mobility, though, you can see that we are attending to the crisis. We’ve just expressed it in many other forms. Americans are worried that our civic groups and organizations are in decline. They’re worried that we’re more alienated from each other. They’re worried that our country has become more politically polarized. They’re very concerned that the housing is unaffordable, that people are no longer rising economically, that we don’t start as many new businesses as we once did, that Americans are less likely to have multiple jobs by a young age, and therefore less likely to have moved from lower paying positions to higher paying positions. We’re worried about all of these things. We tend not to see that the single factor impelling all of these trends forward is a decline in mobility, because it’s something that’s not happening, and things that don’t happen are much happier, are much more difficult to see than the things that do.
Krys Boyd [00:32:01] The social consequences of this are so counterintuitive. And by that I mean like social emotional, as opposed to even economic, like this idea that people move and then extend themselves further into a community is maybe the opposite of what most people might imagine happen.
Yoni Applebaum [00:32:20] Yeah, I think that there is a really good reason that it strikes people as counterintuitive, right? If you’ve lived someplace for years or for your whole life, you can feel like you’re really embedded in that community, really a part of it. You know everybody. And if you move someplace new, you can feel as if you’re not really part of the community. You know no one. But if you look at the patterns of behavior, people who have lived in one place their whole lives, they don’t need to extend themselves in the same way. They don’t need to invest the time and the effort in building up relationships. And what that means in practical terms, is that their own relationships with family, with friends, the organizations to which they start off committed to all of those things that atrophy over time. Because friends move away. Because, you know you have a falling out and you’re not able to patch it back up. There’s many reasons that these things will atrophy, but there’s no impetus for building new relationships. When somebody switches their geographic location, they have to move to that uncomfortable place of investing in community, reaching out to people, risking a conversation with a stranger. Those are not comfortable things to do, and we avoid them to the extent that we can. But physical relocation is often the spur to doing that. And once you’ve done that, you end up a lot happier. The community ends up more vibrant. You get a lot of collective benefits and a lot of individual benefits, but it takes a spur. For many things that are healthy for us. It’s not something that we do without the need to do it. And so it is counterintuitive. Over the last 50 years, as our mobility has ground to a halt, our civic organizations have floundered. And it’s not coincidence.
Krys Boyd [00:34:04] You stress that in order to change things, including making moving easier and housing more affordable, one thing we’ll need to do is to learn to tolerate other people’s choices in constructing new buildings, even if we find those buildings in poor taste. I mean, what kind of progress fails to happen now in the name of keeping tacky construction out of a particular area?
Yoni Applebaum [00:34:26] You know, it’s not just the tacky construction. Although we do need to be more tolerant of that, too, I think. But it’s often housing types that we look at and have trouble imagining ourselves living in. But at different stages of life, people, particularly of different income brackets, are going to need different kinds of housing. When I was young, my first place that I lived independently was was a studio apartment. It was 150ft². But it was what I could afford. I would not want to raise a family in that apartment. I would not even want to live in that apartment today. I didn’t really want to live in that apartment at the time, but it worked for me. Now I live in a single family home. At some point, the stairs in that single family home might be too challenging for me. And I might need a one level apartment. You know, at different points, we need different kinds of housing. What we’ve done, though, is often tried to solve other problems by banning certain housing types. And so we have often tried to solve poverty by regulating low income housing out of existence. This hasn’t solved poverty. What it’s done is create a tremendous homelessness problem. The kinds of low income housing, like SROs or bachelor hotels that were once not very nice places to live, we’re still better as options than living out on the street. But we regulated them out of out of existence. In California, most low income housing types are no longer legal, and they have 170,000 people in their homeless population. And that is the mistake we keep making, is that if we try to regulate out of existence housing types that either are not suited for our needs at this moment or cater to populations where we look at it and think, I wouldn’t want to live like that. What we end up doing is taking away the options that people really need.
Krys Boyd [00:36:20] You know, it’s interesting when you talk about the homeless population, many people who work with folks who are unhoused we’ll talk about the fact that the primary driver of this is not the personal choices or failings of people who find themselves without housing. It’s the cost of of real estate where they live.
Yoni Applebaum [00:36:38] Yeah. You know, Houston has a much lower homeless population than San Francisco. And that’s not because Houston has a lower rate of substance abuse or a lower rate of mental homeless. It’s because Houston has a lot less restrictive land use rules, and San Francisco does, the housing is a lot cheaper there. Whenever you’re trying to solve these problems, it really helps to keep the housing affordable. That’s true, by the way, even of non-market solutions. So if government is trying to provide affordable housing to people who need that extra helping hand up, if you’re doing it in a really tight housing market where you’ve made it really difficult to build, those programs are much more expensive, and the same amount of money helps many fewer people. So whether you’re looking to the market for solutions or looking for government assistance with solutions, if you enable people to build housing and keep it relatively affordable, all of these problems get easier to solve.
Krys Boyd [00:37:31] What can we do to make within our own neighborhoods to make room for others? Assuming that no one is going to touch your single family home? Yoni, what could you and other families on your block do to make it possible for different kinds of people to move in?
Yoni Applebaum [00:37:45] Yeah, I don’t think anyone should be evicted from where they’re living. Right? We’re not talking about if you’ve got a housing situation where you’re happy and you’re living in a single family home or an apartment and you want to stay there, great. The question is, how do we change our attitudes toward what other people do with their property? And there I think you really need systemic change. It’s hard to do this one development at a time. But what we know is that where the rules are consistent and simple, it gets a lot easier to build. Instead, many cities have this patchwork quilt of regulation varies from one city to the next. There are overlay designations and special districts and various funding designations so that you can have hundreds of potential options. These days, if you want to build a house, you’re usually better off hiring a lawyer than an architect to help you navigate the system. That’s crazy. And so if we have relatively simple rules that allow people to build as of right, they can just say, hey, I’m complying with the rules and I’m going to build here. And those rules are consistent so that people who figure out a good way to build housing in one area can apply that solution in other areas to meet the needs of other people. That’s a way to really drive down the costs and really change the equation here.
Krys Boyd [00:38:55] Is there any case to be made for historic conservation of particular neighborhoods?
Yoni Applebaum [00:39:01] Yeah, all of this is going to require balance. You know, if you have truly untrammeled growth, you can do real environmental damage. You can fail to preserve heritage and history. That’s really important to people. But I think what we need to do is to shift our mindset. Often we are very attentive to the harms of development. We can see the costs of knocking down an old building. We need to focus a little bit more on the benefits of change and growth. And then we can take a look at each individual decision and say, hey, on balance, are we helping or are we hurting here? And if we try to get that balance right, instead of always erring on the side of restricting growth, then we can come up with much more vibrant communities that both preserve the most essential elements of their past and invest in the best opportunities for the future.
Krys Boyd [00:39:52] Yoni, I think we’ve talked largely about cities, but so many Americans now live in areas that are defined as suburbs. Are these conversations happening in those places as well?
Yoni Applebaum [00:40:04] You know, I think they really are. And they’re happening for a few different reasons. One is many of the suburbs were zoned exclusively for single family housing have built out at the current lot size. All the single family housing that they will contain. But the demand is still going up. And so people living in the suburbs are realizing that their own children can’t move in. That the service workers in their community can’t afford to live there. And that’s sparking some really uncomfortable conversations about what matters in the community. You can either prioritize the housing and a particular kind of housing stock, or you can prioritize the people. And so these are conversations coming out in the suburbs now. Another reason we’re having them is that many people living in the suburbs are finding that they no longer have the kind of housing that meets their needs. And so senior citizens in the suburbs may be living in a really big house, which they don’t feel that they can afford to leave because they’re embedded in the community there. They’ve built friendships over time there. They have support services there. At the same time that they can no longer navigate the stairs and no longer need that much space. But they’re kind of trapped. And if there was single floor housing in those communities, elevator buildings, it would be much more suited to be able to age in place and retain all of those things. They wouldn’t face the hard choices, and in the process, they’d free up some of those single family homes for the families that they can move in. Today, it’s the suburbs are sort of squeezed at either end. They’re not making room for the young, they’re not accommodating the old. And the prices keep going up and up and up. And so you are hearing these same conversations in the suburbs, and they’re going to require some of the same solutions.
Krys Boyd [00:41:41] A third principle you think we need to embrace is abundance. Make housing affordable by adding housing.
Yoni Applebaum [00:41:49] Yeah. You know, and that sounds kind of intuitive, except that it often runs contrary to our lived experience. I think many of us have had the experience of watching somebody build a new luxury building in town. And it opens up and and offers condos for sale or apartments for rent. And by the next year, the prices are up even higher throughout the community. And often I think people are very skeptical that that building new supply can actually address this crisis. But we know in the places that have tried this that if you’re just taking that one building, it’s like a teaspoon out of a bathtub of need. It just doesn’t get you where you need. But if you build that large scale, if you add enough new housing, things really change in Austin. They’ve added enough new housing that rents are now down by 7%. We can do this at scale where you really make the housing abundant. It’s no longer a scarce commodity that everyone’s chasing, and bidding up instead becomes what it was in the first place, which is a tool, a means to an end, and that housing can enable people to have the kinds of opportunities that they’re seeking. But you’ve got to have had enough of it, and just having a little doesn’t, doesn’t do the trick.
Krys Boyd [00:43:03] How do you create incentives for developers who may spend the same amount of time, and not that much more money building luxury properties where the margins are super high, as compared with more affordable properties that just won’t net them as much profit.
Yoni Applebaum [00:43:20] You know, developers are greedy, and rather than try to convince developers not to be greedy, I’d much rather harness that greed for the public good. If you let them build lots of luxury housing where the profit margins are flat, you can go back to that 19th century model where the people who have the resources to move into that new luxury housing that’s coming online. Do so. And they open up the apartments and the houses that they’re living in to other families. They can also bump up, and you get that same chain of rooms that I described earlier where every family, ten, 12 families can move up there. Researchers studying this today, it’s what they consistently find that when you add luxury housing to the top of the market, which is relatively easy to do because the greedy developers would like to do that, what you do is you enable people. The biggest benefits actually accrue to people toward the bottom of the market. That’s what the rents are really going to drop. It’s where the better housing options really become available. And it’s again, counterintuitive because what you see is a developer putting up a building that’s priced much too expensive for you to have or afford in your community, and it can feel as if it’s a threat to your purchase on that community. But in practical terms, what it tends to do is to make it easier for people like you to stay in the community. And so if you think of it that way, that that adding all that luxury housing is taking pressure off the top of the market and enabling it a lot easier for people to stay in the homes where they are. For them to move out to homes that are a little bit better. And it makes all of the affordable housing options that government and private agencies pursue comparatively cheaper. Because they’re no longer bidding against deep pocketed individuals. For the existing housing stuff.
Krys Boyd [00:45:02] Yoni Applebaum is deputy executive editor at The Atlantic, where his article “Stuck in Place” appears. He’s author of the book “Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.” Yoni, thank you so much for the conversation.
Yoni Applebaum [00:45:17] Thank you.
Krys Boyd [00:45:18] Think is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram and any place you like to get podcasts, just search for KERA Think. Our website is think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
