Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. For much of American history, social mobility, both geographic and economic, defined an American Dream. Right? The idea was simple. If opportunities weren't available where you were, you packed up and moved somewhere better. No society has ever been as mobile as the United States once was. No society has even come close, writes the Atlantic's Yoni Appelbaum in his new piece, How Progressives Froze the American Dream. According to Appelbaum, another quote, ''Over the past 50 years, this engine of American opportunity has stopped working. Americans move less than ever before, trapped by restrictive housing policies, zoning laws, and bureaucratic red tape, policies often championed by the very progressives who claim to support inclusion and economic equality. Instead of moving toward opportunity, many Americans today are stuck,'' he argues, ''and the freedom to choose where to live has become a privilege of the wealthy.''

Another quote from the article, ''The exclusion that has left so many Americans feeling trapped and hopeless traces back instead to the self-serving actions of a privileged group who say that inclusion, diversity, and social equality are among their highest values.'' Folks, what happened? If mobility was once America's greatest strength, how do we get it back? Joining us now is Yoni Appelbaum, historian, a deputy executive editor of The Atlantic. His recent essay in the Atlantic is adapted from his new book. The book is called Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, just published by Random House. Yoni, hi. Welcome back to WNYC.

Yoni Appelbaum: Great to be with you again, Brain.

Brian Lehrer: You open the piece with a striking historical contrast. America was once the most mobile society in the world and now people are stuck. Talk about that high point. Talk about what you describe as what we once were.

Yoni Appelbaum: It's almost impossible to imagine today, but this was the thing that when Europeans came to visit the United States, jumped out at them that they really noticed. It was central to American self-conception. In the 19th century, probably one out of three Americans moved every year, which is an astonishing rate of mobility. In many cities, there was a Moving Day. It was on different days in different places, but all the unwritten leases expired on the same day. You have these wonderful accounts. In New York, it was on May 1st.

You have these wonderful accounts of people gawking as a third half the city would pick up and swap residences between sunup and sundown and pile all their worldly belongings on the curb and flag down a cartman and go off someplace new. This was really weird in the world and I just want to recapture that. People were coming here from an old world in which you might have lived in the same village for generations, and you were born into a particular place, not just a geographic place, but a place in the social hierarchy. Most of the important aspects of your identity were inherited at birth.

They were fixed, and you had little opportunity to change them. Mobility in America meant that people could move to new places. They could define their own identity by the groups they chose to join, by the communities that they decided to belong to. There was this tremendous sense of agency in the process, and it made America prosperous and pluralistic. In that great heyday of mobility that lasts well into the 20th century, this was the signal feature of American society. Many of the things that we really appreciate about America stemmed from this constant churning of the population.

Brian Lehrer: I guess as a foundational question here, or starting point, you accept the idea of the American Dream as real. I'm thinking of the old George Carlin line, the comedian, when he said, ''That's why they call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.'' There's so much cynicism about the American Dream these days. You're saying, at very least, that some version of it, in a very meaningful way, was at some time real.

Yoni Appelbaum: Yes. We've got pretty good statistics about this. It's one of the nice things about digitization of records is it lets us trace these things. We can look at people in the United States and compare them to people in the countries that they emigrated from and find much more upward mobility in the United States. People not just improving over the course of their own lives, but their kids jumping social class or occupational brackets. We can even compare the people who stayed behind in the old world to the people who came to the United States.

We can compare the people who stayed their whole lives in one spot in the United States to the people who moved. What we find over and over again throughout American history is that the people who move do better. They do better, and then their kids do even better. You can compare those second generations, and the effects are even stronger. I think that our discussion of the American Dream comes from someplace real. People were watching. This is why so many people came to the United States in the first place.

It's a good Carlin line, but he is delivering that line in a world that is changing. We also know something about what happens when people want to move and they can't. They grow alienated, frustrated, cynical about the world. They're likely to see the world as a zero-sum game in which somebody else's gains come at their expense. They're likely to believe that it's all rigged, to use a word that's bandied about a lot these days. They're likely to grow disconnected from their neighbors and uninvolved in religious or voluntary organizations. That's what happens when a population is stuck in place.

Brian Lehrer: What probably perked some listeners' ears up, either in interest or in indignation in the intro when I was quoting you, tracing some of this shift away from mobility, the ability to be mobile to well-meaning progressive policies. What are some examples of these policies and how do you see them having backfired?

Yoni Appelbaum: There's a great study in California that says that for every 10 points, the liberal vote share of a particular city in California went up. The number of new housing permits went down by 30%. You can tell a version of that same story in any blue state. This is a problem that is concentrated in progressive jurisdictions. It didn't emerge overnight that this is the work of three generations of progressives, but it comes actually out of a well-intentioned place. There are lots of nasty elements to our zoning laws. Many of them are rooted in racism and discrimination.

They also are rooted in the belief that government can do good things in the world and that there are public goods that are worth protecting. Those are good laudable impulses that progressives are much likelier to pursue than conservatives. The problem is that in aggregate, as we have layered on rules and regulations, we have tried to prevent lots of bad things by adding extra layers of review and process without sufficiently taking into account the opportunity costs. The sum of all of those rules is that it's grown prohibitively expensive or just outright impossible to build in the most prosperous places in America.

It's precisely because people want to live in progressive jurisdictions, precisely because these are the places that are generating jobs and opportunity, that are welcoming to new arrivals, that people want to get in. The fact that we're no longer building housing for them is an enormous problem. It's creating a spike in homelessness in progressive cities. It's creating class-based segregation in those cities. It's exacerbating American inequality. Even worse, it's dividing the nation between these islands of blue prosperity and a very large part of the country where people are shut out of that prosperity.

Brian Lehrer: Yet I think in-- just to take a New York local example, there's a lot of backlash, maybe you've been following it, to the proposals from Governor Hochul and other people to require more dense housing construction, especially around Long Island Railroad stations on Long Island. Other mass transit stations elsewhere build more density in pursuit of more affordable housing. The backlash is coming from more conservative communities that want this maybe 1950s version of the suburbs. Donald Trump is very much behind that vocally. Can you lay it that much on progressive, as opposed to maybe both progressive and conservative policy choices?

Yoni Appelbaum: Sure. I would lay this mostly on progressives because that's where the problem is worst. There are both conservatives and progressives who are NIMBYs who don't want new construction in their communities, often for perfectly understandable reasons. Donald Trump has come out against density, even as he's also signed executive orders calling for deregulation of housing. You find these contending impulses both in red America and in blue America, but there's a reason that I'm pointing to progressives here. That's where the problem is concentrated.

In a country where positive political change seems really hard right now, it's difficult to imagine our dysfunctional Congress getting anything worthwhile done. It's a little hard to imagine this presidency as a positive force for reform. This is a set of issues that because they were enacted largely at the state and local level, blue states and cities actually have the power to reverse this on their own. They don't have to go to Washington. This is not just a question of blame. I'm pointing here to a real opportunity. Progressive areas are shutting population.

People are moving for the first time in American history away from places with more jobs and toward places with cheaper housing. That's never been the case until now. It's always been that people flowed to where the economic opportunities and the social betterment for themselves and their families lay. Now they're going just where the housing is cheap because that's the only choice they have. That is shifting population, shifting electoral votes and congressional representation away from blue states and toward red ones.

When I say that this is a progressive problem, I mean not just that it's a problem that progressive regulation caused. I also mean it is a problem for progressives. If you are serious about the progressive movement being able to exercise political power in the United States, this is an urgent crisis that you would need to fix in order to have that happen.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we invite you in here. Have you ever felt stuck in place? Does it sound like Yoni Appelbaum is talking about you, talking to you in some kind of personal way? Have you ever felt stuck in place, unable to move for better job opportunities, schools, or quality of life? He argues that progressives, despite their stated commitments to inclusion and equality, have created policies that lock people out of high-opportunity areas. Do you agree? Have you experienced anything like this, or maybe you think other forces like corporate greed, wage stagnation, the broader economy are bigger culprits?

There's also a political divide here which we'll get into. Yoni points out that people who stay put tend to vote more conservative, while those who move are more likely to lean more liberal. Do you think declining mobility is helping reshape American politics in the direction that it's been going? 212-433-WNYC. Have you seen any of these dynamics play out in your own life or your own community? Is he making you think about anything in a different way? 212-433-9692. Call or text. Yoni, you want to do that political analysis piece of it that people who tend to stay put tend to vote more conservative while those who move tend to vote more liberal?

Yoni Appelbaum: Yes. We've got some great research on this. One thing we know is that the country is growing more polarized and that seems to be happening over the same 50-year span that our mobility has really plunged. In the 1970s, one in five Americans moved every year. We just got new numbers from the census. It's down to 1 in 13. It's the most dramatic social change in America of the last half century and maybe the least remarked. When people are constantly mixing in to new communities, you keep the political views diverse because people arrive there with their own set of experiences and their own commitments.

Over time, communities trend toward homogeneity. Without that influx of new arrivals, you get polarization. We're seeing that fold-out, that people in stagnant communities tend to adhere to the views of those around them. That's one part of the cause. The other is this really interesting thing that happens when somebody moves. When you move to a new place, you feel a strong sense of agency in your own life. You are, psychologists tell us, likely to become more optimistic about the future. You're likely to see that the gains that others made as reinforcing the gains that you are making and vice versa.

You're growing the pie and you're all getting a larger slice out of that. You're more likely to become involved in your community, to join organizations, to show up at church. These are pro-social changes that happen as a result of mobility. The converse is true too. If you want to move and you can't, and the number of Americans who say that's true of them is up 45%, you grow cynical and detached. You see the world as a zero-sum game, and you grow hostile to outsiders.

In the communities which are declining in the United States, where people are trapped there, they want to move and they can't because they can't afford to go someplace with more opportunities, they're angry, and they're right to be angry. That's not how the United States used to work. It's not how it worked in their parents or their grandparents' generations. That rage is fueling the surge of populism that we have seen over the last couple of decades.

This is, I think, a big unseen driver of American politics, both of its polarization and of the surge tide of populism that is coming from Americans who used to feel as if they had agency in their lives and now feel as if they are trapped by forces that are large, too large for them to even quite grasp in a rigged game that favors others at their expense.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Roland in Tampa, you're on WNYC. Hi, Roland.

Roland: Good morning. How you doing?

Brian Lehrer: Good.

Roland: The mobility and Moving Day was always Moving Day for certain people, and mobility was also limited. The impact of restrictive covenants in redlining kept Blacks and Hispanics to certain neighborhoods, and it still does to a degree. I grew up in a house in Baltimore where my father was able to buy the house only because a particular real estate broker was able to convince one Jewish doctor to break a restrictive covenant and sell the house to my father. That broker then turned around and used a straw buyer to buy other houses, which was similar.

The neighborhood was a little bit like Riverdale. To buy other houses, which he bought through a straw buyer, then turned around and sold those houses to black professionals at a tremendous markup and made a lot of money. The restrictive covenant said that no house can ever be sold to a person of Negro race. When I bought a house in Riverdale some years later, a law school classmate of mine was going to do the closing, went into labor early, and was sitting at-- She asked me if I could just do the paperwork at the closing. I said, ''Sure, I can do it.''

We're at the closing and we're sitting at the table, and the fellow's attorney turned red as we were reading through the covenants. I said, ''Just cross it out initially, we'll move on.'' He had come to his restricted covenant that said the house from Riverdale cannot be sold to me. Those covenants are still existent. There's a case in Texas right now where a woman is trying to get every jurisdiction, municipality to remove the covenant. No one's going to go through many of the deeds to do that, but the covenants are still there.

Brian Lehrer: In the context of Yoni's article and obviously acknowledging the long history and I think you were a caller on a recent segment, I think your Baltimore story reminded me of your call, tell me if I'm thinking of the right person, that it's you.

Roland: No, it's true. I wrote about it in the Baltimore Sun and in the Wall Street Journal. Yes, that's me.

Brian Lehrer: We did a segment specifically on the history of redlining earlier this month. Your story was very moving and very relevant and it is, again. Acknowledging the reality of all of that, how does it play into, in your opinion, Yoni Appelbaum's book and Atlantic article about moving being a good thing and communities being less restrictive for more development being necessary? Sounds like you're somebody who's moved a bunch from Baltimore to the Bronx to Tampa. What do you think about his thesis, if you have a thought?

Roland: The dream is still there, but the restrictions are still there and they'll find other ways. Number one, income limits a lot of people of color from moving, start off with. When you get around that, there's subtle other ways that the market will still work against you. Homeownership in America is something that is not-- and I've lived in other countries. Here, class mobility exists in a way that people can have that house if you work hard, plan well, and the mobility is there. A large part of American identity is determined by where you live and what property you own.

Brian Lehrer: Roland, thank you. I'm going to leave it there and get some other folks on. Thank you very much. Keep calling us. Alyssa on the Upper West Side. You're on WNYC. Hello, Alyssa.

Alyssa: Hi, Brian, longtime listener. Love your show. Thank you. I had read your guest article in The Atlantic, and one part of the article really he talked about Moving Day early in the 20th century and he portrayed it in such a positive way. Growing up, my father used to tell us stories about when he would come home from school and he wouldn't know if his family was still in the apartment because they moved so often. It was actually very destabilizing for his family, never knowing if he came home from school, if his family was still going to be there.

He didn't even know where they were moving to because it was like he was one of nine children. The premise that moving all the time is a positive thing, I highly disagree with that.

Brian Lehrer: Alyssa, thank you very much. By the way, listener push back to one piece of Roland's call. Listener writes, ''Shelley v. Kraemer outlawed restrictive race covenants 80 years ago.'' That doesn't mean that it doesn't go on in informal ways, but he did talk about formal covenants as a more contemporary thing. On any of that from the first two callers, Yoni?

Yoni Appelbaum: They're making good points. If you want to understand how important mobility is to America, look at who we've denied it to over time. Zoning laws start on the West Coast. The first one in 1885 is intended to exclude the Chinese. The first citywide zoning ordinance is in New York City, and it is intended explicitly to push the Jews back into the Lower East Side, down Fifth Avenue. Many of these rules through time have been about denying mobility to disfavored groups within the United States, none more than the Black population.

That's a terrific point and I think is why mobility is so important. We deny it to certain groups and they suffer in consequence. Where we give people that sense of agency over their own lives, then they are able to make choices that will allow themselves to elevate themselves and give their children a brighter future. Your other caller who speaks about the instability of housing and constant moves is also exactly right. There is a difference between never knowing if your family is going to be out on the curb. At the furthest extreme, a homeless family that is bouncing from shelter to shelter is not better off with those frequent moves.

Moving works well when it is a matter of individual agency. The reason that I portray Moving Day so positively is not just the accounts of the people who are moving, it's also all of the complaints of the landlords and the upper crust who are really annoyed about it. They really think that it'd be much better if tenants didn't have as much leverage as they're able to exert on Moving Day. It'd be much better if people knew their proper place and weren't always trying for something a little bit above their social station.

When I see elites complaining like that about a phenomena, it's a pretty strong clue that this is working as a lever of mobility in a way that those elites find destabilizing. Yes, if you push it too far, if you are moving involuntarily, that's not a good thing. If you are denying populations the chance for mobility, that's not a good thing. These things, I think together both reinforce the underlying message, which is that giving people the chance to take control of their own lives and make those choices, to decide whether they want to move and then to follow through on that if they can, that's how we turn it into a positive thing.

Brian Lehrer: We're getting a lot of pushback on our text thread. I'm going to read a few of these to you and invite your reaction. Because you set this up as no other country has ever been as mobile as the United States and that helped economic mobility, listener writes, ''In many other countries, homes are multi-generational and passed down generation to generation. Some of these countries have much better economically than our country does. Another listener writes, ''The housing crisis is not caused by progressive zoning. It's caused by treating property like an ATM and personal debt many Americans can't afford moving costs, plus one month's rent, plus security deposit, for example.'' You want to respond to those two?

Yoni Appelbaum: Yes. They're absolutely right. In many European countries, houses are passed down. Their economies are not better than ours. What they have is more about social welfare systems. Maybe we should adopt that here. Traditionally, we've relied on mobility in place of a more robust social welfare system. I think over the last 50 years we have married American levels of penury with European levels of immobility. That's the worst of both worlds. You can keep people in place and assume that you're going to have to redistribute income into the places that are losing jobs because the laborers will remain even after the jobs are gone.

That's often been the way European social democracies have gone, or you can give people the chance to move toward opportunity, which is the way we traditionally do it. Right now we're doing neither, and that's a pretty miserable equation. I really think that at some fundamental level, what we're talking about here is whether or not we think that people should have the chance to make these individual choices or whether we want to be prescriptive about it. Housing is treated like an ATM, but one reason for that is that housing prices have soared in the last 50 years and now we're seeing private equity and other investors jump into the market too.

When you artificially constrain supply, you can drive up prices and you will attract predatory investment. The solution is not-- We keep trying to solve a supply shortage by setting aside some of the supply for this purpose or for that purpose. If you do that, you're just further constraining the supply and the prices go even higher. That's what we've seen. The prices keep soaring. The solution ultimately is to increase the supply. Then housing ceases to be an ATM and goes back to being a means to an end. A way that people can get to the communities where they want to raise their families.

Brian Lehrer: Another text which supports your thesis, I think, listener writes, ''How does gentrification play into this discussion?'' Listener says, ''I know plenty of people who are struggling to stay in their community because of transient people of means.''

Yoni Appelbaum: Gentrification is a way of saying that more affluent people are moving into a community than historically resided there. Some communities can welcome that. Those affluent people may bring with them the political connections to get decent services for all of the residents. They may be spending enough retail dollars to fill some of the empty storefronts. It's not just boarded-up shops and vape stores. It also comes with real problems. The problems tend to be exacerbated if you are fighting over a fixed supply of housing.

You can think of this like a game of musical chairs. If you have a certain number of chairs set out and new people move into your community and they get first dibs on the best chairs, that's pretty miserable. If you're in a community which is adding housing and new people move in, that's a really different situation where if you're setting out enough chairs, maybe everybody moves to a better chair. That was historically the magic of Moving Day was that cities were adding 5% housing supply every few years. It meant that the wealthy moved up and bought the new luxury units that are coming on the market.

You could trace a chain of moves. 10, 12 families might all bump up because one single rich family had moved into a new townhouse, each one moving into the unit that a previous family had vacated. Each one doing a little bit better than they had the year before. They did not resent gentrification. They look forward to it in the way that you might look forward to upgrading. If you've got a lease on a car or a new iPhone that every couple of years, maybe you can move to a new house which offers new technologies.

Your first house has running water. Your second one has hot and cold running water. The third has gas heat. Housing can get better over time. People looked at it that way as a means to an end rather than an end in and of itself.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking about the central argument in the new book by Yoni Appelbaum, who in his full-time job works at The Atlantic. The new book called Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. A long excerpt, really interesting excerpt from the book in The Atlantic right now, the argument being essentially that America used to be the most geographically mobile country in the world, therefore the most economically mobile country in the world, and that it's largely been well-meaning progressive policies that have had unintended backfiring consequences that have squashed down mobility.

We're going to take more of your calls. Amanda, in Brooklyn, you're going to be next. I see you're planning perhaps to move. We invite other people to call in with your stories of maybe how geographic mobility has helped your families in the past. We had one who said it hurt her family in the past. Of course, we can take either and we will bring into the conversation something from the book that may surprise a lot of New Yorkers. There is a seminal villain in this story who is a famous New Yorker from a few decades ago, and it might surprise you who that is. Stay with us as we continue with Yoni Appelbaum and you on the Brian Lehrer Show.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with Yoni Appelbaum from The Atlantic and his book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Operations, opportunity. Amanda in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Amanda.

Amanda: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I am a writer and comedian here in New York, and all of my friends are actors, dancers, artists, and we all came to New York City for the creative opportunities. I've been here for almost a decade and I've found that me and my friends, we all work so much just to afford the rent, that even though we're surrounded by all of those opportunities, we can't really take advantage of them because we're always at work. I know a lot of my friends, I've been watching them move out of New York City, go upstate, and away from the opportunities just to work less.

No one's pursuing their artistic dreams anymore and it's all this really horribly sad feeling that there's no financial path to become that poor starving artist. You can't even really pull that off. You have to spend all this money. I've even been considering asking my girlfriend if we should just Move to Richmond, Virginia because it's so much more affordable there. The only thing that's really been giving me a lot of hope is assembly member Emily Gallagher's proposal for social housing, where the rent is frozen at 25% of your income.

It reminds me a lot of Mitchell-Lama and the history of housing in New York. Timothée Chalamet lived in those social housing. I always pronounce his name wrong but lived in Mitchell-Lama and how Colman Domingo lived there, and being an artist, you need to be able to afford your rent. My dream has always been to put down roots in New York, but with such short supply and the rents skyrocketing, I'm just hopeful for that social housing bill to go through where it addresses both increasing supply and doesn't leave it up to the market and freezes your rent so you don't get hit by those huge rent increases when your lease comes around and you're not priced out. Anyway, that's my story, but thank you for taking my call.

Brian Lehrer: I wonder. I'm going to invite Yoni to ask you any question that he might have. Putting you on the spot, Yoni.

Yoni Appelbaum: Were you born in Brooklyn? When did you come to the city?

Amanda: I moved to New York from California about 10 years ago.

Yoni Appelbaum: What brought you here?

Amanda: To pursue the arts, to pursue comedy and acting, and also public transit, because cars terrified me.

Yoni Appelbaum: This is such a great story, and it breaks my heart because it's the thing that, to me, at least, has always made New York a special place. It's a magnet for people who see something in the city, who think that they can chase opportunity in the city. My great-grandfather emigrated to New York, and I've been back to see his old tenement where he lived, and it rents now for $7200 a month. That, to me, encapsulates a pretty big change in the city It used to be a place that people like your caller could come to you and thrive in and build the connections in the communities that would give them the chance to make a mark on the world.

That's the New York dream. These days, the fact that somebody can call up and say, ''I love everything about the city, except I don't know that I can afford to live here anymore, and maybe I have to leave.'' That, to me, is a huge red flag about the future of the city.

Brian Lehrer: Is Amanda to some degree-- and Amanda, I'll let you weigh in on your own story, of course, as well, but to some degree an example, even with what she's considering, of what you're trying to celebrate in your book from the American past, Yoni, in that she moved from California to here to do one thing. Now she might move from here to Richmond in pursuit of affordable housing. I don't know if there's an art scene there. It is a capital of a state, maybe be an artist there where she can afford it more. In the New York context, Soho used to be where so-called starving artists concentrate.

Then that gentrified and it became Williamsburg and that gentrified. Now maybe it's Ridgewood, Queens, and some other places. Maybe that's part of the pattern as opposed to a part of the failure of the pattern that you're writing about. What do you think?

Yoni Appelbaum: I think that people who want to move someplace to build a better life themselves, that's great. Richmond is a wonderful city. I have nothing against Richmond, and it does have a thriving art scene. The trouble for me is when the cost of the housing starts to be the driver of the choices. We know that the most important decision that you can make as a parent is not what you read your kids at bedtime. It's not how you sleep train them, it's where you raise them. We've got all this research which says the neighborhood has such an enormous effect on their chances in life.

If people are making that decision about where they're going to put down roots, not based on the kind of community they want to belong to, not based on the kinds of opportunities they want to pursue, but based primarily on where on earth they can afford to live. That's a choice they're making for themselves and for future generations.

Brian Lehrer: Amanda, I guess the difference for you is you move from California to here because you wanted to. You might move from here to Richmond because you feel like you have to.

Amanda: Yes, exactly. I also do want to say also as part of my motivation for moving to New York is that I am a queer person. A lot of my friends are also queer and we were growing up in communities that were really conservative, that were really oppressive, where we didn't feel safe. New York City is truly like a sanctuary for us and a place where we can really embrace who we are. To have to leave that and possibly try to create a new queer scene. Of course, Richmond's very queer. I've picked it as a consideration for a reason. To have to move from a city where there's so much community and you can find so many people just like you and you feel safe here is really heartbreaking.

Brian Lehrer: Amanda, thank you for your call. Keep calling us no matter where you live. Before we run out of time, I want to note for our audience, especially New York listeners, that you have a seminal villain in this story. Tell me if you think that's a fair label. It's of all people, Jane Jacobs and her legacy of urban preservation, and her fights for people who know this part of New York history. We did some segments on it last year, some history segments, her fights with Robert Moses over how to develop New York City versus how to create a neighborhood-based community life in the urban context. What role does Jane Jacobs play in your story?

Yoni Appelbaum: Jane Jacobs is so great and her writings are brilliant. She stood up at a time when Robert Moses and others were championing urban renewal and trying to bulldoze neighborhoods. She had the courage to say, ''Stop. The things you hate about cities, the mixing together of the populations and of the uses, the constant shifting, that's actually what makes cities great.'' She was, I should say, 100% right about all of that. She applied a cure that in many ways over time has become just as bad, if not worse than the original disease.

Her cure was to devolve decision-making back down to local communities, and not just to communities, to small numbers of people who show up at hearings. We know that the people who show up at hearings are whiter, older, richer, more likely to be homeowners, to people who could file lawsuits to challenge governmental decision-making. She herself took a mixed-use building of the kind that she extols, ripped out the storefront, and turned it into a modern single-family home. She wrote brilliantly about everything that was vital about cities, but then her prescription for how to preserve them backfired spectacularly.

What happened as we devolved that decision-making down to the local level was that it became possible for small numbers of people to effectively veto the kinds of construction that had made the city that Jane Jacobs fell in love with. I honor every insight she has into what makes cities good. I think the best way to preserve her legacy is not to follow her prescriptions, but to reverse them. To say, let's make cities able to grow and adapt and change and welcome newcomers again, and then we'll get back the New York that Jane Jacobs celebrated.

Brian Lehrer: Then you say she started it and then her values were adopted all over the country, and so so many places in America developed the same problem. Last question, pushing back in a certain way against your thesis again, listener writes, '' Appelbaum seems to be acknowledging that there are actually lots of factors causing this problem, which implies that his thesis about progressive policies and unintended consequences is overly reductive.'' What do you say to that in our last minute?

Yoni Appelbaum: I'm never going to argue with a listener who says the problem is complicated and multi-causal. Of course, it is. When you look at the places that are suffering this problem and try to find the thing that differentiates them from the places where housing is still affordable, this is what you always come back to. That in the blue jurisdictions, we've layered on large numbers of rules and extensive review processes that have just made it impossible to build. In my reporting, I couldn't get away from that because that's the thing that always comes up.

Brian Lehrer: Yoni Appelbaum, usually with The Atlantic, is also now the author of the book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. There's an excerpt of the book which basically lays out the thesis in The Atlantic right now. Yoni, thank you for joining us and discussing it with us.

Yoni Appelbaum: Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: That's the Brian Lehrer Show for today, produced by Mary Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Zach Gottehrer Cohen produces our Daily Politics podcast. Our intern this term is Henry Saringer. We have Juliana Fonda and Milton Ruiz at the audio control. Stay tuned for Alison.

 

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