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

How we took away the American Dream once we got it ourselves.

The American Dream is often imagined as economic and social mobility manifested in physical outcomes. The book, Stuck, argues that it's the other way around. The reason America is facing historic economic inequality and social isolation is because we are physically stuck.

Yoni Appelbaum is a historian and the deputy executive editor at The Atlantic. Before the Atlantic, he was a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University with a focus on American political and social history. His time in Cambridge is where the story begins with his book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.

Stuck begins with a familiar story-- Appelbaum's growing family caused him to be "priced out" of Cambridge. They moved, "not where they wanted to be, but where they could afford to live." This motivating event, combined with his background as an historian, led Yoni Appelbaum down a path of investigation to uncover an incredible series of stories of how today's America came to be. In his book, Appelbaum maps step by step how we went from a nation on the move to a nation "Stuck".

The book opens with figures about our declining mobility that are hard to ignore:

"In the late nineteenth century... roughly a third of all Americans changed addresses each year. In the 1940s and 1950s, about a fifth of Americans moved annually. By 2021, only one-twelfth of Americans moved."

"Switching jobs frequently when you're young correlates with occupational and economic mobility, but the share of people switching industries, occupations, and employers has fallen dramatically. From four or more before the age of thirty to just one or two."

"The average American today belongs to half as many groups... while half of Americans used to think most people could be trusted, today only a third think the same."

Why did this happen? Why are we not able to live where we want? Why do we look more positively at the past than we do at the future?

Stuck provides three hypotheses.

1. Our intolerance of others, who we discourage from our neighborhoods by restricting the type of buildings "they" can live in.

2. The inconsistent sets of overlapping regulations, put in place by witty individuals to help their communities keep the "wrong" type of buildings from being built.

3. The scarcity this creates in places where most opportunity exists, keeping the American dream out of reach by keeping those places out of reach.

As we learned in elementary school history class, intolerance and opportunity is what drove immigrants since the pilgrims to come to America. Those whose beliefs that weren't accepted had little choice but to risk their lives to create their own community. In the old world, a person belonged to a place. That place was responsible for that person. "Communities were members-only clubs, and you couldn't join unless accepted as a member." In America, this perspective changed. "At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Americans had assumed communities could select their own members. By its end, they assumed individuals could select their own communities." Individuals with the ability to move and select their own communities means that they can freely move towards opportunity.

Stuck tells of many Americans for whom mobility was the key. Abraham Lincoln, Rudolph Hechler, Josiah Bishop Andrews, and J.D. Dotson are all examples of how mobility brought proximity to opportunity to better one's chance at success.

Unlike Lincoln, who used his success to unlock the freedom of movement for others, many enriched by opportunity through mobility refused to tolerate others seeking to do the same. From Modesto to the West Village, well-to-do Americans leveraged zoning, public hearings, and discretionary approvals to do what outright racism and violence could not— keeping the “wrong” people out of their neighborhoods.

A reason why it's so hard to build in America is the inconsistent collection of rules and regulations that restrict what can be built where (a combination of zoning and approvals like historic preservation or environmental review). Stuck argues that this is working as intended. Those who want to restrict who can live in their neighborhoods found success in restricting what buildings and businesses can exist in their neighborhoods. In describing how Charles H. Chaney successfully implemented the first single-family zoning regulation (ironically in Berkeley, California), Appelbaum writes: "To put it plainly, single family zoning was invented by a particularly determined and talented NIMBY, to prevent anyone from building apartments nearby." What Chaney wrote in 1915 echoes what NIMBYs say today: "If a dairy, an undertaker's establishment or even an apartment house is built on Piedmont Avenue... the surrounding property is unquestionably depreciated, further good residences will cease to go in there, the district will deteriorate, and there is bound to be loss."

Stuck is filled with such stories. Americans who attained the American Dream leverage their education and connection to pass regulation that restricts building in their neighborhoods. As a result, what can be built where is largely dependent on the people already living there. Individuals can still choose their community, but only if they have the means to do so.

Housing is scarce because restricting what can be built is the most successful way Americans have found to enforce who is allowed within their community. In San Francisco, a land so rich with opportunity that a red bridge is called the Golden Gate, the median time it takes to get a permit is two years. This is just the approval to build, before any actual building happens. It's no wonder San Francisco has one of the most dire housing shortages in the country.

Housing affordability is a national concern. 69% of Americans said they were “very concerned” about the cost of housing. Loosening control over what can be built lowers costs by increasing supply to meet demand. Cambridge, the place that started the story in Stuck, recently abolished single family zoning. New York City’s “City of Yes” plans to increase housing by lifting and revising a wide array of restrictions. At the same time, President Trump has said that he will “save America’s suburbs by protecting single family zoning.” A key tenant of Project 2025’s plan for the HUD is to prioritize support for the single family home.

Without the perspective of history, one might be lead to believe that this is once again a partisan issue. One of the reasons I recommend this book is because Stuck teaches us that regulation is a weapon wielded by both progressive and conservative elites (Jane Jacobs, our progressive New Urbanist hero, gets called out for her NIMBYism in Chapter 2). The human tendency to hoard what you have once you have it exists on every band of the political spectrum. There’s no moral high ground in supporting housing in the ballot box while vetoing housing at the community meeting.

Stuck helps us understand the current deadlock of inequality and inadequate housing by telling the story of how we lost the unique trait that once defined our nation, our freedom of mobility. By limiting what can be built, we limit who can live where, who can move where, and who our abundant opportunities are for.

Stuck is available on Amazon and in bookstores.

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We recently had the opportunity to interview Yoni Appelbaum on the Most Podern Podcast. The conversation covers the main stories of the book and how we can get ourselves unstuck.