Yoni Appelbaum

We used to be a country, a proper country

Stuck by Yoni Appelbaum: 9780593449295 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books How did America cease to be the land of opportunity? We take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are only accessible to the wealthy. But in America, this...

It makes me genuinely sad that if, as he says, he read the book, this is the impression he formed of the history it presents: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/700580...

Jon, thanks for reading, but you've left me a little puzzled. Where did I write what you quote here?

Grok Says White, Asian, and Jewish Are the ‘Good Races’ Days after praising Hitler, Elon Musk’s chatbot is back at it.

Full story, from @matteowong.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

"On its own accord, Grok dug up the demographics of previous winners of Nobel Prizes in the sciences—disproportionately white men—and determined a set of “good_races”: white, caucasian, Asian, East Asian, South Asian, and Jewish."

How Jane Jacobs got Americans stuck Yoni Appelbaum on the real villians behind our housing and mobility problems

I talk to Yoni Appelbaum on declining mobility and the future of American economic growth, how the abundance movement is changing the tenor of this debate, and some solutions on how to help Americans live where they want and build a more prosperous future: riskgaming.substack.com/p/how-jane-...

Stephen Miller Triggers Los Angeles The protesters gathered in downtown L.A. are a microcosm of the Democratic coalition that has dominated the city for decades.

NEW: Culture war, with real troops. What I saw during three days in downtown LA www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

I agree that the issue is cost. But the paper takes pains to quantify the roles of materials, labor, and regulation—and finds it's mostly the last.

America's Housing Supply Problem: The Closing of the Suburban Frontier? Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

You didn't read the study, AND you're confident it's wrong?

www.nber.org/papers/w33876

Stuck by Yoni Appelbaum: 9780593449295 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books How did America cease to be the land of opportunity? We take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are only accessible to the wealthy. But in America, this...

I know I'm a broken record on this, but the inability to move toward opportunity is a profound shift in American life, it's taken place within our lifetimes, and it's *rapidly getting worse.*

www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/700580...

This is hugely underplayed in the housing discourse. We're not running out of land for suburban starter homes. What's changed—and it really has changed!—is that in the last states where it was still possible to build them, the regulatory landscape has choked off development.

"If the U.S. housing stock had expanded at the same rate from 2000-2020 as it did from 1980-2000, there would be 15 million more housing units."

From this very good NBER paper by Ed Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko.

www.nber.org/system/files...

The most important graph you'll see today. As large blue-state metros choked off growth with zoning, red-state metros kept building cheap suburban housing.

But now, that's changed, as homeowners in those states have mastered the art of blocking development, too.

The result? Prices are spiking.

A High IQ Makes You an Outsider, Not a Genius Acing an intelligence test only counts for so much.

With happy timing, here comes my book extract -- on why having a high IQ can make you an outsider, rather than a genius.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Sunday read: How has zoning historically been used to segregate cities? 1885 Modesto, CA made it illegal to operate laundromats in certain areas for one racist reason. We can’t discuss zoning bills, like the AZ Starter Homes Act, without acknowledging this history.

ℹ️: Stuck by Yoni Appelbaum

5. And often as you say, that means that places are eventually able to rebound. Sometimes, they don't. But either way, the _people_ who were born in places in decline fare better, over the course of their lives, for being able to choose where to live.

4. So I think there's strong empirical support for the claim that mobility allowed us to absorb previous economic shocks and waves of deindustrialization, and that today, the lack of mobility has significantly worsened these effects.

3. But if you think about the people, and not just the place, it's a much less grim story. Instead of remaining the 33rd largest city—which today, would mean 550k people—but being devoid of jobs, the city shrank as people pursued opportunity.

2. Take Fall River, MA. In 1900, it was the 33rd largest city in the country, thriving on textiles, with a pop of 105k. Today, it has only 94k. The textile mills moved south at the beginning of the 20th century, and the city has never wholly rebounded.

1. That's often been the story. But also—and it's important to face this directly—some places just declined, and never rebounded.

Can America Get Unstuck? We used to be more dynamic, more mobile, and more energetic. It’s not clear if we can be again.

The housing market now dictates settlement patterns, rather than following from them. Americans move to find housing they can afford, not to seek economic opportunity. Does it really have to be that way? @ad-mastro.bsky.social reviews @yappelbaum.bsky.social's "Stuck":

This First Things review is either going to be a blurb on the paperback edition of "Stuck," or the ad copy on my new, exclusive fragrance.

"Appelbaum very probably represents the Democratic future. He can bring in libertarians and capitalists with his YIMBY economic policies...but he keeps the coastal activist base happy by including just a touch of racial identity politics and a whiff of lavender identitarianism."

The Dillingham Commission

The point—in context—was that reformers assumed tenement life to be a trap immigrants could never escape, and so sought to ban apartments. But every empirical study showed it was, instead, a launching pad.

There had been some new construction within the area over the previous decade, but not enough to alter the topline finding of "roughly half"; it had been remarkably dense even at the outset.

Key passage from Stuck by @yappelbaum.bsky.social. New York tenement housing was a temporary step ladder for newcomers saving up for something better (and conditions were mostly fine). We see snapshots of where people are in the moment but not how they move up. Observing dynamism is tricky.

Join us this afternoon as we talk housing

Nicely done