Yoni Appelbaum

Localism Must Not Be an Ideology of Soil A critique of the localist critique of Yoni Appelbaum’s “Stuck”

"Some of the critics seems to view the artificial costs of mobility as an argument against mobility, when removing those artificial costs is the whole point of the book." Further thoughts on @yappelbaum.bsky.social's "Stuck," and against localism as an ideology:

Text from the book. The resurgence of mobility revived other aspects of American life that had fallen off during the Great Depression. People sought out churches and clubs and lodges as they tried to construct community in their new surroundings. Between 1940 and 1945, rates of membership in American voluntary associations saw their largest recorded surge. Church membership ticked up, too. Just as the golden age of American voluntary associations in the late nineteenth century had been driven by the remarkable number of Americans moving from one place to another, its revival in the postwar decades was, too. Despite becoming sharply more likely to be living next to new neighbors, and to have moved to an unfamiliar place themselves, Americans expressed more trust in each other and more faith in institutions than they had during the immobile years of the Great Depression.

One of the most interesting things in @yappelbaum.bsky.social's Stuck, is the idea that people join groups most when they can live where they want.

The Running Mate Kamala Harris Didn’t Dare Choose “I love Pete,” she writes in her new book. But picking a gay man would have been too risky.

NEW: Kamala Harris passed on her top choice for a running mate—Pete Buttigieg—because it would've been “too big of a risk” for a Black woman to run with a gay man, she writes in her book, @jonlemire.bsky.social reports:

www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

From Stuck: "If we require multiple dwellings to be fireproof, and thus increase the cost of construction; if we require stairs to be fireproofed, even when there are only three families; if we require fire-escapes and a host of other things," then, he continued, each of the rules could stand up in court, "and at the same time we have made it difficult to build apartment homes."

From Stuck: But although some champions of tenement reform were earnest in their efforts, no one who had paid the slightest attention to the movement could have any doubt as to the actual aims of many reformers. The influx of immigrants to New York City was the problem; eliminating affordable housing was the solution.

From Stuck: Veiller, instead, did everything in his power to make housing more expensive. Immigrants continued to pour into the city in the years immediately after the passage of the Tenement Act, but newly constructed tenements became increasingly unaffordable. The cost of making the improvements to old-law tenements mandated by the law, and increasing competition for the remaining affordable units, combined to drive up prices, setting off rent strikes in 1904 and 1907. "The fact is that the new-law tenements ... are beyond the reach of unskilled wage earners," one reformer complained in 1919.

Many of our land use / building codes are rooted in exclusion + prejudice, even if they are facially anodyne and widely accepted as common sense today

Case in point: early 1900 fire safety reforms were primarily designed to ⬆️ the cost of tenements / MF apts (old and new) to reduce immigration

Strongly recommended for pro-housing people (and even more for people who aren't yet on board): Appelbaum, Yoni. Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Random House, 2025. Moving exerpt attached. #a2council

"When the Dust Bowl set off an exodus out of the Great Plains, 300k migrants showed up in California, a place seen as the land of opportunity. The welcome was not warm."

This was talked about a bit in the book "Stuck" by @yappelbaum.bsky.social:

From Stuck! by @yappelbaum.bsky.social, some great history on U.S. building codes and Lawrence Veiller's work on tenement laws:

5. The post-1970s changes to zoning have, in effect, returned to city governments a "license law" regime, in which local governments are now consumed by these decisions, to the detriment of everything else they could be doing—and with the same invitation to corruption.

4. Prohibition failed, but the three-tier system of alcohol distribution introduced in its wake was intended to address the same problem—and largely succeeded. Retail owners still needed licenses, but the big money was in distribution and production, and they no longer cared who got the licenses.

3. One major (and largely forgotten) impetus behind the disastrous experiment with Prohibition was the desire to clean up city governments by removing the corruption spawned by the license laws, taking the liquor money out of local politics.

2. The saloon owners—and the beer and liquor distributors who supplied them—had more to win or lose in city elections than anyone else, and they spent accordingly. Officials catered to their interests, more than to voters. And corruption ran rampant.

1. In the decades before Prohibition, many municipalities experimented with license-laws, regulating the sale of alcohol. Such licenses swiftly became the most valuable things dispensed by government, with profoundly distorting consequences.

You will never think of Jane Jacobs the same way again after reading this book:

bsky.app/profile/torr...

10/10, no notes

Sounds like a big problem!

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

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.

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