Stuck How the privileged and the propertied broke the engine of American opportunity

Historian and journalist Appelbaum makes the case that a patchwork of zoning and housing policies have limited mobility by creating an artificial scarcity of housing and thereby trapping millions of Americans in poverty. Throughout much of our nation's history, generations of Americans in search of better lives for their families had the ability to relocate to chase economic opportunity. New immigrants clustered in tenements and took in lodgers as a means of saving money, then moved on to better housing as their financial prospects improved. Now, though, arcane and complicated zoning laws--some well-intended, but many explicitly designed to exclude people of a certain class or race--have made it expensive and difficult to build new housing in the very areas where economic growth and job opportunities are expanding. Homelessness continues to rise, while poor and working-class Americans are increasingly unable to afford to live in areas with jobs that would improve their financial outlook. Appelbaum argues that we must restore American mobility if the country is to be a true land of opportunity.

A revisionist history of U.S. residential mobility and its consequences. Appelbaum, historian and executive editor at theAtlantic, claims that "the freedom to move is a fundamental American right." Despite this ideal, the country has a mobility crisis. When people moved to where opportunities for advancement were abundant, America prospered. The country was growing, and housing was available where people could live well. Mobility shaped the American character and guaranteed its democracy. In the early- to mid-20th century, geographical mobility was sharply diminished. Tenement house reforms, restrictions on mortgage lending in the 1940s and 1950s, and NIMBY movements a few decades later closed communities to newcomers. "Every year, fewer Americans can afford to live where they want to," he writes. The primary culprit was and still is zoning, a system of land use regulation that stifles attempts to diversify places of opportunity. Overlaid on this problem is persistent racial discrimination in housing. The result is diminished upward social mobility, increasing inequality, and lower economic growth. "The loss of mobility is experienced as a loss of agency, a loss of opportunity, a loss of dignity, a loss of hope." Appelbaum proposes higher-density development, tolerance for a variety of housing types, flexible zoning, and more housing in affluent places. Except for his discussion of race, though, Appelbaum attends too little to the mechanisms that distribute opportunities in job markets, education, and health care and through the courts, nor does he give enough consideration to how housing and land markets function in a capitalist political economy. He rarely mentions developers and bankers, and the class nature of housing markets is hardly discussed. That said, Appelbaum deserves credit for highlighting the relationship between access to opportunities and spatial mobility and for sketching its history. An informed, if limited, case for why geographical and residential mobility matters in capitalist economies. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.