Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity [B1718]

2025 HCDJ in excellent condition. How did America cease to be the land of opportunity? We now take it for granted that good neighborhoods-with good schools and good housing-are only accessible to the wealthy. But in America, this wasn't always the case. Though for most of world history, your prospects were tied to where you were born, Americans came up with a revolutionary idea: If you didn't like your lot in life, you could find a better location and reinvent yourself there. Americans moved to new places with unprecedented frequency, and, for two hundred years, that remarkable mobility was the linchpin of American economic and social opportunity. In this illuminating debut, Yoni Appelbaum, historian and journalist for The Atlantic, shows us that this idea has been under attack since reformers first developed zoning laws to ghettoize Chinese Americans in nineteenth-century Modesto, California. The century of legal segregation that ensued-from the zoning laws enacted to force Jewish workers back into New York's Lower East Side to the private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in Flint, Michigan to Jane Jacobs' efforts to protect her vision of the West Village-has raised housing prices, deepened political divides, emboldened bigots, and trapped generations of people in poverty. Appelbaum shows us that these problems have a common explanation: people can't move as readily as they used to. They are, in a word, stuck. Cutting through more than a century of mythmaking, Stuck tells a vivid, surprising story of the people and ideas that caused our economic and social sclerosis and lays out common-sense ways to get Americans moving again.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Maybe I'm just a giant nerd, but I found this to be an incredibly compelling book, which kept me engaged all the way through. This is one of those books that changes how you understand the world you live in. It's the absolutely fascinating history of how people built homes and communities in the United States, how culture, and migration shaped communities and housing, and how those histories influenced housing policy - leading to today's housing shortages and, the author argues, has decreased our prosperity. Appelbaum is a master at layering the life stories of those that came before us into the context of their time, and connecting it to the present day."; "Interesting history of zoning that is, unsurprisingly, deeply rooted in racism. Appelbaum's proposals for improving mobility and 'fixing' the situation we currently find ourselves in leave me feeling even more hopeless knowing it's not the path our country will take. Cheers to renting for life."; "This was non-fiction that has a lot of data, facts and numbers to sort thru so I wouldn't call it easy reading. But I learned such a new perspective that I had not really given much thought to before regarding mobility, real estate, zoning and discrimination."; "Sparked much debate among my friend group. Love the mix of history, law, and politics. Most of all I love how this author captured how 'progressive' land use politics from the mid 20th century have had the unintentional outcome of suppressing impoverished communities. The critique of landmarking was particularly interesting to me."