Are Americans Stuck?
The answer is almost certainly ‘Yes,’ if not in the way that you think.
Back in 2020 I had a policy called ‘Get Americans Moving Again.’ It was meant to address the fact that Americans were relocating for new opportunities less frequently than in times past.
Yoni Appelbaum, the author of ‘Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity,’ believes this is one of the biggest things holding back American prosperity. “For 200 years, Americans moved to the places with faster growing economies, and they weren’t always the same places. Moving to Flint, Michigan in the 1920s was a terrific bet. In the 2020s it is not a terrific bet . . . for 200 years, the gap between the richest places and the poorest places was narrowing because people would move from poor places to rich places.” I interview Yoni about his book on the podcast this week.
The statistics are startling: In the 1800s, Americans were so mobile that one out of 3 moved every year. In the 1960s, about one out of every five Americans moved in any given year, a rate of 20%. In 2023, that was down to one in 13, or about 7.7%.
Why do we move less? Yoni pegs the culprit as zoning laws. Housing became much more expensive in high-growth markets like New York or Boston or San Francisco because of restrictions on building in various areas. “America is often described as suffering from a housing crisis, but that’s not quite right. In many parts of the country, housing is cheap and abundant, but good jobs and good schools are scarce. Other areas are rich in opportunities but short on affordable homes.” He’s right; I spent months traveling to the Midwest and there are very reasonably priced homes anywhere you look. The jobs and growth opportunities might be hundreds of miles away. In high-growth cities and affluent suburbs, however, it’s extraordinarily difficult to build housing for the average family. In Manhattan, 27 percent of all lots are now in historic districts or are otherwise landmarked.
By one estimate, the decline in mobility is costing America $2 trillion each year in lost productivity. The toll is more personal too. “People who have recently changed residences report experiencing more supportive relationships and feeling more optimism, greater sense of purpose, and increased self-respect. Those who want to move and cannot, by contrast, become more cynical and less satisfied with their lives.” More and more, people want to move but never actually do.
So what can be done? I’m an advisor to PadSplit, a company that makes it easier for people to rent a spare bedroom. Yoni makes a couple of recommendations. First, let people build near you and join your neighborhood. Stop stopping new developments. Let people build. Rules should apply uniformly across different neighborhoods and communities. Second, be more tolerant of what growth and change could look like, even if the new buildings don’t look good to you. Third, have an approach of abundance. We need a lot of new supply in attractive regions. Many of these changes will be engendered locally.
Yoni has taken a fascinating lens to an underrated problem in American life – we don’t move enough. If we change that, it would improve our culture and economy immeasurably. Call it Doing the Unstuck.
For my interview of Yoni, click here. For his book, click here. To see what Forward is doing in your community to help improve local policy, click here.
