An Excerpt from Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American 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 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.
Stuck has been longlisted in the Current Events & Public Affairs category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below comes from the book's opening chapter, "A Nation of Migrants."
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I wrote this book in our new home, in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Shepherd Park. As I typed, a mixed-use development rose outside my window, and the shuddering rumbles of earth being dumped, the metronomic chirps of heavy machinery moving in reverse, and the insistent chattering of jackhammers have provided my soundtrack. Soon, I will have thousands of new neighbors, moving in search of better lives for themselves and for their children—just as my own ancestors came to this country and then moved ceaselessly around it, seeking to build better lives for themselves and for me. In that sense, this book is unavoidably a personal narrative as well as a national one.
The house in which I am typing these words was built in 1923 by a high school mechanical arts teacher named Joseph Wilson who came here in pursuit of his own dreams. Like most Americans of his era, Wilson spent his life on the move. Born to a shoe merchant in a western Pennsylvania boomtown, he left home for college and then landed a job as an instructor at the Thaddeus Stevens Industrial School in Lancaster. From there, he moved to Washington, D.C., into a dismal four-room rental in a large apartment building. Smoke-damaged wallpaper was tacked to the wall. On the front lawn, where rowdy kids threw fruit skins at each other, there was not a blade of grass to be seen. It wasn’t much, but there was a wartime housing crunch, and at least it was affordable. When World War I ended, though, and rent control eased, his monthly payments jumped by a third, up to $40. The notion that a prospering city might not be able to provide affordable places for workers to live was then sufficiently novel that it sparked a congressional investigation, and Wilson testified about his struggles.
When he had a daughter in 1922, he sought a home of his own in which to raise his family. He found one in a Sears catalog for $1,947. The model he chose, the Puritan, fit six rooms into a two-story square, twenty-four feet to a side, topped with a peaked roof. It arrived by rail in thousands of pieces with instructions for assembly, like a life-sized Lego kit. Wilson bought a lot on which to build it, in a recently subdivided neighborhood near the top of the District of Columbia. His mortgage from Sears, for the land and the house together, worked out to $30 a month—just what his rent had been before the landlord jacked it up. Instead of a run-down apartment, though, it bought him a house with a green lawn and a one-car garage on a tree-lined street of single-family homes. Here was the American dream of homeownership made manifest.
At least for some. Because then, and now, the neighborhood where Wilson landed was not for everyone. In the words of one developer, the land had been “legally safeguarded by covenants from every element that might endanger its value,” housing, as a resident later put it, a “solid Anglo-Saxon yeomanry.” Most of my neighbors would not have been welcome here in 1923. The deeds stipulated that the land could not be “rented, leased, sold, demised, transferred, or conveyed unto or in trust for any negro or colored person or persons of negro blood or extraction.” I would not have been welcome, either; Jews were barred by convention, not generally by legally enforceable covenants, but the rule was equally rigid. Other restrictions in parts of the neighborhood set street frontages, minimum dollar values for homes, and setbacks from the street. Only detached and semidetached houses were allowed. The developers aimed to create a bucolic refuge from the bustle of city life—and from the diversity of its people—and sell it to prosperous white families. In 1920, Washington layered onto these covenants the force of law, adopting a zoning ordinance that set maximum heights in the neighborhood and restricted it to residential use.
At one level, exclusion failed. Jews arrived in the 1940s, setting off a massive wave of white flight. By the 1960s, according to one estimate, 80 percent of the neighborhood was Jewish—complete with synagogues, butchers, and delicatessens. That same decade, Black families began to arrive, following Supreme Court rulings striking down racial covenants and desegregating the schools. Realtors used blockbusting tactics in nearby neighborhoods to precipitate racial panic, but local civil rights activists were determined to show that integration could work. They banded together into a group dubbed Neighbors Inc. “You shouldn’t have to tell a Jew what is wrong with ghettos,” Marvin Caplan, the driving force behind the group, wrote in The Atlantic. Soon, Neighbors Inc. was advertising for new residents to come “live your convictions.” Today the neighborhood is 55 percent Black, and as integrated as any in America. One local resident, a leading expert on housing, inequality, and racial discrimination, recently praised it as a “diverse Eden.”
But there is trouble in paradise. The rules intended to enforce economic segregation proved more effective, and more lasting, than those aimed more explicitly at racial and ethnic segregation. High school teachers like Wilson cannot afford to build homes here anymore, nor can anyone build a house like mine on so narrow a lot. Although Neighbors Inc. pushed for racial integration, it achieved that by standing fast against economic diversity, agitating, for example, against the conversion of basements into rental apartments. Its goal was less ensuring affordability than preserving affluence. “Stabilization has been achieved . . . in terms of property values,” its executive director boasted in 1969. He was right. The median value of a house in the neighborhood jumped from $25,000 in 1960 to $132,000 in 1980, nearly doubling in inflation-adjusted terms, even as integration proceeded. In previous decades in other parts of the city, rising demand had led developers to build town houses or apartment buildings, providing affordable places for new arrivals to live. But while the courts might have invalidated racial restrictions, they upheld the legality of single-family zoning. Rising demand for a fixed supply of houses kept prices climbing. As professional-class families had fewer kids and eschewed intergenerational households, and as the rising affluence of the residents led them to renovate apartment conversions back into single-family homes, the community actually began to shrink. The population has declined by a quarter since 1970, and the number of children by more than a third.
I love my neighbors, and my neighborhood. I think more people should have the chance to live here, and in Cambridge, and in places like them around the country—where jobs are abundant and incomes are climbing and services are robust. I want them to be able to raise their kids in a place that will expand their horizons and let them go further than their parents. But instead, American mobility is in sharp decline. The places that today offer the greatest opportunities have grown exclusionary, turning away the next generation of Joseph Wilsons. And there is a bitter irony at work here. Progressive communities like Cambridge and Shepherd Park, which pride themselves on their openness and tolerance and diversity and commitment to social justice, are the worst offenders. That mixed-use development out my window? It’s just on the other side of an invisible line. The children who live there won’t be able to attend our schools. When a developer tried to build a similar mixed-use project in my own neighborhood a few years ago, adding nearly two hundred new apartments atop a grocery store, residents rallied to kill the proposal. The objections they lodged offered a survey course in NIMBYism—the impulse to say, “Not in my backyard.”
Not far to the south, two lawn signs sit side by side on a neatly manicured lawn. One proclaims, no matter where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor, in Spanish, English, and Arabic. Beside it, another reads, say no, urging residents to oppose the construction of an apartment building that would house the new neighbors the other sign welcomes. Ironic, yes. But also instructive. In theory, the drives toward inclusion and exclusion should exist in tension. In practice, though, progressivism has produced a potent strain of NIMBYism, a defense of communities in their current form against those who might wish to join them. Mobility is what made this country prosperous and pluralistic, diverse and dynamic. Now progressives are destroying the very force that produced the values they claim to cherish. How could that happen?
This book is my effort to answer the question that I first encountered in Cambridge and that has been repeated insistently by what I see around me each day. The story that unfolds in these pages, though, is not quite the one I set out to write. I thought I knew the basic contours of the tale. But as I dug into archives, scrolled through microfilm, talked to people around the country, and read through the brilliant work of historians and sociologists and economists, I found a richer and more complicated narrative than I expected, filled with colorful characters, questionable motives, and unintended consequences. I also encountered unlikely heroes—people like Hang Kie and Fred Edwards—whose stories we’ve largely forgotten, but who fought to secure the freedom to move at great personal risk. And I learned that while this country has always been imperfect, it was also once remarkably fluid, allowing its people to pursue their dreams and make it more perfect. And that gives me great hope that it can do so once more.
Excerpted from Stuck by Yoni Appelbaum. Copyright © 2025 by Yoni Appelbaum. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
About the Author
Yoni Appelbaum is a deputy executive editor of The Atlantic and a social and cultural historian of the United States. Before joining The Atlantic, he was a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University. He previously taught at Babson College and at Brandeis University, where he received his PhD in American history.
