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- [00:01]
Derek Thompson
Hey, it's Bill Simmons letting you know that we are covering the White Lotus.
- [00:04]
Yoni Applebaum
On the Prestige TV Podcast and the.
- [00:06]
Derek Thompson
Ringer TV YouTube channel every Sunday night this season with Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson. Also on Wednesdays, Rob Mahoney and I.
- [00:13]
Yoni Applebaum
Will be sort of diving deep into theories and listener questions. So you can watch that on the Ringer YouTube channel and also on the Spotify app.
- [00:21]
Derek Thompson
Subscribe to the prestigious podcast feed, subscribe to the Ringer TV YouTube channel. And don't forget, you can also watch.
- [00:28]
Yoni Applebaum
These podcasts on Spotify. White Lotus Go.
- [00:36]
Derek Thompson
This episode was brought to you by Workday There are two kinds of people in the world, backward thinkers and forward thinkers. Forward thinkers have plans 15 minutes from now and 15 years from now. They're not just one step ahead, they're 1,000 steps ahead. And when you're a forward thinker, you need a platform that thinks like you do. Workday's AI illuminates decision making and reimagines how you manage your people and money for long term success. Workday moving business forever forward. Find out more@workday.com what does it mean to be rich?
- [01:13]
Yoni Applebaum
Maybe it's about measuring life and laugh.
- [01:15]
Derek Thompson
Lines and time by how often it stands still. At Edward Jones we believe the key.
- [01:19]
Yoni Applebaum
To being rich is knowing what counts.
- [01:22]
Derek Thompson
Let's find your rich Edward Jones Member, SIPC Today A History of American Housing if you were going to think of one word to describe the U.S. economy at this moment, I think you could do a lot worse than the word stuck. First, the labor market is stuck. Yes, unemployment is low, around 4%, but that low unemployment rate really disguises how surprisingly hard it is to find a job today. The hiring rate has declined consistently since about 2022, and it's now closer to its lowest level of the 21st century than the highest. So we're in this weird moment where it feels like everybody's working but nobody's hiring. And if you or somebody you know is looking for a job, you can literally see the challenge of finding work right there in the official labor market stats. Second, the housing market is stuck, interest rates are sticky, high tariffs are looming, and young people are shut out of the market. The median age of first time home buyers just hit an all time high of 38 years old this year. When Yahoo. Finance asked Jim Tobin, the CEO of the national association of Home Builders, to describe housing conditions recently, he said, well.
- [02:49]
Yoni Applebaum
I think right now it's stuck is.
- [02:51]
Derek Thompson
The way I see it. And above all, people are stuck. 60 years ago, one in five Americans moved every year. Today it's more like one in 13. And according to today's guest, Yoni Applebaum, the deputy executive director of the Atlantic, this fact, the decline of migration in America, the decline of moving in America, is absolutely critical to explain so much of what Americans think has gone wrong in this country. Yoni is the author of the latest cover story of the Atlantic entitled How Progressives Froze the American Dream, which is adapted from his book with a fitting title, Stuck. Yoni was our guest in our first ever sold out live show in Washington, D.C. at Union Stage in February. And today we talk about why declining migration is perhaps the most important social fact of modern American life. The history of housing policy and zoning laws going back not just through the 20th century, but into the 1800s. And finally, we talk about why Yoni believes that homeowners in liberal cities have strangled the American dream and left many Americans feeling so stuck. I'm Derek Thompson and this is Plain English live from dc. We good? Yes, we are. Wow. Thank you so much for coming to the first ever live Plain English podcast recording. Thank you for making history and thank you also for braving the elements. I know it's absolutely gnarly out there. I haven't checked the road conditions recently, but it looks super gnarly. This morning I was worried no one's going to show up. I was sending absolutely frantic, frantic emails to Elizabeth back here. This is wonderful. Full house. This is awesome. So what's this show about? Today? When I announced this show, I'm pretty sure that it was an economics episode. And so I wanted to sort of honor the theme of that episode. You know, people happen to be listening to the Econ show. Maybe they expected an economic related theme. And I thought, you know, within the field of economics, one thing we haven't done in a long time, which is obviously important and of high interest to people in this room and around the country, is, is housing. It's been months since we did a housing episode. And then finally I thought, I've got this book coming out called Abundance, and if there was some way for me to tie housing to abundance, that would really make it useful. My book agent is right here in the fifth or sixth row. It would be very useful for her as well. She would be very pleased with me if I found a way to tie this in to the book. And so I was thinking, what am I going to do? That's at the intersection of economics and housing in Abundance. And then fortuitously, as Kismet, the Atlantic releases its cover story this month called provocative headline how Progressives Broke the American Dream about housing policy and the decline of migration in America. That's based on this book, Stuck by Yoni Applebaum, the deputy executive editor of the Atlantic. And I thought, well, this is perfect. I have to have Yoni on to talk about his cover story, his, his new book, and the history of housing in America. So a quick history of Yoni himself and just how smart this guy is. Yoni was a Harvard PhD. Leaving anonymous comments on TheAtlantic.com, in particular on TA Nehisi Coates blog in, I don't know, 2010, 2011 or something like that. I mean, basically just procrastinating on his dissertation about the 19th century in America at Harvard and just leaving brilliant comments under TNC's blogs. So brilliant, in fact, that he developed a personal relationship with Ta Nehisi. Ta Nehisi introduced him to then Atlantic.com editor Bob Cohn, who went on to become the head of the Economist. Yodi was hired as an anonymous commenter to be the politics editor of the Atlantic. I mean, talk about upward mobility here, folks. He's now gone on to become the deputy executive editor. I mean, when I say this as my boss's boss, I am telling you, like literally in the org chart, this man is my boss's boss. So I am only going to be mildly mean to him as I bully him on the show. Please help me welcome the most successful anonymous commenter in the Atlantic's 160 year history, Yoni Applebaum. How did I do? Yoni, welcome to the show.
- [07:56]
Yoni Applebaum
So glad to be here.
- [07:57]
Derek Thompson
Did I sufficiently embarrass you?
- [07:59]
Yoni Applebaum
Yeah, you did a pretty good job there.
- [08:00]
Derek Thompson
Good. Yeah, I saw you actually. You mildly stumbled over some chord back there. I saw that as a sign of your potential embarrassment. So look, I wrote the COVID story of the last issue of the Atlantic, the Antisocial Century, where I argued that alone time rising, self imposed solitude is what I called the most important social change of the past half century. I worked on this article really hard. You were an editor or an editor's editor on this article. A 9,000 word article that I spent months and months on. You are the article of this month's cover story. And I'm reading along until I get to this sentence in the fourth paragraph. The decline in geographic mobility is the single most important social change of the past half century. Although other shifts have attracted more attention. What the fuck is that? Is the Atlantic just gonna do this every single month? Like whatever random thing we decide to focus on is the most important social change in the last half century. Defend this claim that the decline of geographic mobility is the most important social change of the last 50 years.
- [09:14]
Yoni Applebaum
I think then I can tell this crowd that the next issue of the Atlantic says that the guy who leaves a quarter inch at the bottom of the bottle and doesn't get up to replace it with a new one, that is the biggest social change.
- [09:26]
Derek Thompson
Yes, it is.
- [09:27]
Yoni Applebaum
And we're just going to do this every month. No. So I think you're right. Aloneness is an enormous crisis in America, and this is what I'll defend. I think the reason that we feel so alone and disconnected from each other is that something fundamental has shifted in American life. We used to move around a lot. We don't anymore. And it's had the perverse effect of leaving us really disconnected from each other.
- [09:55]
Derek Thompson
And the key statistic here is in the late 19th century, one in three Americans moved in any given year. Now it's one in 14. So the annual rate of mobility has gone from about 30% of the country to about 7% of the country. That's an enormous change. And I love this passage of the book Stuck. You write, quote, the notion that people should be able to choose their own communities is America's most profound contribution to the world. Many of the cherished features of our society trace in one way or another back to this innovation. Many of our country's most glaring injustices result from the ways in which this freedom has been denied to those who needed it most. The fact that it is now endangered is not just a problem for housing markets, It's a lethal threat to the entire American project.
- [10:48]
Yoni Applebaum
God, there's nothing worse than listening to your own words getting read back to you in front of. You know, I wrote that because when we move, there's two ways to look at it, right? One is you back up a truck, you load it up, you go someplace new. It's a mechanical thing. The other way to think about it is what it actually means to move. To relocate from one place to another. You're starting over. You arrive in a new town, you need to figure out who you are. You need to reconstruct your identity. And you do that by finding a job. You do that by building social connections. Maybe you show up at church for the first time in years that Sunday in order to find out who else lives around here. Maybe you're at the bar and you turn to the person sitting next to you, which you wouldn't usually do because it's awkward to talk to the guy sitting next to you at the bar. And you introduce yourself. When you move, you have a chance to figure out who you want to be. You have a chance to start over. And in America, this is a land of second chances, of fifth chances, of 13th chances. Americans move a lot, and we've historically done that a ton. And that made our society really open to people redefining themselves, not slotting into a particular role in an elaborate social hierarchy, being stuck with the identities with which you're born. No, in America, you've had the chance to move up, to move in some entirely unexpected direction, to decide who you want to be. And the injustice is part of it, too. Because if you want to know who's gotten the raw end of the deal in America, you can look back through our history at the groups that have been deprived of mobility. The literal mechanism of enslavement is the denial of mobility. You can't leave, you can't physically leave. Right? And defiantly, African Americans would run away, was the language they used at the time. Right. They would assert the mobility in the face of immobility. And that's been true throughout our history, that the populations we've denied mobility have been the ones that have gotten the wrong end of the deal. And the people who have had the chance to move and redefine themselves are those who've moved up in America.
- [12:50]
Derek Thompson
So you're trying to understand why this happened, right? Why in the last 140 years, the mobility rates declined from about 33% to about 7%. And I can imagine at least three really obvious suspects that we just have to start with. The first suspect is that maybe we're just older. We're an aging country. Like most developed democracies in the world, it's young people who move the most. It's old people who tend to stay where they've decided to be when they're 50 and 60. Maybe the country's just gotten older. The second is maybe we're richer. Maybe this isn't a problem at all. Maybe it's one more irony of our economic success. We're more likely to own rather than to rent. That's why we're staying put. Maybe it's that our houses are just more comfortable than they used to be. Maybe the industrial mix of cities is more similar to each other. So Whereas in the 1840s, if you wanted to find gold, you had to go to California. But today, if you want to be a registered nurse and you live in North Carolina, you don't have to move to San Francisco, you don't have to move to Boston. There's RAs everywhere. You can do these jobs wherever you happen to be. And then finally, I think we have to throw this on the table. Whereas in the early, pretty much every decade before the 1970s on, it tended to be men who worked and women who stayed at home. Now you have dual earner households and it is absolutely harder to move when you're moving two jobs rather than one. So why doesn't this answer the entire social mystery that you're after? We are older, we are richer, and we are more dual earning.
- [14:22]
Yoni Applebaum
It's embarrassing to admit. You're right on every count. And we're a heck of a lot older. We founded this country that the median American was something like 16 and today the median American is more like 38. We do have dual income households. We're a lot richer per capita. But when you look at the decline in mobility, what's really interesting to me about it is it's down across the board. It's down among dual income households and it's down among singles. In fact, it's down more among young singles than it is among dual income households. If you look at age plays a role here, but young people are moving even less. That's the most dramatic end of the decline. So it's not just that we're aging, it's that at these earlier points in the life cycle, before we're tied to others, before we have all kinds of commitments that might keep us in place, we're moving a lot less than we used to. And it's how broad that decline is and the fact that it has been particularly acute among the people who once moved the most, that makes me think that something else is going on here. If you find something declining and that decline is highly focused among one group, you start looking at that one group. When you see everybody no longer doing what they once did, you start to look for some broader cause.
- [15:43]
Derek Thompson
So if it's not age and if we don't think it's wealth, can you talk to us a little bit about the dual earner piece? Is that the same thing essentially, that dual earner households and single households, you said, are equally likely to see these declines in mobility. So we have to find some cause that's outside of wealth, outside of dual earner state. What is it? What is the key ingredient here that you think is driving down mobility?
- [16:07]
Yoni Applebaum
The key ingredient that has over the last 50 years eroded our mobility is housing prices. It used to be the case that if you were a janitor in Alabama and you moved to a wealthy city somewhere, San Francisco, you would earn more as a janitor working in San Francisco, you might even be able to jump occupational brackets and get a better job that paid you even more. You'd pay more to live in San Francisco. The rents were higher than they were in rural Alabama. But you more than make it up by your gains. Today, for the first time in American history, the opposite is true. If you are a janitor in rural Alabama and you move to San Francisco, you'll end up not a little behind, you'll end up way behind. You'll pay so much more to live there that you will actually have less in your bank account with each successive month. And that dynamic is a sudden and dramatic change. People in America for 200 years were moving from the poorer places toward the richer places, and they were better off for it. And the gap between the rich and the poor places was narrowing, and it slows starting around 1970, and then it stalls, and then it reverses. And today the gap between the rich and poor places in America is getting wider. And that is, I think, the fundamental challenge.
- [17:23]
Derek Thompson
You're pointing to attention. You're pointing to attention that, I think is just the heart of the American identity. The American dream posits this connection between hard work, upward mobility, and ownership, right? You work hard, you buy a home, you move up in the world. But it seems almost like the American dream is not even coming apart at the seams. It's almost like inverting. It used to be the case that you moved toward opportunity in order to get richer, but now it's the places with the highest income and the most upward mobility that also have the most unaffordable housing. And it's the places with the lowest income and sometimes even, according to the Harvard economist Raj Chetty, the lowest upward mobility that have the cheapest housing. So it's almost like you have to make a choice, right? Are you moving toward cheap housing or are you moving toward upward mobility? That's not the choice that Americans had to make. For most American history, to move toward opportunity meant you could afford to live there, right?
- [18:22]
Yoni Applebaum
And it's a reversal of the flow, right? People were flowing for 200 years toward the places with the fastest growing economies, toward the places with the best jobs, and now they're flowing toward the places with the cheapest housing. And Raj Shetty has shown us that the single most important decision you can make as a parent is where you're going to raise your kids. That's more important than how you sleep, train them, what books you read to them, what their social media use is like, what really determines their prospects in life is where you're living. And so when I say that people are moving toward where the housing is cheaper, that could be fine, maybe they're happy there. But I also know that as they move into communities with relatively bleak prospects for themselves, they're going to pass those on, and their kids will have relatively bleak prospects, too. And when you get generations in America trapped in places where their prospects are bleak, where they're not doing as well as their parents did and their kids won't do as well as they did, that's a deep social crisis.
- [19:22]
Derek Thompson
Your book is really wonderful history about how the rules that we've placed on housing have made it harder for the American dream to survive in the 21st century. And I want to take some time, sort of in a. In a plain history sort of way, to really trace that history of zoning. I'm not sure a lot of people truly understand where this thicket of laws came from. What their original motivations are, are we're the world that we all live in, where people who are yimby, who are abundance progressives want to make housing easier to build. Where did this world of zoning and permitting actually come from? So I think this is like a really useful way to tell this story. Start us off in the late 19th century, before any of these rules existed in American cities. And tell us a little bit about this feature of another world called Moving Day, which I had never heard of, but really does give you a sense that the past in America was a different country.
- [20:20]
Yoni Applebaum
Yeah, Moving Day was crazy. Moving Day was one day in a city, in a rural area where all of the unwritten leases, and almost no leases were written expired on a single day. And a quarter, third, half the population would get up and move to someplace new in a day between sunrise and sunset. So there would be carts going through the streets of the city piled high with belongings. People, people be coming out of an apartment while the new family is moving into the apartment.
- [20:49]
Derek Thompson
It's the highest stakes musical chairs you could possibly imagine.
- [20:52]
Yoni Applebaum
It was total chaos. You'd get tourists coming over from Europe just to watch this. Right. Because it was the craziest thing they'd ever seen. Americans were nuts, and they were only too delighted to come over and witness just how crazy we were. But there was a reason that people were doing this. Almost everybody who moved on Moving Day ended up someplace better than they had started. Americans in this era are looking at housing the way I might look at an iPhone. I have it for a couple of years. I'm ready for the new model. Your next apartment might have hot and cold running water. It might have heat, which was a really cool thing when they brought gas heat into apartments. By moving on an annual basis, as long as you're building new housing, you build some new luxury housing. The rich people move in there, they vacate the places they've been living. And somebody bumps up, you can trace 10, 12, 15 moves in a row where different families are bumping up, each going to a house, an apartment, a townhouse that's a little bit better than the place that they're leaving. So you have this wild mobility happening in the United States. And it was a new thing in the world, and this is why the Europeans were coming over and gawking. For the longest time, you were attached to the place where you were born. You had a place in society. If you were a yeoman, farmer or a peasant, you were attached to the particular community into which you were born, where your family had lived for generations. You could look out the church window and see row after row of gravestones with your name on it, and you knew you'd lived there your entire life, and you knew that your children would live there. Your identity was defined. You had a role, and you couldn't rise above your station. In the United States, we start the same way. In the colonial era, if you tried to move into a town, you didn't have the right to move into that town. They could warn you out. They could just deliver a notice which said, yeah, you bought a house, we don't want you. And they did it routinely. You had no right to just move in. You had to belong to the community. And to belong to a community, a community had to accept you. And right around 1800, the laws in the United States start to change. And they say, no, we're not going to do that anymore. Communities aren't members only clubs that have to accept you. We're going to let you belong to a community just by moving into that community and saying, I intend to become a resident. It can be an act of individual choice. Now individuals will choose their communities instead. And when we do that, it sets off this riot of motivations. Mobility, which by the mid 19th century, has resulted in a third of Americans moving every year because they can. For the first time in world history, they've got the chance to decide where they want to live and to define their own identities through their moves.
- [23:25]
Derek Thompson
It's absolutely wild to think about one question I have actually about moving day. Before we continue to tell this story. People must have liked some of their neighbors. Maybe they're annoyed by half their neighbors, but they might have liked some of their neighbors. In a world with this level of absolute mobility, where there's so much churn, it's exciting, it's dynamic, it also seems fundamentally disruptive. You know, I certainly wouldn't want to have to move every three years if I couldn't guarantee that the neighbors I lived around I adored and wouldn't come with me. Do you have any, as a historian of this era, do you have a sense of, like, the social dimension of moving day, the degree to which people truly did celebrate their chance of moving on, or whether there was like a tinge of mournfulness about the fact that they might have to leave some of their friends behind?
- [24:22]
Yoni Applebaum
Sure. You know, and I've moved. I suspect most of you in the crowd have moved at some point in your lives. I've never found it a particularly fun experience. I've never wanted to move. You know, there's always been some reason, some impetus that makes me leave where I am and I'm perfectly happy and I get up and go. And you can read these accounts of dislocation. People were not always thrilled by this, but they were drawn to it because of what it offered. Right. It was a good trade they were making. Not everybody moves every year. Some people settle down and spend the rest of their lives in a single house. But there was sort of the social expectation. There's this wonderful story of an older lady who decides she's not moving that moving day, but she's so embarrassed not to be moving that she draws all her curtains and pretends that she's gone so that nobody will know she didn't move until they've all left. It's a different world, right. You have to think about the kind of social expectation that exists where it's like a little embarrassing not to be the one who's moving. But the other thing I'd say to that is that this same era, when Americans are moving all around, the Europeans who come over to gawk at them and laugh at them and to decide there's something wrong with our national character, that we don't love our homes enough. Those same Europeans notice something else about the United States. They're like, damn, this is the country with more voluntary associations and tighter knit communities than anything we've ever seen. And they praise this to the skies even as they're deriding our mobility, and they never draw the connection. They don't get it. They don't understand that because Americans are moving all the time. When you land there, you're in this new building, you're in the new townhouse. You go and you knock on your neighbor's door and you introduce yourself because you've just moved in and you don't know anyone. And maybe you go down to the lodge hall and you join this peculiar club because you need a community. You've landed someplace new. It is precisely the fact that we're moving around, precisely the fact that we do become isolated from each other, which impels Americans to build these kinds of social connections. So yeah, there's a loss, but there's also a gain with each new move.
- [26:24]
Derek Thompson
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- [27:42]
Yoni Applebaum
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Derek Thompson
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Yoni Applebaum
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Yoni Applebaum
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Derek Thompson
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- [28:12]
Yoni Applebaum
I can say to my new Samsung.
- [28:13]
Derek Thompson
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- [28:16]
Yoni Applebaum
Friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve. And it does without me lifting a finger so I can get in more squats anywhere I can.
- [28:23]
Derek Thompson
1, 2, 3, 3.
- [28:26]
Yoni Applebaum
Will that be cash or credit? Credit.
- [28:29]
Derek Thompson
4 Galaxy S25 Ultra. The AI companion that does the heavy lifting. So you can do you get yours@samsung.com.
- [28:37]
Yoni Applebaum
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- [28:38]
Derek Thompson
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- [28:39]
Yoni Applebaum
Results may vary based on input.
- [28:40]
Derek Thompson
Check responses for accuracy. So I want to go back to the year 1880. There is no zoning law in America. There is no permitting. There is no Washington D.C. height ceiling. There are basically no rules for housing. And today these rules just encircle us. They're absolutely everywhere. So it's a little bit like a 145 year epidemic that grew from patient zero to now patient infinity. Tell me the story of patient zero. 1880s, there are zero zoning laws in America. What is the first? And tell me how ironically it was the gold rush, the California gold rush that was the motivation for the first zoning law in U.S. history.
- [29:22]
Yoni Applebaum
Yeah, you got to go to California, right? So this is a land of insane opportunity, right? You can literally pick up gold. And if there's anything that's going to get Americans to be mobile, it's the promise, like move to this state and literally the gold is there for the taking. So people flood into California, mostly men, and they instantly need labor. And they need labor for railroads, they need labor for the mining. They import. Large numbers of Chinese workers come over and this creates enormous tension. The white workers who've arrived in California are enormously racist. They actually start a political party that's just an anti Chinese party. They would like the Chinese to be gone from their state. But the Chinese are serving a variety of important functions. They drive them off the railroads, but the Chinese discover a niche. Nobody wants to do laundry. All of these gold miners are out there. Their clothes are filthy, but they consider laundry to be beneath them. They think of it as women's work and they refuse to wash their clothes. It gets so bad, I'm not making this up, that somebody starts a business where he puts the dirty laundry on ships. The ships go to Hawaii where they launder the clothes and then bring them back to San Francisco.
- [30:36]
Derek Thompson
Oh my God.
- [30:38]
Yoni Applebaum
So a smart Chinese entrepreneur says, you know, I'll do that. That's something that I can do. That would lead to my acceptance and I can make it in America. So the Chinese essentially become the laundromats of California. And the Chinese laundry is. It's a little like a Starbucks coffee shop. You don't walk 10 blocks past three Starbucks. You just stop at the first one and you get your cup of coffee. So location is really important to them. They're in Modesto, California, and they start moving into the white neighborhoods to be closer to their customers. And there is an enormous backlash against this. And the white residents of Modesto to try everything to drive the Chinese out. The first thing they try is arson. They try burning them out, and the Chinese rebuild. Then they try vigilante violence. They put on hoods, they form 50 strong and they go and they beat them. They tear down the buildings and they rebuild again. And then they try zoning. And zoning succeeds where the violence has failed. Because when they write the zoning ordinance, they're clever about it. They don't say, this is an anti Chinese law. They say, this is a public health ordinance. We are going to push all of the laundries west of the tracks and south of G Street. And if you go and you pull a map of Modesto, there's only one block that's west of the tracks and south has a label on it. It says Chinatown. But they don't say all the Chinese have to move back to Chinatown. No, they just say all the laundries need to be located here. It's a zoning ordinance. It says something which is fine in one part of the city is not fine in another part of the city. And the courts allow it, because the courts are elected in those years in California, and they know exactly how their voters feel about the Chinese. And so this is the original zoning ordinance in America is to drive the Chinese out of Modesto, California.
- [32:25]
Derek Thompson
So the original zoning laws in America are very explicitly about creating zones, commercial zones in cities that legally look like we're trying to keep one business over here and one business over here, but are de facto efforts at segregation by race and segregation by class. How do we move from the world of one zoning law in one city in one state in 1885 to the world of zoning in the 1960s before things really take off? Take us from 1880 to 1960.
- [32:55]
Yoni Applebaum
Yeah. So this starts for a little while. It doesn't get that far because everybody sort of understands what's going on. But it gets picked up in New York about 30 years later, where the New Yorkers have their own problem, which is that the Jews are coming up from the Lower east side, and they figure out that a zoning ordinance, the first city wide zoning ordinance in America, is a really good way to push them back in. So they pass that and it works. And they've got A legal problem though, which is that zoning is blatantly unconstitutional. That's not my opinion. That's actually the opinion of the man who writes the zoning ordinance. But he says there's a loophole here. If it's adopted widely enough nationally before it goes to the Supreme Court, then it could be seen as a regular use of municipal power. So if we can spread it widely enough, quickly enough, we can keep them down in the Lower east side. And he sets up a bureau to spread zoning. He interests the Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, in this, and they spread it nationwide. Fdr, when he comes to office. The New Deal will help spread this too. The New Deal gets into the home mortgage business in order to stop bank failures. But it's got a particular problem which is that it's shouldering an awful lot of risk and neighborhoods change. And so New Deal bureaucrats will draft these rules that say you can have a government loan as long as your neighborhood will never change. So we'll only lend you the money if there's a zoning ordinance. And oh yeah, you also have to have a covenant on the land that says that the race of the neighborhood can never change. We'll only lend you the money if you segregate by class and by race. Because we need to know that when we make this loan. And it's a safe land. So this spreads it nationally. And by the 1950s, 1960s, pretty much all of America is zoned in one way or another. There are some outliers, some exceptions, but zoning has spread nationwide.
- [34:44]
Derek Thompson
So I think a careful listener at this point is realizing there's actually, there's definitely a big hanging mystery here because the first thing that we said is that mobility in America has declined significantly in the last 50 years. Remember, you're very rude claim is that it's the largest social change of the last half century. But what you said now is that zoning is actually a 1-140-year-old story. So something in the story must have some kind of step change in the 1960s, 1970s. How does sort of phase one of zoning in America, which is sort of about taking the city, cutting it up into little slices and saying, this is where we want class A, this is where we want Class B. This is where we want race A, Race B. How does that age of zoning become the age of zoning that catastrophically pushes down migration in the next 50 years?
- [35:40]
Yoni Applebaum
Yeah, it's a two step dance. I think about my great grandfather who was a victim of zoning. He fought in World War I and was decorated, commanded 7,000 soldiers in World War II survived that war, came home, and died of a heart attack, arguing with his local zoning port. True story, right? Zoning can do that to you. It sort of raises your blood pressure like that. But what he was arguing about was that he'd been born into a world in which if you owned land, you could build on it. And by the time he came back from the Second World War, he wanted to put a little shed on his land, and he needed somebody's permission to do that. Construction in America had become. Almost all construction in America become subject to government approval. There was almost nothing that you could do on your property without coming into compliance with these government zoning rules. That wasn't enough to restrain mobility. What happens is around 1970, America changes its attitude toward government. Conservatives become convinced that big bureaucrats are ruining everything. But the left, liberals also turn against government in this era. They're convinced that government has been captured by big business, is impervious to the demands of ordinary Americans, and that it needs to be held accountable to the public interest. And so we changed the laws. Up until then, if you wanted to challenge a government decision, you needed to be able to show that you had a stake in that government decision, that you would be harmed by it in some way. But instead, we pass a whole new raft of laws which say you can bring suit. You can challenge any government decision in the public interest. Right. You can step forward and say, I'm challenging the way this decision was made. I don't think it followed the right process. I don't think it took everything into account. This seemed like a really good change. There were a ton of problems in America at the time. This is the birth of the environmental movement. Because we had rampant pollution. People are challenging urban renewal, which is leveling entire neighborhoods. So it comes out of a really good place. But the effect is that you have just given anyone, anyone with enough time and money and sophistication, a veto over anything the government could possibly approve. And you've spent the last hundred years meaning that every bit of new construction in the country is something that the government needs to approve. And if you put those two things together, it's a really dramatic change. For the first time in American history, it becomes impossible to build.
- [38:06]
Derek Thompson
So your cover story is not called why Property Owners Froze the American Dream or why Homeowners Froze the American Dream. The COVID story is why Progressives Froze the American Dream. And social media did not like that. I saw some screenshots from Blue sky of people being very, very mad at you. For, I mean, some terms I saw were hippie bashing, punching left, blaming progressives when we should be blaming neoliberalism, the Reagan revolution. Conservatives. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to represent the best and smartest possible version of the people who think this cover line sucks. And then I want you to tell me why they're wrong.
- [39:07]
Yoni Applebaum
So I think the best version of this, and boy, do I have a lot of, a lot of examples to draw from. The Internet is mad at me today. Derek. The best version of this says, look, there's a lot of problems in America. Those problems do date back 50 years. But if you look, this is a society that's grown more unequal over the last 50 years. The deregulation advantaged incumbent interest, big business. We've seen inequality grow as corporate CEOs now pocket 50, 100, 1000 times what their ordinary workers are earning. If you want to know why Americans can't afford to live where they want to, it's because the spoils of their labor are being pocketed by Wall street fat cats and CEOs instead of shared equally with them. If you want to know what broke America, it was moving away from a strong and proactive role for government and toward a society which was increasingly a winner take all society. And that's, I think, a pretty compelling narrative and it says a lot about what's wrong with America. The problem is it doesn't explain this.
- [40:23]
Derek Thompson
Why not?
- [40:24]
Yoni Applebaum
Well, you know, if you look at the places that are not building, there's a great study in California that says that for every 10 points the Democratic vote share went up in a city, the number of new housing permits dropped by 30%. It is specifically the blue cities, whether in red states or in blue states that have been most restrictive. They're the places that are prospering the most, and they're the places that have grown hardest for people to move into. And so this is actually something. There's lots of problems in America that I think you can blame on the Reagan revolution. But this is one where, when you go and you look, where is the problem? The problem is in places that are governed by Democrats. And the more progressive those Democrats are, the worse the problem typically is. The higher the housing prices have gone, the harder it is for people to move in there. And I should say my critique is these are great places. I think more people should live in places like this. I think more people want to live in places like this. That, that progressive governance is often delivering lots of things that people really want to take advantage of. And it kills me that they have made it so damn hard for new people to come in.
- [41:35]
Derek Thompson
You're a liberal, I'm a liberal. You're in many cases a progressive. I mean, especially in the 1920s sense, I would say, like you would feel very comfortable in the sort of, you know, Rooseveltian progressive party.
- [41:47]
Yoni Applebaum
I'm that old.
- [41:48]
Derek Thompson
Sorry, excuse me. What is it, do you think about the character of modern progressivism that lends itself to the outcomes you're describing? I feel like I could easily whip up a story that says Yoni Appelbaum claims that in the 1970s, America experienced a revolution of individualism. It was a revolution of individualism that existed at practically every station, every level of American society. You saw individualist writers like Kerouac show off their skills and talk about how Americans needed to ironically get on the road to truly express their individualism. You saw individualism express itself in terms of environmentalism, environmentalist policies, people saying that individuals should be able to sue the government to save the life of species and to preserve parts of nature that they care about. I mean, even talks about like, you know, Ralph Nader is among the more boring names to raise in almost any circle. But the legal revolution that Ralph Nader started in the 1970s was in many ways an individualistic revolution. It was the little guy against government. And this was an ideology that captured a lot of folks. But I don't think of modern liberals as being the most strikingly individualist coalition. I tend to, in my head, think of them as being more collectivist, more universalist. So how did it happen that modern progressivism became, by your description, the torch bearers of a kind of individualism that is making it harder to build housing in cities?
- [43:23]
Yoni Applebaum
Well, the uncomfortable truth is that there is a strong anti democratic strain within modern progressivism. When you start talking about allowing individuals to challenge government decisions, what you're actually saying is there may have been an election. These politicians may have won. They may have tried to make decisions that they felt were in the public interest, but any individual has the power to stop them. And we want that because ultimately we don't trust that they're going to act in the public interest without delegating this power to anyone to stop them. The people who do this, I think, do this with the very best of intentions. They can see that often government is making bad decisions. It is serving corporate interests. It is discriminating on the basis of race. They want these tools for the very best reasons. But once they've created these Tools. The tools can be used by anyone. And I'll give you an example. They pass an environmental law in California, the ceqa, which is intended to protect the open spaces in California. That's what the legislators drafting and say they're going to do. You can go and look at all of the cases that have been been filed under the ceqa. Almost all of them are about blocking multifamily housing in affluent neighborhoods. The tool is a good tool that is created for a good purpose, but once you've created it, it's available for anyone to use. And overwhelmingly, it gets used by people who are trying to keep others out of their neighborhoods. And usually they even thought of that as virtuous. So why does somebody block a multifamily development? Well, they say it's out of of. It's going to ruin the historical character of my neighborhood. I care about my community. I'm afraid that it will gentrify the community. I'm worried that by building on this open lot, we are despoiling the environment and ruining an open place. All of these rationales are rooted in progressive ideals, but the aggregate impact of allowing any individual to block anything is something that nobody's really anticipated. I think of it a little bit like dropping an apple core on a sidewalk. If I drop an apple core on a sidewalk, it's not a big deal. Does not change the world. If you pass a law which allows anyone to drop an apple core on a sidewalk, that sidewalk is going to get pretty disgusting pretty quickly. The cumulative impact of lots of these individual decisions is something that is much, much worse than any of the individual actions. Blocking one new development doesn't change the world. Blocking all new development breaks America.
- [46:00]
Derek Thompson
I'm trying to hold your feet to the fire in terms of being specific about your theory, but I'm a fellow traveler here. I absolutely agree with the thrust of this book and the thrust of your cover story. I was actually telling someone from North Carolina at the super bowl party that I was at during the fourth quarter where there was absolutely nothing to do except talk about zoning, that I was gonna come to D.C. and do this podcast interview. And he said, oh, my God, you have to see this video from a local meeting of the Board of Supervisors to approve a development in sort of the part of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I live, that's like a little bit rural. And he shows me this video, and it's testimony by this woman, this incredibly distressed, emotional woman, who says, I know that people want to build this enormous apartment development, but I have A farm in this part of town. And I have horses on that farm. And what if people try to feed my horses? What if someone comes and feeds apples to my diabetic horse. Day after day after day after day? I swear to God, this is a joke. Day after day after day. What if they try to pet my horse and get bitten. And suddenly I'm sued for a million dollars? I want to close the statement by saying. We cannot possibly build or approve this development. Yada, yada, yada. The board of supervisors voted 5, 0 to turn down the development. I want to be fair to this woman. And fair to the Board of Supervisors. I don't know her. I don't know them. But I do think that there is a liberal inclination. A progressive inclination. To care about the people we choose to focus on. And in that moment, the Board of Supervisors is choosing to care about this woman. And choosing to care about her horses. And choosing to care in particular about her type 2 diabetic horse. Who could theoretically be fed apples by a stranger every day. When they buy those apples from a Trader Joe's. And drive to the horse. And feed the same horse every single day. It could theoretically happen. But in all seriousness, they're trying to exercise care for this woman's opinion. But that's because she is the person they can see. They can't see the 50 people who would be able to live in that apartment development. Who are not present at that supervisor's meeting. Because they don't even know yet. That they have the opportunity to live in Chapel Hill. And as a result, Chapel Hill, God bless them. Is one of the most progressive zip codes in North Carolina. One of the most progressive zip codes in America. And essentially has the development structure. Of being frozen in time from 1971. I mean, there is nothing approximating a modern apartment structure. In the Carrboro area where I live. God love them, it's not there. And I think it speaks to this idea of they care so much about the people. That they can see. That they don't think about the care they're not representing. For the people they can't see. And that's a huge part of this, too.
- [49:03]
Yoni Applebaum
Now I'm worried that people will read the book and kill the diabetic horse. You know, the most powerful test I ever heard at one of these hearings. And God knows I've been to a lot of them. Way too many. One is too many. Was from a woman who said. I'm here tonight because I came before the City council a couple years ago. When there was A development going down my block and I testified against it. I didn't want it there. It was going to change my neighborhood. People don't like change. We're change averse creatures. We come by that naturally. And she said afterward, somebody walked up to me and said, you know, I'm hoping to live in that building. Could I buy you a cup of coffee? And I talked to her and two years later, the building's there. She's moved in. She's become one of my closest friends. And so I came tonight to testify because none of the people in this next building are here to testify. They don't even know, right? They're living somewhere else in the country. They don't yet know that they're gonna move to this community. There's nobody here to testify for them. So I've come to testify for them. I thought, that's incredibly powerful and sort of watched the crowd's reaction. And somebody else stood up and said, that's nice, but I'm worried about the parking. So it's not just shifting the frame isn't enough. Part of the critique I'm laying out here is that if you empower local communities to choose their members, you go back to that early modern model, you go back to that world in which people can and will for justifiable reasons, there's always some good reason to say no and communities will become exclusionary. If you say that communities need to allow new people to move in, they need to allow for a degree of construction, then you can continue to live in an America where people have the chance to choose to move and you don't have to have a system that needs to bend over to take into account the people who aren't there to testify.
- [51:05]
Derek Thompson
Two last questions for you. Is there a generational split here? Like when we talk about how progressives froze the American dream? What a tagline like this cannot include, and in this case necessarily allies, is that young progressives are considerably more yimby. Yes, in my backyard than boomer progressives. So when you think about the progressive character that has unfortunately turned against housing abundance in the last few decades, how do you feel about this generational divide between like the Jane Jacobs generation and the, you know, Matt Iglesias generation?
- [51:42]
Yoni Applebaum
You know, this is one of the things that gives me tremendous hope. I went to a hearing here in D.C. for a proposal to build on a parking lot next to a transit station. It's just a mostly vacant parking lot at the moment. And one woman stood up to testify and said, you know, I was here at the first hearing on this proposal 25 years ago. It's still a parking lot, by the way. Like 25 years later, they're still fighting about whether or not it would be a good idea to put housing on a vacant parking lot next to a transit station. And she gave the same arguments that she's been using for 25 years. But then other people had showed up that night and they were mostly younger. The older generation tends to see growth as a problem. The younger generation tends to see that smart growth is an answer. That if you're putting housing next to a transit station, you're not despoiling the environment, you're addressing global warming. That if you build affordable housing into a community that desperately lacks it, you're not changing the character of that community, you're preserving it. You're giving a new generation of people from diverse backgrounds the chance to move in. And they see how broken the housing market and they're really eager for solutions because they love their communities and they really want them to thrive. They want them to grow. Somebody who's been living in the house they bought 50 years ago May just not at a visceral level, understand how tough it is today for new people to move in. Somebody who's been to a bunch of open houses, they get it. They know. And so there is a generational shift. And I think that generational shift is really, really powerful. And it's a reason that you're starting to see local level change on this issue throughout the country.
- [53:25]
Derek Thompson
I want to conclude where you conclude, you say that any serious effort to restore mobility should follow three simple principles. The first principle is consistency. That means rules that apply uniformly across a city will tend to produce neighborhoods with diverse populations and uses. The second principle is tolerance, and I love this point. Organic growth is messy and unpredictable. Giving Americans the freedom to live where they want requires tolerating the choices made by others, even if we think their taste. This is my gloss on it. If their taste sucks. What's the third principle that we should apply to restore and fix the most important problem in America?
- [54:08]
Yoni Applebaum
You know, we don't need just a little bit of housing. We need a lot of housing. We have 50 years of housing to make up. The third principle is abundance.
- [54:16]
Derek Thompson
Oh, that's so interesting. It's a lovely idea. Can you explicate it Maybe a little bit.
- [54:25]
Yoni Applebaum
I think that if you want to understand how much abundance can do for this country, you're going to have to wait a month, five weeks. Yeah, you can pre order right now. And get a terrific explanation of just.
- [54:39]
Derek Thompson
What a canon should the man is doing the Applebaum. The book is stuck. The other book is Abundance. Thank you guys so much for being here. I appreciate it.