Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity - Hardcover

Appelbaum, Yoni

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593449290 ISBN 13: 9780593449295

Verlag: Random House, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

How did America cease to be the land of opportunity?

LONGLISTED FOR THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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Chapter One

A Nation of Migrants

The last thing I ever wanted to do was move. Most of what I needed lay within an easy walk of our Cambridgeport apartment. In the mornings, I took my children to preschool, stopping to run errands at the local shops on the way home. From our back porch, I could see a city park, with a playground and basketball hoops and a broad grassy field. Our neighbors who had been strangers when we moved in had since become our friends; I could pop downstairs for a couple of eggs when I ran short and expect a knock if they needed a cup of sugar. My office at Harvard was just under a mile down the street.

But the apartment had only two bedrooms. Rent was costing us a third of our income each month, and it kept going up. Our daughter and son wouldn’t want to share a room forever, and an apartment with a third bedroom in Cambridge was well beyond our reach. Every year, more friends in our position gave up and left. They moved out to the suburbs or to cheaper cities in other parts of the country—not where they wanted to be, but where they could afford to live. One family in our building had come back to the States with their daughter after years of humanitarian work abroad. When I learned they were expecting twins, I offered my congratulations and was met with a despondent sigh. They’d discovered what a larger apartment in the Boston area would cost—much less a freestanding house—and decided that the only rational thing for them to do was return to Africa.

If theirs was an extreme case, it represented a common problem. Every year, fewer Americans can afford to live where they want to. The crisis shows up in lengthening commutes; the average commuter now travels almost thirty minutes each way to their job, and one in ten spends more than an hour. It shows up in soaring home prices, pushed skyward by the desperation of buyers—up by more than 60 percent over the past decade, to an average of about half a million dollars. It shows up in painfully high rents; half of all renters now spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, the threshold for being “rent burdened,” and a quarter spend more than 50 percent. And it shows up in the record number of Americans unable to afford those rents and forced into homelessness.

In fact, it shows up so pervasively that I hardly needed studies and statistics to see it. I thought about it every time I walked past a glitzy new condo for sale across the street from a homeless man sleeping on a sidewalk. I thought about it while sitting in traffic alongside thousands of other drivers who had infinitely better ways to spend their time. I thought about it when I encountered a school in an expensive neighborhood that had been converted to some other use, because so many families had been priced out of the area that Cambridge had lost two-thirds of its children. I thought about it as I watched anti-gentrification protests, led by neighbors concerned that they, too, would have to leave the city they loved. And I thought about it each month as I wrote a check to cover the rent.

Some Americans have become so accustomed to the places with the greatest opportunities being effectively reserved for the rich that it somehow seems natural that they should be. In fact, it represents a recent and profound inversion. For centuries, Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder moved toward such places, not away from them, searching for a foothold on the first rung of that ladder, looking for the chance to climb. Entrepreneurs raced to erect housing to hold them. Cambridge had long been a magnet for such people. The city had hardly run out of space; it hadn’t even returned to the postwar peak of its population. And yet instead of drawing people in, Cambridge was now driving them out. And it wasn’t alone. Throughout the country, the places where ordinary Americans were likeliest to find better jobs, earn higher incomes, and give their children better lives were increasingly priced beyond their grasp. Families were stressed. Cities were struggling. And the country was growing ever more unequal.

What happened? As a historian, I suspected the answers lay in the past, and I started right at home, with my own apartment. Digging through property records, census manuscripts, insurance maps, municipal directories, and old newspapers to piece together its story, I could tell, at a glance, that it hadn’t always been so pricey. My century-old building was a three-decker—one of the iconic flat-roofed wooden structures, with apartments stacked like layer cakes, built to house the workers of New England’s industrial cities. When they were constructed, far from being seen as luxurious, they were regarded as a sure sign of a neighborhood’s decline. “Foreigners are coming in increasing numbers,” the Massachusetts Civic League warned in 1911, bringing with them the three-decker, “which, besides being objectionable on other grounds, is a flimsy fire-trap and a menace to human life.”

Built in 1901 by Joseph Doherty, a local real estate man who saw opportunity in Cambridgeport’s rapid growth, our menacing building was wider than most, with a central staircase, two units on each floor, and mild delusions of grandeur. If the building showed its age, it also showed a certain pride of craftsmanship. Moldings ran along the ceilings, sliding doors separated the front parlor from the bedroom, and—a delightful absurdity—a butler’s pantry with drawers and shelves opened off the dining room. Doherty had bought the lot and the handsome ten-room, single-family home that occupied it. He tore the house down, replacing it with a pair of double three-deckers and making room for twelve families in a space that had previously accommodated only one.

To the west lay Old Cambridge, home to Harvard and stately mansions on sedate tree-lined streets. In the opposite direction lay East Cambridge, a gritty industrial area filled with factories and recent immigrants. Cambridgeport was a neighborhood in between, in every way—neither an industrial slum nor an elegant suburb, but something new in the world. A settlement house worker named Albert Kennedy studied the neighborhood and watched as the children of immigrants moved in and then moved on to greater prosperity. Deciding he needed a novel term to capture its distinctive role, he dubbed it a “zone of emergence.”

Doherty had made a clever investment. He had no trouble renting the units in his building, erected opposite a large Catholic church, to other second-generation Irish Americans. The butler’s pantries and other small flourishes he’d added to his buildings appealed to his tenants’ aspirations. Their parents might have sweated in the factories, but their children were now graduating from high school. Thomas Sweeney, for example, was a self-employed plumber; his daughter Margaret put her education to work as a government stenographer. My building’s six apartments also housed a telephone operator, postal letter carrier, car salesman, store clerk, and gym instructor. Half a century later, the building still housed a similar mix of residents, although as Irish Americans ascended the economic ladder, other second-generation immigrants had arrived behind them. Our own apartment was rented by Jessie White, whose father emigrated from Canada, and her two adult daughters. When Jessie’s husband, a brass finisher, died in 1940, she took in a shipping clerk as a boarder to help make ends meet. One daughter operated a boxing machine at a factory; the other, who had finished high school, found an office job at an oil company.

And yet, by the time we moved in half a century after that, something had gone wrong. Instead of a new generation of blue-collar families,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593449290
• ISBN 13: 9780593449295
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 306
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Harder; https://www.edel.com; ; Neum�hlen 17; Hamburg; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland