STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: Writer Yoni Appelbaum has an item on the wall of his house.
What are we looking at here?
YONI APPELBAUM: This is an ad from an old Sears catalog.
INSKEEP: From an era when the Sears department store chain advertised prefabricated homes.
APPELBAUM: You could buy the Sears puritan colonial. And what I really love about this ad is the price. It cost $1,947, which is just slightly less than I ended up paying.
INSKEEP: (Laughter) A few generations later, it was slightly more expensive.
Quite a bit more expensive, really, though this Sears house is still small and simple. Appelbaum says the first buyer ordered it 100 years ago.
APPELBAUM: It arrived like a giant Lego set - a lot of pieces and a book of instructions.
INSKEEP: A high school teacher assembled this house for his family with his own hands at a time when housing was cheap and Americans moved a lot for new opportunities. Today, housing is not cheap, not even this old Sears house.
APPELBAUM: There is nobody living off the salary of a high school teacher who's buying into this neighborhood today.
INSKEEP: It's in a prosperous city, Washington, D.C., where housing costs have soared. Today, many Americans can't afford to move where the jobs are. Appelbaum traces this change in a book called "Stuck," a one-word title that tells you what the author thinks of our loss of mobility.
APPELBAUM: The thing that once made America distinctive, the thing that when people came over here from Europe, they noticed right away was that Americans tended to move a lot. In the 19th century, maybe 1 out of 3 Americans moved every year.
INSKEEP: One out of three?
APPELBAUM: It was an astonishing festival of mobility. There'd be a moving day in each city where a third - half the city would pick up and swap houses in a single afternoon. All the leases ran out at the same time, and everybody was hoping to move up and find something a little bit better. As late as 1970, it was 1 out of 5 Americans moving each year. And we just got new numbers from the census. We have set a new record. It was only 1 in 13.
INSKEEP: Housing costs have gone up way more than salaries have. It's especially bad in areas with lots of jobs, which means that many Americans miss out on opportunities. That's what he means by stuck.
What's driving up home prices in a city that's prosperous, like the one we're sitting in now?
APPELBAUM: We're sitting right now in a neighborhood of single-family homes. If you wanted to take one of these houses and turn it into an apartment building, you couldn't do that. A hundred years ago, America adopted zoning ordinances which restricted what people could build on their land.
INSKEEP: Zoning governed how much of a property could be covered by a house or how many units could be on it or how high the building could be, all of which affected housing density.
APPELBAUM: There's always a reason not to build denser housing. People worry about parking, they worry about shadows, they worry about the changing nature of the community or its historic character. These are all actual concerns, and they're legitimate concerns.
INSKEEP: The problem comes when residents use those concerns to keep far too many neighborhoods exactly as they are.
APPELBAUM: If you block almost all new developments, it gets impossible for Americans to move toward opportunity.
INSKEEP: You can buy a cheap house in a town that doesn't have too many jobs. Appelbaum's area has plenty of jobs and not enough homes. He says his own neighborhood prides itself on racial diversity, welcoming all kinds of people so long as they are all able to pay in the high six figures for a single-family home.
APPELBAUM: Not far from where I live, there's a metro station with a large parking lot that's largely unused. And 25 years ago, there was a proposal to build housing on that parking lot. It's exactly the sort of project that urban planners will tell you they love. You put people living next to mass transit, next to a downtown area. They don't need to use cars a whole lot, and you can build on vacant land, so you're not displacing anyone. This project had everything going for it.
Twenty-five years later, you can drive by and still see the parking lot. It's finally moving toward construction, but it has been held up by legal challenges and public hearings and process delays for a quarter century. And that's an ideal development with almost no reasonable objections to its construction. It gets even harder in more complicated cases.
INSKEEP: What are the politics of that area that has resisted that change so long?
APPELBAUM: This is one of the most progressive communities in America, and it's not alone. There was a fascinating study of California which found that for every ten points better that liberal candidates did in those cities, housing permits in those cities dropped by 30%. Progressives have overwhelmingly been the ones to have layered on these rules and walled off the communities that they celebrate for their diversity, for their openness from allowing new people to move into those communities.
INSKEEP: People have so many theories about why Americans are so angry and so divided and feel the country is not working for them. Do you feel you've hit on the actual reason that that is?
APPELBAUM: We know a lot about what happens when people want to move and they can't. Psychologists tell us they grow more cynical, more disconnected. Sociologists tell us that they're less likely to become active members of groups and organizations, less likely to show up in church on Sunday. Economists tell us that their earnings will stagnate - they won't move into new careers, they'll have fewer jobs and start fewer businesses. We can see all of these things happening. Americans have watched their country change over the last 50 years. There's a broad sense in this country that something is broken, that it doesn't work the way that it used to.
And we can also talk to the political scientists who will tell us that people who moved more than a hundred miles from their hometown were likely to vote for Democrats in recent presidential elections, and those who remain very close to their birthplace were much likelier to vote for President Donald Trump. The chance to shape your own life, to have agency, to choose where you want to live leads people to feel hopeful about the future, to feel open to the possibility that others' gains might lift everybody up and that people who feel stuck in place conversely tend to see the world as a zero-sum game in which the gains that anyone's making come at their expense.
INSKEEP: Yoni Appelbaum, author of "Stuck," says he's found one way to think about America's divide - some people can afford to take advantage of this country's economy, and some people can't.
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