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Chapter 1: Why did Americans used to move frequently?
This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Hannah Rosen. I have moved many times in my life, across continents, across the country, back and forth across D.C., which is where I live now, and I didn't think much about it. I just chalked it up to restlessness. Until I read Yoni Applebaum's new book, which is also the March cover story in The Atlantic.
Chapter 2: What does Yoni Appelbaum argue in his book 'Stuck'?
The book is called Stuck, How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. In it, Applebaum argues that there is and always has been something quintessentially American and also quintessentially hopeful about moving.
In the 19th century, moving day was like a thing, a holiday celebrated across different American cities at different times when everybody would just up and move. To quote Applebaum, "...nothing quite so astonished visitors from abroad as the spectacle of thousands upon thousands of people picking up and swapping homes in a single day." But moving isn't happening so much anymore.
Chapter 3: What were the historical perspectives on American mobility?
Applebaum writes, every year, fewer Americans can afford to live where they want to. So what happens to a country geographically, culturally, politically, in some ways psychologically, when mobility starts to stall? Can you read this from your intro, these couple of sentences?
The notion that people should be able to choose their own communities instead of being stuck where they happen to be born is America's most profound contribution to the world. The fact that it is now endangered is not just a problem for housing markets. It is a lethal threat to the entire American project.
Okay, let's start with the second half. Why is mobility the thing that defines the American project?
It is the thing that defines the American project because it was the first thing that anyone who got a year from Europe noticed. People would come to the United States and gawk. They saw this as either our greatest asset or our great national character flaw.
But they were amazed at how often Americans moved, and they were particularly amazed that the Americans who were moving were not moving out of desperation, that Americans tended to be doing okay in one place and to still want something more for themselves, want something better for their children, and to move someplace else in pursuit of it.
And you're not just describing something geographic. You're describing something psychological, right?
Yeah, I'm talking about an attitude that Americans believed that they could change their destinies by changing their address, that they could move someplace new and do better than they were doing. And also, and this is the second half of the answer, Americans believed that they were not defined by the circumstances of their birth. That was the great gift that mobility gave us.
And that had really profound implications that took me a while to unravel.
Right, because it's not just about geography. It's not just about money. It's about a sense of yourself as having infinite possibilities, like you could just move and move. You weren't class-bound in any way.
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Chapter 4: How has American mobility changed over time?
They'd hire a cart to take them across town or down the lane, and... And then they would push past the family that was moving out of some other apartment or townhouse or home. As they were taking their stuff out, they'd be moving their stuff in. But between sunup and sundown, quarter, third, half of a city might relocate.
And there are these descriptions of sort of the trash lining the gutters as things fell out of the carts or there wasn't room for it in the new apartment. And people would go scavenging through the gutters trying to find out of the trash their own treasures. It was... raucous and wild and respectable Americans always looked down on it.
And yet, for the people who participated in it, it was a way to have their home be kind of like an iPhone or a car. You keep the one you have for a year or two, and then you trade up for a newer model.
So, upgrades. Now, where is this happening? Is this happening in cities of a certain size, in immigrant communities? Like, who is doing all this chaotic moving?
Well, that's one thing that really upset the upper crust.
And who are they? Let's define all the sides. Who are the respectable Americans?
The respectable Americans are those of longstanding stock who are trying very hard to impress the European cousins. And they are appalled at this defect of their national character, that people don't know their place. They don't know their station. They're always moving around looking for something better for themselves. And they write about it in those kinds of moralistic terms.
But the people who are participating in it, it's very broad. I mean, when you're talking about half the city moving, what you're talking about is activity that's as much a middle class and upper middle class activity as it is a working class activity. As long as you are adding a good number of fresh new homes to the market every year,
Pretty much everybody who moved could move up because the wealthy were buying brand new homes that had just been erected. But they were vacating homes that were a few years older or apartments that they were moving out of. And those became available to the upper middle class. And you'd get a chain of moves. You can trace this.
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Chapter 5: What was 'Moving Day' and why was it significant?
So everybody is constantly moving up in the world as they constantly relocate.
So there are decades of massive amounts of mobility. It's considered respectable enough. And then at some moment, a few forces start to slow this all down. So can you tell the story of what happens in lower Manhattan?
Yeah. It's a sad story when you look closely at it. Lower Manhattan, the Lower East Side, is like no place that's ever existed before since it is so dense. People are living in tenements at a rate per acre, the way demographers measure this, that is multiples of any place in Manhattan today.
Do you remember the numbers? Because I think they're extraordinary. Maybe I'm just remembering this from going to the Tenement Museum, but when you actually look at the density numbers, they are just hard to get your head around.
Yeah, I think it's like 600 per acre. It's really, really, really high. There's no place in Manhattan today that's even a third as dense, even though the buildings are now much, much taller. So they're really squeezed in there, and reformers are appalled, and there are real problems with some of these units.
But what they're really appalled about, it turns out, is less the housing conditions than the presence of so many immigrants with their foreign ways, foreign religion, foreign languages, weird foods, odd smells, right? They're looking at this, and they are not happy that this is invading their city. They're not subtle about it.
They're quite clear that they think that apartments are themselves degrading. This is the original progressive era, and there's a tight intertwining between the reformers and government, and they move fluidly among them.
Wait, like who is the they? Are we talking about city planners? This is a really interesting moment, because it's unexpected, this part of the history.
Lawrence Wheeler is sort of Mr. Tenement Reform. He's the guy who will write most of the reports, will serve on the commissions, will move in as the first deputy commissioner of the tenement office when New York creates one. He is both a government official and a reformer, and that was pretty typical. They move fluidly among these jobs.
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Chapter 6: How did zoning laws affect immigrant communities?
Chapter 7: What are the implications of mobility on the American identity?
Yeah, it's a little heartbreaking sometimes to look closely at your heroes and find out that the story you thought you knew is not the one that actually played out. Jane Jacobs was a woman who saw clearly what it was that made cities great at a time when almost nobody wanted to recognize that.
Right.
She saw the diversity of their populations, of their uses, the way that people mixed together as being not as the progressives had it, something that needed to be corrected with rational planning, but as a strength that needed to be recognized and rescued and reinforced. And she stood tall against that.
urban renewal, against the notion that the way to save cities was to knock them flat and to rebuild them with all the uses very carefully segregated out, and wrote this brilliant book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that laid out these principles. And she saved her own neighborhood from urban renewal. and became in the process sort of the patron saint of urbanism.
And her great lesson that she took from all of these experiences was that you needed to empower individuals with a deep appreciation of urban life, with the tools to stop governments, And that was the gospel that she preached. And in many ways, it was necessary at that moment at the peak of urban renewal.
But what she didn't understand at the time, maybe couldn't have understood at the time, was that she was going to create problems that were even worse than the problems that she was trying to prevent.
After the break, how Jane Jacobs inadvertently contributed to the stuckness of America. Okay, so here we have Jane Jacobs. She moves into what street was that that she moved into?
She moves into 555 Hudson Street.
Okay, she's on Hudson Street. That's an amazing place to live. What had been all around her was, who was living there at the time? It wasn't other people like her, right?
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