This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Yoni Appelbaum to discuss his book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.
We discuss the history of moving in the United States and how the different traditions of land ownership and management in America evolved. We also talk about how much people loved apartments at the turn of the 19th century and zoning's targeted groups.
Scroll down below the audio player for an edited excerpt of our conversation, or click here for an unedited, AI-generated transcript of the entire conversation.
Jeff Wood: I saw your discussion with Rachel Cohen at Vox, and I wanted to continue one of her questions on the era of deregulation. We just chatted with Stacy Mitchell of [the Institution for Local Self-Reliance], and there are a lot of things about the increase in conglomerates and the reduction in access to goods and services between then and now that seems to fit your narrative actually pretty well. We deregulated, but it also consolidated power in a few hands versus many, and I’m wondering how that consolidation maybe was part of this story about the grinding to a halt of mobility — because of how many companies were coming together as conglomerates, maybe, how many people were consolidating power in cities as the ability to keep people out or to make sure that they weren’t building housing. There seems to be, it feels like anyways, this story about deregulation, [in] the 70s and 80s, leads us down this road to overregulation that we’re seeing now in the housing market.
Yoni Appelbaum: Yeah it’s a super interesting question and it’s a funny dynamic. The forces in the 60s and 70s that give us the modern problem, right?
You have a couple generations. You have the original zoners in the original progressive era. We develop zoning as a tool of racial segregation, but also just of imposing order and rationality on cities. Then you have a second generation in the New Deal who take this national. The New Deal makes federal housing lending contingent on communities being zoned.
And so lots of communities that haven’t adopted it are basically forced to adopt it. The third generation arrives in the 60s and 70s. And these are people who have grown jaundiced about the New Deal. They’re looking at the marriage of big business and big government. They think the regulatory agencies have been captured by businesses and they’re often not wrong about that.
They can see the consolidation of corporate power and they come up with an alternative. They say, the problem here is that government is no longer protecting the public interest. We need to pass new laws that allow the public to challenge governmental decision making because, otherwise, ordinary citizens and small communities are powerless in the face of this kind of consolidation.
So it’s a critique of the New Deal that comes from the left, and it’s a critique of corporate power. And you can think of the figures who launched this critique in their own ways. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is a critique of the way that environmental regulation has been captured by the chemical industry. Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed talks about how highway safety regulation has been captured by the auto industry. And Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities... is about how the governance of cities has been captured by the real estate development industry and it’s unholy alliance with big government, which wants to develop things wholesale.
So there is a big revolt against bigness and consolidation. The trouble with it is that it pushes to the opposite extreme. The remedy it creates is a set of legal changes, which enabled people to sue and to do this in two ways. One is you no longer, in most instances, need to demonstrate that you yourself have been damaged by a decision that government makes in order to challenge that decision, so a public interest group can sue.
And then the other big change it makes is that it allows people to challenge the government for not following its own rules and procedures. And we’ve got a bunch of different laws that in different ways enable people to bring these kinds of legal challenges. So if the first two generations of progressive reformers have made every question of construction in America subject to government approval through zoning and other kinds of regulation, this third generation then gives any individual who dislikes the government, the decision, the power to bring the government to court. And that’s a power that is unequally exercised. And this is the complicating wrinkle.
The wealthier, better educated people in America who can work the bureaucratic system, they know how to navigate it, have the resources to bring the government to court in those communities — a single individual, a small group can grind everything to a halt. They can keep the development from coming in there. In other communities, that’s not the case. They may not have the resources to challenge governmental decision making to challenge the granting of a permit, for example. And so you get this real inequality taking root and it comes from this well intentioned place. People can see the consolidation of corporate power.
They want to challenge it, but their remedy is not to make government strong enough to challenge corporations. The remedy is to kneecap government to make it impossible for government to, a democratically elected government to act in the public interest at all by essentially distributing a veto to anyone with enough money to exercise it.
