The Upward Mobility Crisis

How Housing Abundance Can Get America Moving Again

In the 19th-century, one-third of Americans moved each year—farmers left for factories, pioneers pushed westward, immigrants arrived in waves, many more simply changed houses. While most people throughout history had been chained to the land, Americans codified the right not just to leave a place, but to arrive and stay somewhere else. Though often denied to immigrants, women, and Black Americans, by the late 1800s mobility had become more than a national habit: it was a fundamental American right. In an era of cheap, abundant housing, Moving Day became an unofficial holiday in which people of all classes would seek to improve their lives simply by moving house. But by the 1960s, American mobility began to slow; today, it’s screeched to a halt—only one in thirteen Americans moved in 2023. As Yoni Appelbaum argues in Stuck,¹ “this engine of American opportunity has stopped working.”

The problem isn’t an affordable housing crisis—it’s a crisis of mobility.

Now, too many Americans are stuck in place. Historically, mobility revitalized communities, promoted democratic pluralism, and fostered social equality. Today, Americans start fewer businesses, join fewer social organizations, have fewer children, and generally trust each other less than they did when they were more mobile. Mobility has been blamed for causing Americans to “sort” into isolated, homogeneous communities, but Appelbaum argues the opposite is true. Moving encouraged people to meet their neighbors and forge connections in their newly adopted homes. Instead, anomie and alienation define our current age.

As it turned out, many of the Americans who themselves benefited by moving to better opportunities wanted to close the door behind them—especially for the “wrong” kind of people. When the courts wouldn’t let the people of Modesto, California, segregate their city by race, they passed a law in 1885 that limited land use—specifically to keep Chinese laundries (where the owners often lived) confined to Chinatown, away from white neighborhoods. Other cities soon discovered that “segregating land by its uses and the size of the buildings…[was] a potent means of segregating populations by race, ethnicity, and income.” In 1916, New York City implemented the nation’s first zoning law, largely to push Jewish garment workers—mostly poor immigrants—back into the tenements of the Lower East Side and away from tony Fifth Avenue.

While racism certainly drove early zoning attempts, classism also played a role.

New York tenement “reformers” like Lawrence Veiller saw apartment buildings as “debasing influences” that destroyed family life, religiosity, and privacy and sought to “penalize [them] so far as we can in our statute”—because people liked them too much. Indeed, tenements were “zones of emergence” that helped poor immigrants springboard into better neighborhoods. While Veiller dreamed of burning them down, he found he could make tenements unbuildable by raising construction costs under the guise of “fire safety” rules that exempted private houses. The upward mobility that tenements afforded was exactly what reformers wanted to reform away—and over the next century they regulated market-rate housing for the working poor out of existence.

The villainization of apartment buildings was paired with the valorization of the single-family home.² Municipalities and the federal government would go on to impose zoning regimes, minimum lot size standards, and racial red-lining—often as conditions of federally-subsidized mortgages—that would fuel the development of suburbs while leaving behind those who didn’t fit the desired complexion and status in the inner cities. But as legal segregation ended, even zoning would not have been enough to stifle the American dream. Reformers in the 1960s—led by none other than “urbanist apostle” Jane Jacobs—would introduce new tools that would ensure that mobility happened primarily in one direction: out.

Although Jacobs rightly understood that neighborhood vitality depends on a mix of people, uses, and buildings, she inadvertently made the opposite mistake of top-down urban renewal proponents by arguing that the current residents of a neighborhood should control its destiny. In championing local control, her legacy was one in which her neighborhood’s organic evolution would now be subject to extensive procedural review and public hearings—a local vetocracy controlled by the most affluent members of the community. Before Jacobs, West Village townhouses had gradually given way to apartment buildings; after, the neighborhood would remain fixed in the expensive amber of historic preservation.³

The idea of local neighborhood control spread across the country and became stuck in our national psyche. The result, as Appelbaum sums up, was that a “nation that had grown diverse and prosperous by allowing people to choose their communities would instead empower communities to choose their people.” Through rigid zoning codes and other tools, communities chose to close themselves off to newcomers. That exclusion didn’t just trap people in place, it deepened economic divides.

As

Kevin Erdmann

argues, scarcity hits those at the bottom hardest. In New York, housing costs exceed incomes tenfold in the poorest neighborhoods, compared to 3-to-4 times in the richest neighborhoods. Other cities are less extreme, but the story is the same. When cities fail to build, wealthy renters compete for limited supply, driving up prices and displacing the poor. In the 1800s, Moving Day reflected a chain of upward movement—wealthier tenants upgraded, and others followed, but such “filtering” breaks down under housing scarcity. Today, tenements that once offered affordable entry points now rent as “luxury” units to the highest bidder. Where migration once helped working-class people climb the ladder, modern housing scarcity means moving to high opportunity cities often makes them financially worse off.

The loss of economic mobility has made us all poorer: economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti calculated that if New York, San Francisco, and San Jose had built enough housing for everyone who could have benefited from moving there, GDP would have increased by $2 trillion by 2009. Instead of moving to where the good jobs are, people are moving to where the cost of housing is relatively cheap, places like Texas, Florida, the Carolinas—the red states. As Appelbaum puts it, “instead of moving toward opportunity, for the first time in our history, Americans are moving away from it.”⁴ He puts the blame squarely on the people who have gated the blue cities to newcomers, specifically censuring the “potent strain of NIMBYism” endemic in modern progressivism.

The solutions are fairly straightforward from a policy perspective: radical liberalization of stultifying land use codes, a topic we’ve covered a lot here at City of Yes. Of course, it’s the politics—including overcoming the now deep-seated desire to retain local vetocracy—that makes reform so difficult. As if to demonstrate the point, after last week’s publication of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, many on the left have jumped to critique the emphasis on deregulation at the heart of the “abundance agenda.” As the mounting successes of pro-housing YIMBY reformers show—in cities like Austin, Cambridge, and Minneapolis, and in states like California, Montana, and Florida—political solutions are increasingly tractable and delivering real results. So to left-wing critics who believe that the status quo, magical thinking, or modern monetary theory will somehow unleash abundant housing, I’d argue it’s time to get your thinking unstuck from outdated, self-defeating ideology and embrace what works.

But there have also been critiques from the right. Oren Cass, a leading proponent of the New Right’s free-market skepticism, warns that liberalizing zoning and unleashing housing abundance in big cities would create mega-city “black holes,” draining economic vitality from other places. Addressing the “en vogue ‘Abundance” agenda” more broadly and not Appelbaum in particular, Cass argues that although increased mobility might optimize individual welfare, it would lead to a collective loss. His reference point is Tokyo, a city that has managed to build abundant, affordable housing even as its population continues to grow—because it’s drawing in people from the rest of Japan. He worries that fixing housing in New York or San Francisco would trigger a flood of newcomers and entrench the “agglomeration economies” that make them so attractive. Cass references the same research paper by Hsieh and Moretti that Appelbaum did, writing that “the average U.S. city would lose 80% of its population while New York City would balloon to eight times its current size” without restrictive zoning.

Except that’s not what the paper actually says.

Cass draws his ballooning figures from a misreading of Hsieh and Moretti’s work. The figures he references come from a stylized model that assumed perfect mobility, unlimited housing, and unlimited demand—a counterfactual, not a forecast. What the paper actually illustrates is the tremendous economic potential locked away by zoning, not a prediction that everyone would flock to megacities. In reality, as the researchers recognize, people value climate, culture, and community differently. Not everyone wants New York’s wet winters, Austin’s scorching summers, or San Francisco’s clement climate—and everyone hates density, especially on the scale of Tokyo. And Tokyo, Cass’s warning case, reflects Japan’s heavily centralized structure—not the diverse, decentralized geography of American power, economics, and culture that spans dozens of cities.

Liberalizing zoning in high opportunity cities will, instead, make people everywhere better off.

This includes not only the people who move, but also the people who stay—especially those housing cost-burdened workers that Erdmann writes about. Those who remain in communities that people move from also benefit, as outmigration eases local labor and housing pressures. Meanwhile, the increase in national wealth and increased productivity would have spillover effects from cheaper goods and services, technological gains, and greater tax revenues that could support redistributive programs.

Contra the scarcity-minded adherents of the anti-market Old Left and New Right, economic mobility is good for the country at large: urban housing abundance is not a black hole but a big bang.

Yoni Appelbaum’s Stuck is a compelling, richly detailed addition to the abundance discourse. “Mobility,” Appelbaum writes, “made this country prosperous and pluralistic, diverse and dynamic.” We can make America…that…again, if policymakers, advocates, and neighbors everywhere heed his call. The future of our country requires getting Americans moving again—we ought to stop standing in our own way.

1. Because I read an advance reader’s copy of Stuck, uncorrected for publication, I will quote from Appelbaum’s companion article in The Atlantic, found here.

2. I’ve written much more about that here, here, and here.

3. Ironically, Jacobs had earlier renovated her West Village townhouse in a manner that later preservationists called “badly remodeled” and “completely out of character” with the neighborhood.

4. There’s plenty of opportunity in these red states, but Appelbaum’s point is that people are generally migrating to housing, not jobs.