384. Yoni Appelbaum: Priced out of the American Dream

Seattle home prices are notoriously sky-high, making this city a difficult place to afford and move to. How did Seattle and other U.S. cities become that way? Or, as historian and journalist Yoni Appelbaum puts it, how did the U.S. cease to be the land of opportunity? Pulling from his book, Stuck, Appelbaum explores how housing affects the very fabric of our society.

For 200 years, people in the U.S. moved to new places for economic and social opportunity. But, Appelbaum argues that not only is this American Dream becoming more inaccessible, it hasn’t been available to many for a long time. He explains how zoning laws stopped people from moving, including the legal segregation of Jewish workers in New York’s Lower East Side and the private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in Flint, Michigan. These efforts, Appelbaum says, have raised housing prices, deepened political divides, emboldened bigots, and trapped generations of people in poverty. And now, he argues, we are stuck––literally unable to move.

While Seattle may be an expensive place to live, it’s a common story all over the country. Appelbaum describes what caused these problems and lays out ways to get people moving again.

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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