Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity

How did America cease to be the land of opportunity?

We take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are only accessible to the wealthy. But in America, this wasn’t always the case. 

For most of history, your prospects were tied to where you were born, but Americans came up with a revolutionary idea: If you didn’t like your lot in life, you could find a better location and reinvent yourself there. Americans moved to new places with unprecedented frequency and, for two hundred years, that mobility was the linchpin of American economic and social opportunity.

Yoni Appelbaum, deputy executive editor at The Atlantic, will discuss his new book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, which shows that this idea has been under attack since reformers first developed zoning laws to ghettoize Chinese Americans in nineteenth-century Modesto, California. The century of legal segregation that ensued has raised housing prices, deepened political divides, emboldened bigots, and trapped generations of people in poverty. Appelbaum shows that these problems have a common explanation: people can’t move as readily as they used to. They are, in a word, stuck. 

In his remarks and in conversation with the Center’s David Luberoff, Appelbaum will tell the vivid, surprising story of the people and ideas that caused our economic and social sclerosis and will lay out common sense ways to get Americans moving again. 

In person only but pre-registration requested.