How the American Dream Got Stuck. Conversation with Yoni Appelbaum

Do you feel like something in our country is seriously broken right now? Like we’re losing a piece of what once made America optimistic and upwardly mobile — the belief that our future could be better than our past?

Yoni Appelbaum has done the research, and the story he tells is unsettling but also hopeful. For most of American history, uniquely in the world, America’s secret sauce was the freedom to move toward opportunity. That mobility gave people the agency to shape their future and even their identity. But over the past 50 years, we’ve become stuck.

Stuck in part because of the purposeful and openly discriminatory use of land. Some of the earliest zoning rules, beginning in 1885 in Modesto, California, were designed to push out Chinese laundry owners by banning the very businesses they operated to serve their customers. Over time, we became very good at building these legal walls. They came to seem normal, appropriate, even “scientific.” The result has been growing separation, rising resentment among those left out, and real strain on the foundations of our democracy.

But here’s the hopeful part: these land-use walls are words on paper, written by people. That means they can be rewritten. We can choose to get unstuck.