That community has been disappearing for decades. The factory has downsized or closed, and its longtime employees have had to accept lesser and often demeaning work. The homogeneity of the old days has been replaced by an influx of newcomers from other parts of the world who speak unfamiliar languages and eat unfamiliar foods. The church is not what it was, and the high school is struggling to stay open. Rotary has trouble filling its tables at lunchtime.
What do the residents of these places want at this point in the 21st century? Most of them don’t have a desire to pack up and move. They love their community too much for that. Nor do they expect the society of the 1950s to come back. They simply want to regain some measure of the local stability, continuity and fellowship they remember from when they were young. At least that’s what I think they want.
Yoni Appelbaum doesn‘t agree. In an intensely argued new book called Stuck, the journalist and historian insists that the foremost problem in American society is the absence of mobility — people can’t move from stagnant communities and neighborhoods to places where greater opportunity exists. “America faces not an affordable housing crisis,” he writes, “but a mobility crisis … a loss of agency, a loss of opportunity, of dignity, a loss of hope.” The decline of mobility, he writes, “has left many Americans feeling trapped.” If they could only move somewhere else, Appelbaum believes, much of America’s social discontent would go away.
There’s no disputing that moving somewhere else was a defining element in American culture in the early years of the republic. New settlements west of ordered civilization always held out the prospect of more freedom and greater prosperity. Visitors to this country almost invariably remarked on it. “In the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835, “a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it, and he sells it before the roof is on. … He settles in a place, which he soon afterward leaves, to carry his changeable longings elsewhere.’’ Settled communities held communal moving days to celebrate the pluck of their neighbors packing up for new adventures in the West. “Be out at 12 you must,” one Brooklyn minister warned the travelers on moving day, “for another family are on your heels.”
And as many of us learned in school, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed in 1893 that the frontier was the lodestar of American life and that its disappearance would mark a crucial break in the national consciousness.
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Nor was wanderlust merely a frontier phenomenon. Immigrant families on New York’s Lower East Side appreciated the close-knit camaraderie of their crowded streets, but as soon as they could afford it, and as soon as improved transportation made it possible, they moved to larger quarters on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx or to Williamsburg in Brooklyn.
While immigrants were moving out in an urban setting, millions of Black people from the South were heading for the urban North and cities unfettered by Jim Crow. Between 1910 and 1970, some six million African Americans moved north.
This was a migration of the disadvantaged, but after World War II, wanderlust became a middle-class phenomenon as well. The suburbs opened up, with bigger homes and bright green yards, and tens of millions of urban residents took advantage of reasonable prices to relocate there. Back in the 1990s, when I was researching a book on Chicago neighborhoods, I was struck by a puzzling paradox: The tight-knit community and front-porch sociability of urban bungalow neighborhoods was an essential element of life there, but after a few years many of the homeowners had decamped for the suburbs, often migrating in clusters with the families that had been their neighbors back in the city.
SO WHEN IT COMES TO HISTORY, Appelbaum undeniably has the facts on his side. The question is just how relevant all this is to the present moment.
It’s well documented that the wanderlust that marked the middle of the 20th century has ebbed away in the years since then. In the 1940s and 1950s, Appelbaum tells us, roughly 20 percent of Americans moved every year. By 2021, the number of movers was down to 1 out of 12. Why has this happened? One explanation is that we just aren’t as footloose as we used to be.
But Appelbaum doesn’t think that’s the real answer. He argues that “American mobility has been slowly strangled by generations of reformers, seeking to reassert control over their neighborhoods and their neighbors.” What have the reformers done? They have championed zoning ordinances that have dramatically reduced the production of new housing, especially moderately priced homes. They have placed bureaucratic regulations and other obstacles in the path of developers who want to build. They have used preservation laws to keep older neighborhoods essentially frozen in place. All of these actions, and others as well, have made mobility prohibitively expensive, even — or perhaps especially — for those who believe, as Appelbaum does, that mobility is the key to opportunity and national prosperity. We have stopped moving, he insists, mainly because we can’t afford it.
But there are other reasons why mobility has declined over the last generation, as Appelbaum somewhat grudgingly admits. Two-career families are less likely to consider relocation an appealing option. Joint custody keeps some members of divorced families remaining in place. And then, of course, in the past five years there has been the rise of working from home, making a residential move in many cases not only expensive but unnecessary.
PERHAPS EQUALLY IMPORTANT, though, is the attraction millions of Americans feel for the relatively homogeneous communities most of us lived in during the middle of the last century. Homogeneity is not a popular idea among urbanist academics in an age of enshrined diversity, but the stark fact remains that most Americans are more content spending their lives among neighbors who think and behave like them.
The journalist Bill Bishop argued convincingly in his 2008 book The Big Sort that Americans were increasingly congregating in politically and socially homogeneous enclaves, and I have seen nothing in the years since that disproves his contention. The current cohort of Americans seems to crave familiarity, and this is a reason why so many of them resist moving to distant places, even if there may be a better-paying job waiting for them somewhere out in the far reaches of the country.
From what I have seen, this doesn’t just apply to the middle class or to small-town residents. Some years ago, at a breakfast in Houston convened to discuss housing issues, I was startled by the impassioned remarks of a woman who lived in one of the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods. If you are going to build new housing, she said, build it where we are living. We want to stay where we are. Don’t make us trek across the city to claim a new apartment.
One such outburst isn’t proof of anything, but it had a powerful effect on me. It still does.
Even Appelbaum, as passionate as he is about the benefits of mobility, seems at times to accept the existence of a powerful countervailing force. “Perhaps,” he speculates near the end of his book, “American mobility was merely a life stage in the growth of the republic, an artifact of our restless youth.” Perhaps “what we’ve experienced this past half-century isn’t just a prolonged mobility recession, but a permanent change in the structure of American life.’’ Perhaps “we’ll need to redesign public policy around an assumption of stasis.”
Appelbaum doesn’t want that to be true, but he is too honest to discount the possibility. And it has to be appreciated. The people who live in declining factory towns or impoverished urban neighborhoods may not be doomed to spend the rest of their lives there. But there are powerful reasons why they do not chase after opportunity the way Americans once did. Housing prices are one of them. But the undying attachment to community and sociability is a vital one that isn’t going to disappear.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
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