Stuck

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

By: Yoni Appelbaum

Narrated by: Ari Fliakos

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.

Though for most of world history, your prospects were tied to where you were born, 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 remarkable mobility was the linchpin of American economic and social opportunity.

In this illuminating debut, Yoni Appelbaum, historian and journalist for The Atlantic, shows us 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—from the zoning laws enacted to force Jewish workers back into New York’s Lower East Side to the private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in Flint, Michigan to Jane Jacobs’ efforts to protect her vision of the West Village—has raised housing prices, deepened political divides, emboldened bigots, and trapped generations of people in poverty. Appelbaum shows us that these problems have a common explanation: people can’t move as readily as they used to. They are, in a word, stuck.

Cutting through more than a century of mythmaking, Stuck tells a vivid, surprising story of the people and ideas that caused our economic and social sclerosis and lays out common-sense ways to get Americans moving again.

©2025 Yoni Appelbaum (P)2025 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Fascinating. In this riveting story of mobility from the Puritans to the present, Stuck reinterprets American history and offers a key to reimagining a vibrant, more egalitarian, future.”—Heather Cox Richardson, author of Democracy Awakening

“In this vivid and troubling history, Yoni Appelbaum offers a provocative account of how immobility has contributed to the inequalities of income and wealth that are devastating the United States.”—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths

“At once a fascinating history and a blueprint for change, Stuck unravels a powerful and urgent story about the hidden forces that have shaped—and constrained—American opportunity. With gripping historical insight and sharp contemporary relevance, Yoni Appelbaum delivers a must-read work for anyone passionate about equity and the future of American mobility.”—Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Devil in the Grove

The voice and the content

I liked that the opening gave us the whole book's argument. Then went into greater detail on chapter at a time.

Moving?

Moving! An american way of chasing the dream. Maybe and for some. But there are super successful affluent and modest happy people who have stayed in the same City or area all their lives.

Yes let’s make moving easier in all American cities. Best and easiest to do away with zoning which maybe impossible but at least make it inclusive to all of any income. Stop exclusive zoning and regulations that slow or stop more housing being built. We are stuck because housing is expensive and there is simply not enough in high employment areas.

Great incite and love the history on how America grew into our present state of a housing crisis.

Practical, relevant social/housing insights

I enjoyed the comprehensive historical statistics and illustrative, relevant examples of social patterns, politics and informal and formal housing policies the author’s themes.

land of opportunity

As a society we need to answer for our children what opportunity will they have and not close the door to their future