They saw other people—including children—as the greatest threat to their environment and their happiness, and zoning as the most powerful tool they had for keeping them out.
Welcome to my virtual book club to discuss
’s Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. This week: a discussion of Chapter 9, “A Plague of Localists.” Please chime in!‘Everyone belongs to a specific place’
The chapter begins in 1939, when Fred Edwards was prosecuted in California for driving his destitute brother-in-law, Frank, from Texas—violating the state’s “anti-Okie law,” rooted in what Appelbaum calls “the old-world notion that everyone belonged to a specific place.” Edwards appealed, and in 1941, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law. Edwards v. California became a landmark: mobility was not a privilege but a core guarantee of citizenship. Finally, a Supreme Court ruling less awful than the disasters described in earlier chapters!
For a time, the principle held. Wartime labor needs reinforced mobility, and postwar America became astonishingly dynamic: one in five people moved each year. Prosperity flourished. But by the 1970s, Appelbaum argues, a backlash set in. Americans revived the older idea of belonging—people should not be free to choose their communities; communities instead should choose their people. And they could wall out the ones they didn’t like.
At this point, the mobility pendulum mostly stopped swinging: the forces of exclusion slowly gained traction over the next half century, and America has never really regained the dynamism it once had.
Silent Spring and Unsafe at Any Speed
This particular pendulum swing toward exclusion, like the ones before it, didn’t come out of nowhere. It had a context. Reformers in the 1960s were responding to real failures of government and industry. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring showed how federal agencies had encouraged the spraying of millions of acres with pesticides, ignoring public health. Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed forced automakers to admit they were knowingly selling unsafe cars. And Nader’s Raiders were right to highlight cozy relationships between developers and politicians, fraudulent land sales, and regulatory capture. They diagnosed a real disease: a system where corporate and bureaucratic power too often went unchecked.
But diagnosis is the easy part. Appelbaum argues that the cure they prescribed—stripping discretion from agencies and arming local residents with countless veto points—has had a terrible side effect: it broke the engine of American opportunity.
‘Clothed in the respectable costume of environmentalism’
Nader wasn’t just about cars; his Raiders also issued a 1200-page report on California land use. This bizarre report correctly identified problems of urban sprawl and pollution, but, as Appelbaum notes, “without any apparent awareness of the irony, decided to double down on [the low-density zoning] prescriptions, which had produced the problem in the first place.”
Throughout Stuck, Appelbaum shows that as wave after wave of (mostly white) people spread across the country, they tried to pull up the ladder behind them to prevent others from following their trail. One of the cleverest tricks of the ladder-puller-uppers since the 1960s has been to co-opt the environmental movement. On the heels of the Nader report, California passed the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). This statue, originally designed to protect fragile wetlands and vulnerable species, became a favorite weapon for protecting neighborhoods from the horror of new neighbors.
“Save the planet” became the perfect cover for incumbent protectionism. But instead of shielding virgin land, neighborhood opposition to infill development pushed new housing to the edges—and destroyed the very open spaces environmentalists claimed to cherish.
I see the same pattern locally: Los Alamos needs housing, but instead of changing the rules to let builders make full use of our existing footprint for development (saving lives, helping the local economy, and stopping metric tons of emissions), leaders plead with the Department of Energy, local pueblos, or the Forest Service for more fire-prone raw land to build, you guessed it, single-family homes. Many of these leaders will tell you they are environmentalists.
“What many Californians most wanted to defend, it turned out, weren’t the last unspoiled places,” Appelbaum writes. “They wanted to protect their own neighborhoods from any new construction and to stop new people from moving in.”
The parable of the Old Spaghetti Factory
Appelbaum provides a sad but typical coda: In 2008, a Hollywood developer received approval for a 22-story tower to replace an Old Spaghetti Factory restaurant building. Residents sued and lost, but dragged the process out long enough to kill the project’s financing—a common tactic. A new developer demolished the unsafe building, rebuilt a replica, and was sued again—this time over the demolition. By 2015, the tower was complete with 40 tenants. Residents sued yet again, claiming the replica needed fresh environmental review. This time, they won: “Some 40 tenants were forced to move out of the completed building, and along with the adjacent park, it sat unused for the next three years.”
Many may find this selfishness staggering—I did. But we have built a system that empowers and incentivizes this behavior. Housing has concentrated costs and diffuse benefits. This makes it a collective action problem. If we invite people to veto anything that is personally inconvenient to them, they certainly will.
Malthusian misanthropy
Robert Fellmeth, the Nader Raider behind California’s land use report, didn’t just want to stop development—he wanted to stop people from happening at all. “I happen to have a philosophical view that we should stop increasing the goddamn population,” he told Appelbaum.
At its core, anti-housing rhetoric often springs from this Malthusian terror of overcrowding. Fellmeth’s generation embraced the idea of stopping babies by stopping housing—and it worked! Research shows that a 10% rise in home prices cuts births among non-homeowners by 1%. America’s fertility rate is now below replacement in part because housing scarcity makes family formation unaffordable.
But Fellmeth’s anti-growth policies didn’t just shut down American fertility (which he wanted), they incentivized sprawl and driving (which he didn’t). Because infill housing is mostly illegal where jobs are, commutes have ballooned, spewing carbon and baking the planet. Economists call this kind of invisible consequence an “externality.” Another externality: today nearly half of New Mexico households (46%) live below their survival budget, unable to reliably afford basics. Since 2017, rents are up 60%, home prices 70%, and homelessness 87%, leaving families one emergency away from disaster. This misery is directly attributable to our rules governing where housing can be built.
The children and grandchildren of these “cautious greens”—degrowth environmentalists who claim to be protecting the planet—face a poorer future because of these policies. So does the planet.
Strange bedfellows: the left-right alliance against growth
Ralph Nader embodied a leftist anti-government philosophy, and the neoliberal tax rebellion of the same era provided the perfect complement from the right:
The tax revolt of the 1970s, when voters put a cap on property taxes in California and backed tax cuts in many other states, left cities unable to raise the funds required to fulfill their ambitions or even their obligations. By downzoning their land and then using the approval process to negotiate community benefits packages from developers, local governments figured out how to provide amenities to their current residents without charging them a dime. But there was still a bill to be paid. The costs are now passed on to the purchasers and renters of the new developments, driving up the price of residential and commercial space.
Cities, unable to pay their bills through general taxes, discovered they could foist costs onto new arrivals: a sort of tax on growth. Nader pinched new housing from the environmental left; neoliberal austerity pinched it from the right. From the existing residents’ perspective, this accidental collusion was a win-win: no new neighbors, no new taxes, skyrocketing housing values.
But Appelbaum argues the most insidious change wasn’t just in how we taxed or zoned—it was in how we decided who gets a say.
‘Participatory planning narrows the range of voices’
The era’s suspicion of bureaucrats and experts, married to Nader’s push for “government-proof” laws, reshaped local decision-making. What emerged was a new model of “participatory planning,” one that claimed to empower ordinary citizens against feckless government and corporate behemoths, but in practice handed enormous leverage to a third arm of unaccountable power: the loudest, most privileged local voices.
Who actually shows up to oppose housing? One study found that “homeowners were 46 percent of local voters, but an astonishing 73 percent of commenters, and that they were likely to oppose new developments,” writes Appelbaum. The median municipal voter is 57—fifteen years older than the median eligible voter—and those over 65 outnumber voters under 35 seven to one.
Appelbaum illustrates these data with the story of a Cambridge homeowner who opposed a project, then changed her mind after befriending someone who benefited from new housing. She testified in favor of another project, urging neighbors to imagine the friends they might gain. Her plea was met only with “stares and grumbles.”
Again and again, processes meant to broaden participation are dominated by the privileged and the propertied. Elected officials could resist but often treat community meetings as mini-elections. They aren’t: elections are elections. Project hearings are wildly unrepresentative, and officials must recognize that, balancing vocal opposition with the needs of the many—including those who don’t attend meetings.
The insider-dominated system, Appelbaum argues, isn’t accidental: “Public hearings are intended to privilege the desires of existing residents above the needs of those who might take advantage of a neighborhood’s opportunities.”
‘Civic blackmail’ and systematic exclusion
Localism hasn’t delivered power to the people. It has delivered the iron fist of exclusion in the velvet glove of public input. Decision-makers, Appelbaum says, often practice “civic blackmail”: extracting concessions from developers in exchange for approval. The aim isn’t improving the lives of new residents or creating a vibrant and prosperous community, but shrinking or killing projects entirely. Preservation rules, height caps, impact fees, setbacks, and parking mandates can all be justified individually—yet function as exclusionary tools in practice.
Over time, these restrictions have accumulated, with new rules larded on old ones. Rarely are rulebooks rewritten entirely to match the current moment. Had current regulations existed in 1776, most American cities wouldn’t exist: four in ten Manhattan buildings couldn’t be built under current codes. In San Francisco, a third of buildings—housing more than half the city—are out of compliance. If the whole U.S. were zoned like its most restrictive suburbs, the population would be cut in half.
Across the political spectrum, agrarians dream of unwinding America back to little houses on the prairie: no cities, only one cabin per hundred acres of land. But many of the same people would not be so happy to unwind the benefits that America has gained from its cities and its dynamism. Even fewer would be willing to give up their home, their town, and their very existence to this unwinding.
The plague spreads
California, once the land of promise, shows the costs of restrictive zoning. After quintupling its population between 1920 and 1970 while keeping housing affordable, the state’s turn to localism pushed median home prices above $900,000—over 10 times median income. Seven percent of residents have seriously considered leaving. More than 170,000 have lost their housing entirely and live on the streets.
The political price is steep, too: California is losing congressional seats for the first time in history, ceding power to Texas and Florida as they absorb its displaced residents.
Appelbaum interviewed Fellmeth for the book. His house, worth $90,000 in his Nader Raider days, is now worth $1 million. “There’s something wrong with a situation where the price of a house goes up that much,” he admits—while continuing to blame “overpopulation.” In this telling, the problem is breeders stubbornly having babies instead of reserving resources for those born in 1945; it’s Americans having the temerity to move around in their own country, instead of staying put in the town where they were born.
Motivated reasoning is powerful.
With one chapter to go, “A Plague Of Localists” feels like Appelbaum’s apotheosis. It’s the story of artificial scarcity imposed on the many after a few reap the benefits of abundance. Again and again, America’s history is one of ladders pulled up, walls erected, and opportunity denied to newcomers—young people, job seekers, immigrants—once incumbents have secured their own place.
The plague of localists continues to spread, and our future is paying the price.
Next week: Chapter 10, “Building A Way Out,” the last one! After documenting how America broke its mobility engine, Appelbaum offers solutions: tolerance for growth, consistent rules across regions, and enough supply to make housing a consumer good rather than an investment asset.
Comments: Here is what readers had to say about Chapter 8
James Garner connected the housing exclusion theme to the GI Bill, noting that while veterans’ benefits appeared universal, federal enforcement left to states meant non-white veterans were largely excluded from education and mortgage benefits.
bnjd from What Are Streets For Newsletter shared historical research showing that moral reformers opposed the common practice of letting extra bedrooms to boarders, which FHA policies later sought to eliminate.
Andie of The Good Enough Newsletter grappled with whether self-segregation by class and race reflects human nature or unnatural policies, and shared her own experience living in a Kansas City suburb that was incorporated in the 1950s to avoid resource-sharing with the city.
Ken Kovar from Talking Head Hunter’s Guide pointed to the irony of the “white men don’t be yellow” poster and argued that zoning laws need updating to reflect today’s economic and technological realities rather than just regulating single-family homes.
Discussion questions for Chapter 9:
The 1960s reformers Appelbaum describes were responding to genuine problems—urban renewal, environmental damage, government collusion with industry—but their solutions often made things worse for the very people they aimed to help. How do we stop narrow interests from capturing reform efforts and bending them to equally destructive ends?
Appelbaum argues that participatory planning “narrows the range of interests and voices that can participate in planning”—do you see this dynamic in your own community, and how might we balance meaningful public input with actual housing production?
The chapter describes how 1960s reformers created legal tools to challenge government decisions, which affluent neighborhoods then used more effectively than working-class areas—have you seen this play out in your region?
Chapter 9 shows California activists opposing both urban density and suburban sprawl, effectively ruling out building anything, anywhere—have you observed similar contradictions in local housing debates, and how do communities escape this trap?
I very much support the direction of your analysis and arguments.
To highlight one of the specifics in your discussion: Proposition 13, to cap increases in property taxes, passed when I was in high school. It immediately decimated many public services, most notably public schools. Over the text decade or so, the state and county governments found ways to back-fill some of the losses, but it was very difficult to shift the tax base in a secure, progressive direction.
Anyway, we bought our home in 1987. We basically pay the same property taxes as we did more than thirty years ago, because of prop. 13. My neighbors who move in next to us can pay almost ten times that amount, due to the increase in property values, for the same public services.
This is a system that so rewards long term residents that Prop. 13 has been described as the third rail of California politics. Things do seem to be shifting, as us old people with huge increases in property values and tiny increases in property taxes become a smaller minority.
Perhaps when the profound unfairness of this system reaches the breaking point, there will be enough pressure to make a foundational change in how we fund public services in California. (This is also a system that illustrates why purist "localism" can't work. I think a fair, progressive, sufficient system to fund public services requires policies at the statewide level.)
Well now i got to get this book!