Americans used to move around a lot, chasing opportunity. No more.
Yoni Appelbaum. Photo by Jessica Torch Nation & World Americans used to move around a lot, chasing opportunity. No more. Yoni Appelbaum argues legal, political hurdles over past 50 years have had troubling economic, social consequences March 7, 2025 long read Excerpted from “Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity” by Yoni Appelbaum, lecturer in history and literature, ’14. America is a nation of migrants. No society has ever been remotely so mobile as America at its peak. In the late 19th century, the heyday of American mobility, roughly a third of all Americans changed addresses each year. European visitors were astonished, and more than slightly appalled. The American, Michel Chevalier observed in 1835, “is devoured with a passion for locomotion, he cannot stay in one place.” On Moving Day, when leases expired in tandem, the greater part of a city’s population might relocate to new quarters between sunup and sundown,...