Why don’t more Americans move to where the good jobs are? - The Boston Globe (2025)

Applebaum thinks the primary reason is that restrictive zoning rules have driven up the cost of building homes, ultimately making it too expensive for many people to go to places with higher-paying jobs. One study he cites found that if a lawyer moved from the Deep South to New York City in 2017, his net income would go up by about 39 percent after adjusting for housing costs — the same as it would have in 1960. If a janitor made the same move in 1960, he would gain 20 percent in net income. But by 2017, the janitor would be 7 percent worse off, because his gains in pay would be outstripped by housing costs.

In America today, the lawyer is still moving, but the janitor isn’t. “Mobility has largely become the privilege of an educated elite,” Appelbaum writes.

He argues that the solution is for states to limit municipalities’ ability to impose exclusionary zoning.

My interview with Applebaum has been edited and condensed.

You argue that what led to American prosperity was a novel idea — that someone could move from town to town. Why is mobility so correlated with socioeconomic success?

If you’re moving, you’re usually going to land someplace that’s growing, and it will be growing because it has a concentration of thriving industries. Throughout American history, people who move have ended up earning more than those who have stayed where they were born. They have been likelier to jump occupational brackets. Their kids do even better than they had done, and better than the children of people who had stayed.

A society that is mobile is one in which individuals have a sense of agency. They are exercising control over their own lives. Five hundred years ago, we all lived in a world where almost everything about your identity was inherited at birth. The United States created a society in which individuals were, to an unprecedented extent, able to define their identities through their own choices, through the communities that they would choose to join, the churches with which they affiliated, the clubs that they belonged to.

Why do you believe housing prices are the main reason people stopped moving?

Other explanations don’t really account for this consistent, broad-based 50-year decline in mobility.

Forty-five percent more Americans say they want to be moving and can’t than did 50 years ago. Mobility has ceased to be a good economic bet for many Americans.

People used to move toward opportunity. We’ve driven the housing costs up so high that instead of moving toward opportunity, Americans now move toward cheaper housing, if they move at all.

Your book largely blames zoning restrictions for the high cost of housing. And you trace the origins of zoning to racism, as it was used to move Chinese-run laundries out of white neighborhoods in California. Is zoning still motivated by racism?

There are many reasons people pursue and refine zoning ordinances. I do think zoning has continued to be a tool to segregate ourselves by class, and in America that does generally mean to a large extent by race.

Zoning is a tool for saying that some things are OK in some neighborhoods and not in others, rather than having simple, consistent, and clear rules that apply in rich and poor neighborhoods alike. We’ve developed an intricate system of laws that tends to extend much tighter protections against unpopular uses of land in rich areas and which effectively prevents people with lower incomes from moving into those areas.

Your critique is that when the public is allowed input into the planning process, it skews neighborhoods toward the interests of homeowners, who tend to be whiter, older, and wealthier than their communities as a whole. Do we want a system where neighbors don’t have input on new developments?

I’m an enormous fan of democracy. We have a terrific system of government which asks people to show up at elections and choose the people who create the rules for their communities. Part of the weirdness of zoning is it delegated many of those tasks to appointed bodies. Then we compounded that about 50 years ago by forcing those bodies to adhere to a putatively democratic process which allowed anyone who had the flexibility in their schedule, the education, and the resources to show up in an obscure room at a particular hour on a weeknight evening and devote two hours of their time to waiting to testify to weigh in, as if that was somehow a fair, representative process. We know that it is not. A system which prioritizes the voices of people who object to doing things is a system that is designed not to do things.

Is there any jurisdiction doing it right?

Japan offers a really interesting alternative to the way the United States conducts zoning. In Japan, the central government continues to exercise a much stronger role. It’s created a dozen labels, and communities can apply those labels to different tracts of land. They can’t invent their own. They can’t layer on Byzantine rules. Every community in Japan plays with the same tool kit and applies it as it wants. That’s a much fairer process. It’s also one that allows builders to operate in different jurisdictions because the rules are familiar to everyone.

What does the solution look like here in Massachusetts?

Even with an entirely dysfunctional Congress and a presidential administration that does not seem particularly interested in being constructive, states and localities maintain the ability to solve this problem. Since the problem is most acute in the most progressive jurisdictions, it’s a problem progressives can address themselves without even needing to reach across the aisle.

It’s a three-part solution. The first is to have simple, clear zoning rules that are consistent across jurisdictions. That enables builders to break ground with confidence that that they can build without needing to go through an extensive review process.

The second thing we need to do is to grow much more tolerant about the variety of housing that we authorize. Beyond zoning codes, there are building codes and other rules that have made it almost impossible in most places in the Commonwealth to build most of the forms of housing that people would actually want to inhabit. It makes it hard for young families to move into a community in starter homes. It makes it difficult for people to age in place in their communities and relocate toward single-floor housing. It makes it hard for people of different incomes to live in close contact with each other.

The third thing we need to do is to build a lot of housing. We’ve spent 50 years digging ourselves into this hole. We’re not going to get out of it in a single summer. But the good news is that this is a problem that can largely solve itself, provided that we pare back the rules and get out of the way.

You’re part of the liberal “abundance” movement, the idea that we can increase the availability of housing, clean energy, and other goods by eliminating red tape. One critique of the movement is that solutions like zoning reform are inadequate for the scale of the housing crisis, and anything large enough to be effective will have such a backlash that nothing will happen.

It’s certainly true that zoning reform alone is inadequate, but without fixing these rules nothing else is possible. These rules not only inhibit private development; they inhibit the ability to provide other forms of publicly subsidized housing. Housing costs now eat up so much of family income that it gets increasingly difficult for Americans to afford basic necessities, which has created its own political backlash.

We know that in the jurisdictions where a city votes 10 percent more liberal, it issues 30 percent fewer housing permits. Americans are smart enough to have noticed that, and unless progressives can bring down the cost of housing, they will continue to see their states bleed population, congressional representation, and electoral votes.

Shira Schoenberg can be reached at shira.schoenberg@globe.com. Follow her @shiraschoenberg.