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

By:

Sign Up Now! Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title. Learn about membership options, or view our freely available titles.

Synopsis
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.
Copyright:
2025

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
320 Pages
ISBN-13:
9780593449301
Related ISBNs:
9780593449295, 9798217020652, 9798217020669
Publisher:
Random House Publishing Group
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Yoni Appelbaum
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
History, Nonfiction, Social Studies, Politics and Government
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

Reviews

No Rating Yet