Author | Lightnews

Yoni Appelbaum @yappelbaum.bsky.social · 19h

BREAKING: Mark Wolf, appointed to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan, writes that he is resigning as a judge to have the freedom to speak out against the president's assault on the rule of law.
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

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Alexandra Petri @petridishes.bsky.social · 5d

law and order: sandwich crimes unit www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

Law and Order: Sandwich Crimes Unit

Serving justice to sandwich-wielding offenders takes expertise.

www.theatlantic.com

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Yoni Appelbaum @yappelbaum.bsky.social · 11d

You keep making this claim, and I'm baffled by it. Can I ask you to point to the passage from my book where I defend or rehabilitate Robert Moses? Here's the sole mention of Moses, and the passage in which I make my view of the conflict between them plain:

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Shane Phillips @shanedphillips.bsky.social · 16d

We published our 100th episode! Listen for some fun lore about the Housing Voice hosts, answers to listener questions, and the announcement that we'll be reading Stuck for our first book club, with author Yoni Appelbaum joining us for the last episode in that short series.

UCLA Lewis Center @uclalewiscenter.bsky.social · 18d

This week on #UCLAHousingVoice, we're celebrating 100 episodes!! The hosts reminiscence on their favorite episodes (like @shanedphillips.bsky.social 1st pick) and answer listener questions. Also, we have updates on our book club!

As always, thanks for listening! 🎧 www.lewis.ucla.edu/2025/10/22/1...

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Addison Del Mastro @ad-mastro.bsky.social · Oct 6

"Some of the critics seems to view the artificial costs of mobility as an argument against mobility, when removing those artificial costs is the whole point of the book." Further thoughts on @yappelbaum.bsky.social's "Stuck," and against localism as an ideology:

Localism Must Not Be an Ideology of Soil

A critique of the localist critique of Yoni Appelbaum’s “Stuck”

thedeletedscenes.substack.com

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Russell Richie 🔰🌐🏗🚲♿🏳️‍🌈 @drussellmrichie.bsky.social · Sep 23

One of the most interesting things in @yappelbaum.bsky.social's Stuck, is the idea that people join groups most when they can live where they want.

Text from the book.

The resurgence of mobility revived other aspects of American life that had fallen off during the Great Depression. People sought out churches and clubs and lodges as they tried to construct community in their new surroundings. Between 1940 and 1945, rates of membership in American voluntary associations saw their largest recorded surge. Church membership ticked up, too. Just as the golden age of American voluntary associations in the late nineteenth century had been driven by the remarkable number of Americans moving from one place to another, its revival in the postwar decades was, too. Despite becoming sharply more likely to be living next to new neighbors, and to have moved to an unfamiliar place themselves, Americans expressed more trust in each other and more faith in institutions than they had during the immobile years of the Great Depression.

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Yoni Appelbaum @yappelbaum.bsky.social · Sep 18

NEW: Kamala Harris passed on her top choice for a running mate—Pete Buttigieg—because it would've been “too big of a risk” for a Black woman to run with a gay man, she writes in her book, @jonlemire.bsky.social reports:

www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

The Running Mate Kamala Harris Didn’t Dare Choose

“I love Pete,” she writes in her new book. But picking a gay man would have been too risky.

www.theatlantic.com

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Josh Linden @joshlinden.bsky.social · Sep 14

Many of our land use / building codes are rooted in exclusion + prejudice, even if they are facially anodyne and widely accepted as common sense today

Case in point: early 1900 fire safety reforms were primarily designed to ⬆️ the cost of tenements / MF apts (old and new) to reduce immigration

From Stuck: "If we require multiple dwellings to be fireproof, and thus increase the cost of construction; if we require stairs to be fireproofed, even when there are only three families; if we require fire-escapes and a host of other things," then, he continued, each of the rules could stand up in court, "and at the same time we have made it difficult to build apartment homes."

From Stuck: But although some champions of tenement reform were earnest in their efforts, no one who had paid the slightest attention to the movement could have any doubt as to the actual aims of many reformers. The influx of immigrants to New York City was the problem; eliminating affordable housing was the solution.

From Stuck: Veiller, instead, did everything in his power to make housing more expensive. Immigrants continued to pour into the city in the years immediately after the passage of the Tenement Act, but newly constructed tenements became increasingly unaffordable. The cost of making the improvements to old-law tenements mandated by the law, and increasing competition for the remaining affordable units, combined to drive up prices, setting off rent strikes in 1904 and 1907. "The fact is that the new-law tenements ... are beyond the reach of unskilled wage earners," one reformer complained in 1919.

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Jonathan Levine @jnthnlvn.bsky.social · Sep 3

Strongly recommended for pro-housing people (and even more for people who aren't yet on board): Appelbaum, Yoni. Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Random House, 2025. Moving exerpt attached. #a2council

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Torr 🧵 @torrleonard.bsky.social · Sep 2

"When the Dust Bowl set off an exodus out of the Great Plains, 300k migrants showed up in California, a place seen as the land of opportunity. The welcome was not warm."

This was talked about a bit in the book "Stuck" by @yappelbaum.bsky.social:

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Emily Hamilton @ebwhamilton.bsky.social · Aug 26

From Stuck! by @yappelbaum.bsky.social, some great history on U.S. building codes and Lawrence Veiller's work on tenement laws:

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Yoni Appelbaum @yappelbaum.bsky.social · Aug 21

5. The post-1970s changes to zoning have, in effect, returned to city governments a "license law" regime, in which local governments are now consumed by these decisions, to the detriment of everything else they could be doing—and with the same invitation to corruption.

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Yoni Appelbaum @yappelbaum.bsky.social · Aug 21

4. Prohibition failed, but the three-tier system of alcohol distribution introduced in its wake was intended to address the same problem—and largely succeeded. Retail owners still needed licenses, but the big money was in distribution and production, and they no longer cared who got the licenses.

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Yoni Appelbaum @yappelbaum.bsky.social · Aug 21

3. One major (and largely forgotten) impetus behind the disastrous experiment with Prohibition was the desire to clean up city governments by removing the corruption spawned by the license laws, taking the liquor money out of local politics.

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Yoni Appelbaum @yappelbaum.bsky.social · Aug 21

2. The saloon owners—and the beer and liquor distributors who supplied them—had more to win or lose in city elections than anyone else, and they spent accordingly. Officials catered to their interests, more than to voters. And corruption ran rampant.

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Yoni Appelbaum @yappelbaum.bsky.social · Aug 21

1. In the decades before Prohibition, many municipalities experimented with license-laws, regulating the sale of alcohol. Such licenses swiftly became the most valuable things dispensed by government, with profoundly distorting consequences.

Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈 @maxdubler.com · Aug 21

One noteworthy fact about local control of land use in Los Angeles is that it's why City Councilmembers keep going to prison.

As it turns out, land use rules that are so complex that you need special permission from the Councilmember to build ~anything create irresistible incentives for corruption!

Former L.A. Councilmember Jose Huizar pleads guilty in corruption case

Former Los Angeles City Councilmember Jose Huizar pleaded guilty Friday to charges of racketeering and tax evasion, admitting that he extorted at least $1.5 million in bribes from real estate developers.

Under a plea agreement filed Thursday in federal court in Los Angeles, Huizar acknowledged that sweeping corruption allegations that he has denied for years were true.

It also confirmed that pervasive graft tainted the city’s byzantine process for approving real estate projects in downtown Los Angeles in recent years.

Huizar’s deal with prosecutors came after developers were convicted of bribing him at two consecutive trials, and an array of other players at City Hall pleaded guilty to felonies.

In the years leading up to his arrest n June 2020, Huizar led the council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee, which reviews large-scale real estate development proposals. That gave Huizar enormous power over major construction projects during a boom period for downtown.

Huizar, 54, was the primary target of prosecutors in a case that unearthed extensive corruption in the city’s approval process for multiple downtown high-rise projects, all of them located in what was then his district.

One was a 77-story skyscraper that was proposed on Figueroa Street but never built. Another was a planned 20-story residential tower on Olympic Boulevard, also abandoned.

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Torr 🧵 @torrleonard.bsky.social · Aug 16

You will never think of Jane Jacobs the same way again after reading this book:

bsky.app/profile/torr...

Torr 🧵 @torrleonard.bsky.social · Jul 9

The section of Yoni’s book “Stuck” that is about Jane Jacobs is an essential read:

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Yoni Appelbaum @yappelbaum.bsky.social · Aug 15

10/10, no notes

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Yoni Appelbaum @yappelbaum.bsky.social · Aug 15

Sounds like a big problem!

www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/700580...

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Emily Hamilton @ebwhamilton.bsky.social · Jul 30

We used to be a country, a proper country

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Yoni Appelbaum @yappelbaum.bsky.social · Jul 28

It makes me genuinely sad that if, as he says, he read the book, this is the impression he formed of the history it presents: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/700580...

Stuck by Yoni Appelbaum: 9780593449295 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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...

www.penguinrandomhouse.com

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Yoni Appelbaum @yappelbaum.bsky.social · Jul 28

Jon, thanks for reading, but you've left me a little puzzled. Where did I write what you quote here?

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Yoni Appelbaum @yappelbaum.bsky.social · Jul 11

Full story, from @matteowong.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Grok Says White, Asian, and Jewish Are the ‘Good Races’

Days after praising Hitler, Elon Musk’s chatbot is back at it.

www.theatlantic.com

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Yoni Appelbaum @yappelbaum.bsky.social · Jul 11

"On its own accord, Grok dug up the demographics of previous winners of Nobel Prizes in the sciences—disproportionately white men—and determined a set of “good_races”: white, caucasian, Asian, East Asian, South Asian, and Jewish."

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Danny Crichton @dannycrichton.com · Jul 9

I talk to Yoni Appelbaum on declining mobility and the future of American economic growth, how the abundance movement is changing the tenor of this debate, and some solutions on how to help Americans live where they want and build a more prosperous future: riskgaming.substack.com/p/how-jane-...

How Jane Jacobs got Americans stuck

Yoni Appelbaum on the real villians behind our housing and mobility problems

www.riskgaming.com

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