Illustrations by Javier Jaén

The idea that people should be able to choose their own communities—instead of being stuck where they are born—is a distinctly American innovation. It is the foundation for the country’s prosperity and democracy, and it just may be America’s most profound contribution to the world.

No society has ever been as mobile as the United States once was. No society has even come close. In the 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 “is devoured with a passion for locomotion,” the French writer Michel Chevalier observed in 1835; “he cannot stay in one place.” Americans moved far more often, over longer distances, and to greater advantage than did people in the lands from which they had come. They understood this as the key to their national character, the thing that made their country distinctive. “We are a migratory people and we flourish best when we make an occasional change of base,” one 19th-century newspaper explained. “We have cut loose from the old styles of human vegetation, the former method, of sticking like an oyster to one spot through numberless succeeding generations,” wrote another.

As the 19th century turned into the 20th, as two world wars passed, as the Baby Boom began, Americans kept on moving. And as Americans moved around, they moved up. They broke away from stultifying social hierarchies, depleted farmland, declining towns, dead-end jobs. If the first move didn’t work out, they could always see a more promising destination beckoning them onward.

These ceaseless migrations shaped a new way of thinking. “When the mobility of population was always so great,” the historian Carl Becker observed, “the strange face, the odd speech, the curious custom of dress, and the unaccustomed religious faith ceased to be a matter of comment or concern.” And as diverse peoples learned to live alongside one another, the possibilities of pluralism opened. The term stranger, in other lands synonymous with enemy, instead, Becker wrote, became “a common form of friendly salutation.” In a nation where people are forever arriving and departing, a newcomer can seem less like a threat than a welcome addition: Howdy, stranger.

Entrepreneurship, innovation, growth, social equality—the most appealing features of the young republic all traced back to this single, foundational fact: Americans were always looking ahead to their next beginning, always seeking to move up by moving on.

But over the past 50 years, this engine of American opportunity has stopped working. Americans have become less likely to move from one state to another, or to move within a state, or even to switch residences within a city. In the 1960s, about one out of every five Americans moved in any given year—down from one in three in the 19th century, but a frenetic rate nonetheless. In 2023, however, only one in 13 Americans moved.

The sharp decline in geographic mobility is the single most important social change of the past half century, although other shifts have attracted far more attention. In that same span, fewer Americans have started new businesses, and fewer Americans have switched jobs—from 1985 to 2014, the share of people who became entrepreneurs fell by half. More Americans are ending up worse off than their parents—in 1970, about eight out of every 10 young adults could expect to earn more than their parents; by the turn of the century, that was true of only half of young adults. Church membership is down by about a third since 1970, as is the share of Americans who socialize several times a week. Membership in any kind of group is down by half. The birth rate keeps falling. And although half of Americans used to think most people could be trusted, today only a third think the same.

These facts by now form a depressingly familiar litany. They are often regarded as disparate phenomena of mysterious origins. But each of them can be traced, at least in part, to the loss of mobility.

In 2016, Donald Trump tapped into the anger, frustration, and alienation that these changes had produced. Among white voters who had moved more than two hours from their hometown, Hillary Clinton enjoyed a solid six-point lead in the vote that year. Those living within a two-hour drive, though, backed Trump by nine points. And those who had never left their hometown supported him by a remarkable 26 points. Eight years later, he tapped that support again to recapture the White House.

Today, America is often described as suffering from a housing crisis, but that’s not quite right. In many parts of the country, housing is cheap and abundant, but good jobs and good schools are scarce. Other areas are rich in opportunities but short on affordable homes. That holds true even within individual cities, neighborhood by neighborhood.

As a result, many Americans are stranded in communities with flat or declining prospects, and lack the practical ability to move across the tracks, the state, or the country—to choose where they want to live. Those who do move are typically heading not to the places where opportunities are abundant, but to those where housing is cheap. Only the affluent and well educated are exempt from this situation; the freedom to choose one’s city or community has become a privilege of class.

The sclerosis that afflicts the U.S.—more and more each year, each decade—is not the result of technology gone awry or a reactionary movement or any of the other culprits that are often invoked to explain our biggest national problems. The exclusion that has left so many Americans feeling trapped and hopeless traces back, instead, to the self-serving actions of a privileged group who say that inclusion, diversity, and social equality are among their highest values.

Reviving mobility offers us the best hope of restoring the American promise. But it is largely self-described progressives who stand in the way.

Javier Jaén I. Moving Day

The great holiday of American society at its most nomadic was Moving Day, observed by renters and landlords throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th with a giant game of musical houses. Moving Day was a festival of new hopes and new beginnings, of shattered dreams and shattered crockery—“quite as recognized a day as Christmas or the Fourth of July,” as a Chicago newspaper put it in 1882. It was primarily an urban holiday, although many rural communities where leased farms predominated held their own observances. The dates differed from state to state and city to city—April 1 in Pittsburgh, October 1 in Nashville and New Orleans—but May 1 was the most popular. And nothing quite so astonished visitors from abroad as the spectacle of thousands upon thousands of people picking up and swapping homes in a single day.

For months before Moving Day, Americans prepared for the occasion. Tenants gave notice to their landlords or received word of the new rent. Then followed a frenzied period of house hunting as people, generally women, scouted for a new place to live that would, in some respect, improve upon the old. “They want more room, or they want as much room for less rent, or they want a better location, or they want some convenience not heretofore enjoyed,” The Topeka Daily Capital summarized. These were months of general anticipation; cities and towns were alive with excitement.

[Jerusalem Demsas: The right to move is under attack]

Early on the day itself, people commenced moving everything they owned down to the street corners in great piles of barrels and crates and carpetbags, vacating houses and apartments before the new renters arrived. “Be out at 12 you must, for another family are on your heels, and Thermopylae was a very tame pass compared with the excitement which rises when two families meet in the same hall,” a Brooklyn minister warned. The carmen, driving their wagons and drays through the narrow roads, charged extortionate rates, lashing mattresses and furnishings atop heaps of other goods and careening through the streets to complete as many runs as they could before nightfall. Treasure hunters picked through detritus in the gutters. Utility companies scrambled to register all the changes. Dusk found families that had made local moves settling into their new home, unpacking belongings, and meeting the neighbors.

In St. Louis, the publisher of a city directory estimated in 1906 that over a five-year span, only one in five local families had remained at the same address. “Many private families make it a point to move every year,” The Daily Republican of Wilmington, Delaware, reported in 1882. Moving Day was nothing short of “a religious observance,” the humorist Mortimer Thomson wrote in 1857. “The individual who does not move on the first of May is looked upon … as a heretic and a dangerous man.”

Moving Day was, The Times-Democrat of New Orleans attested, “an essentially American institution.” Europeans might move “in a sober, quiet, old-world way, once in a decade or thereabout,” the paper explained, but not annually, in the “excessive energetic manner of the nomadic, roving American.” European visitors made a point of witnessing the peculiar ritual and included accounts of carts flying up and down the streets in their travelogs.

For some, Moving Day meant trauma and dislocation. In tightening markets, landlords seized the opportunity to jack up rents. But in most places and for most people, Moving Day was an opportunity. The housing stock was rapidly expanding. You could spot the approach of the holiday, a Milwaukee paper explained, by the sight of new buildings being rushed to completion and old houses being renovated and restored. As wealthier renters snapped up the newest properties to come to market, less affluent renters grabbed the units they vacated in a chain of moves that left almost all tenants better off. Landlords faced the ruinous prospect of extended vacancies if they couldn’t fill their units on Moving Day. Tenants used their leverage to demand repairs and upgrades to their house or apartment, or to bargain for lower rent.

The habit of annual moves was not confined to the poor or the working class. Nor was it confined to local relocations. Americans moved to new territories, thriving towns, and rapidly growing cities, driven forward by hope. “That people should move so often in this city, is generally a matter of their own volition,” the journalist and social reformer Lydia Maria Child wrote of New York. “Aspirations after the infinite,” she added tartly, “lead them to perpetual change, in the restless hope of finding something better and better still.” It’s not a bad summary of the American dream.

What lubricated all of this movement was not an abundance of space but rather a desperate eagerness to put space to better use. The viability of their communities, Americans believed, rested on their capacity to attract merchants and manufacturers and, above all, residents. Land use was regulated as early as the colonial era, but the rules were sparse, and written to maximize development. A fallow field or an abandoned mine could be seized; a vacant lot could draw a stiff fine. Noxious businesses, such as tanneries and distilleries, were consigned to the margins, for fear that they would deter construction in the center. The goal was growth.

The nation’s push westward in the 1800s created new opportunities, and Americans moved toward them—dispossessing Native peoples of their land—but westward migration was never the whole story, or even most of it. The rate of migration within the East was even higher, as Americans drained away from farms and into market towns, county seats, and teeming industrial cities. There were few rules about what could be constructed on private property, and a diverse array of buildings sprang up to meet demand. A new arrival might rent a room in a private home, boardinghouse, tenement, residential hotel, or bachelors-only apartment building. Some of these structures were garish, or stuck out from their surroundings like tall weeds. Reformers were eager to manage the chaos, and cities began to adopt more extensive building codes, aimed at reducing the risk of fire and protecting the health of residents. But old buildings continually yielded to newer ones, as neighborhoods climbed higher to meet demand; the first townhouse on a block of freestanding homes might, a couple of decades later, be the last remaining townhouse sandwiched between apartment buildings.

So long as speculators erected new buildings, so long as aging houses were turned over to the rental market or split up into flats, so long as immigrant entrepreneurs built new tenements, people could reasonably expect to find a new home each year that in some way exceeded their old. And through the 19th century and into the early decades of the 20th, the supply of homes steadily expanded.

Javier Jaén

Americans of that era tended to look at houses the way Americans today look at cars or iPhones—as useful contrivances that nevertheless lose their value quickly and are prone to rapid technological obsolescence. Every year, newly constructed and freshly renovated homes offered wonders and marvels: water that ran out of taps, cold and then hot; indoor plumbing and flush toilets and connections to sewer lines; gas lighting, and then electric; showers and bathtubs; ranges and stoves; steam heating. Factories created new materials and cranked out hinges, doorknobs, hooks, wooden trim, and railings in a dizzying variety of styles. One decade’s prohibitive luxury was the next’s affordable convenience and the third’s absolute necessity. A home was less a long-term investment—most people leased—than a consumer good, to be enjoyed until the next model came within reach.

The cultural implications of an always-on-the-move society were profound, and perhaps counterintuitive. As they observed the nomadic style of American life, some critics worried that the constantly shifting population would produce an atomized society, leaving people unable to develop strong ties, invest in local institutions, maintain democratic government, or build warm communities. In fact, that got the relationship between mobility and community precisely backward. Over the course of the 19th century and well into the 20th, Americans formed and participated in a remarkable array of groups, clubs, and associations. Religious life thrived. Democracy expanded. Communities flourished.

The key to vibrant communities, it turns out, is the exercise of choice. Left to their own devices, most people will stick to ingrained habits, to familiar circles of friends, to accustomed places. When people move from one community to another, though, they leave behind their old job, connections, identity, and seek out new ones. They force themselves to go meet their neighbors, or to show up at a new church on Sunday, despite the awkwardness. American individualism didn’t mean that people were disconnected from one another; it meant that they constructed their own individual identity by actively choosing the communities to which they would belong.

[Jacob Anbinder: The pandemic disproved urban progressives’ theory about gentrification]

All of this individual movement added up to a long, grand social experiment—a radical reinvention of what society could be. In the European lands that many immigrants had come from, successive generations lived in the same towns, inhabited the same houses, plied the same trades, and farmed the same land. Experience had taught them that admitting new members left a community with less to go around, so they treated outsiders with suspicion and hostility. They learned that rifts produced lasting bitterness, so they prioritized consensus and conformity. Village life placed the communal above the individual, tradition ahead of innovation, insularity before acceptance.

But when the earliest settlers crossed the Atlantic, they left behind their assumptions. They had moved once, so they should be able to move again. The Puritans soon codified into law the right to leave the Massachusetts Bay Colony, likely the first time anywhere in the world that this freedom was put into writing and defined as a fundamental right. Two centuries later, as the midwestern territories competed to attract residents, they would add a complementary freedom, the right to arrive—and to stay, without the need to secure the formal consent of the community. Together, these revolutionary rights conferred on Americans a new freedom to move, enabling the American story.

Mobility was not always uncontested, of course. Waves of immigrants faced discrimination from those who had come only slightly before, turned away from communities just because they were Irish, or Italian, or Jewish. Laws excluded the Chinese, and vigilantes hounded them from their homes. Women seldom enjoyed the full privilege of mobility, constrained by social strictures, legal barriers, and physical dangers. And even after the end of slavery, Black Americans had to fight at every turn to move around, and toward opportunity, in the face of segregation and racist violence. But by the end of the 19th century, mobility was a deeply ingrained habit throughout the United States.

That habit has now been lost, and the toll is enormous. By one estimate, the decline in mobility is costing the American economy nearly $2 trillion each year in lost productivity. The personal costs may be even greater, albeit sometimes harder to recognize. Residential relocation is like physical exercise in this way: Whether you’re sitting on a couch or ensconced in a home, you’re unlikely to identify inertia as the underlying source of your problems. It’s only when you get up that the benefits of moving around become clear. People who have recently changed residences report experiencing more supportive relationships and feeling more optimism, greater sense of purpose, and increased self-respect. Those who want to move and cannot, by contrast, become more cynical and less satisfied with their lives. And Americans are shifting from that first category to the second: Since 1970, the likelihood that someone who expects to move in the next few years will successfully follow through on that ambition has fallen by almost half.

Americans of previous generations would be shocked by our stagnation. The inclination to keep moving was long the defining feature of the American character. And yet today, we’re stuck. What went wrong?

II. Who Killed American Mobility?

Blame Jane Jacobs. American mobility has been slowly strangled by generations of reformers, seeking to reassert control over their neighborhoods and their neighbors. And Jacobs, the much-celebrated urbanist who died in 2006, played a pivotal role.

In 1947, when Jacobs and her husband, Robert, moved to their new home in Manhattan’s West Village, the area was still filled with immigrants and their children, with people constantly moving in and moving out. Before the Jacobses arrived at 555 Hudson Street, the building had been rented by an immigrant named Rudolph Hechler, who lived with his family above the store they operated. A large sign read FOUNTAIN SERVICE—SODA—CANDY, and a cheerful awning added cigars and toys to the list of promised delights. Hechler had come to the U.S. from Austrian Galicia when he was 13, and spent much of his life working in the garment industry, chasing the American dream. He moved between apartments and neighborhoods until he had finally saved enough to move his family from the Bronx to the West Village and open his own shop.

Bob and Jane were different. They were young, urban professionals, Bob an architect and Jane a writer for a State Department magazine. And they came to stay. With dual incomes and no kids, they were able to put down $7,000 in cash to purchase a house, placing them among the scarcely 1 percent of families in all of Greenwich Village who owned their home.

Instead of finding a new tenant for the storefront, the Jacobses ripped it out, transforming their building into a single-family home. They cleared the bricks from the lot behind the house, turning it into a fenced-in garden. On the first floor, they installed a modern kitchen, dining room, and living room, with French doors opening onto the backyard. “The front of No. 555,” a preservation report later noted, “was rebuilt in 1950 at considerable expense, using metal sash and two-colored brick to complete the horizontality of the wide windows. It retains no vestige of its original appearance.” (The new facade, the report concluded, had been “badly remodeled,” and was “completely out of character” with the neighborhood.)

That Jacobs would later celebrate the importance of mixed-use spaces to urban vitality, drawing a vivid portrait of the remaining shops on her street, presents no small irony. But in doing as she pleased with the property she had purchased, she was only upholding a long American tradition. The larger irony involves what Jacobs did next. Although she is widely remembered as a keen-eyed advocate for lively and livable cities, her primary legacy was to stultify them—ensuring that no one else could freely make changes as she had and, most important, ruling out the replacement of existing buildings with larger structures that could make room for upward strivers.

[From the August 2019 issue: The economist who would fix the American dream]

Jacobs arrived in the West Village just as many Americans were abandoning dense, urban neighborhoods for the attractions of suburbia. For decades, city officials and reformers had worried about the spread of urban blight. They looked at the crowding, chaos, and confusion of immigrant neighborhoods like the West Village with horror. They wanted to sweep away neighborhoods that grew and decayed organically and replace them with carefully planned blocks. Urban planners sought to provide families with affordable homes, consolidate the jumble of corner stores into supermarkets, and keep offices at a distance. Everything would be rational, everything modern. They wanted to take the rich stew of urban life and separate out its components like a toddler’s dinner—the peas to one quadrant, the carrots to another, the chicken to a third—safely removed from direct contact.

In 1916, the year Jacobs was born, New York City began an ambitious effort to achieve this sort of separation: enacting the first comprehensive zoning code in the United States. By the time Jacobs moved there almost two decades later, the once-radical scheme of zoning, with sections of the city separated out for different uses, seemed less a startling change than a natural feature of the city’s environment. Urban planners had hailed it as a cure for poverty and blight; it was supposed to ensure a better future for the city. But zoning failed to produce these benefits, instead limiting the ability of New York and like-minded cities to adapt to evolving needs. Officials soon embraced a more radical scheme of urban renewal: bulldozing old, dense neighborhoods in the name of slum clearance. And Jacobs, whatever her other sins, had the courage to stand up and demand that it stop.

From her renovated home on Hudson Street, Jacobs fell in love with the city as it was—not the city as urban planners dreamed it might be. She saw shopkeepers greeting customers and schoolchildren buying candy. She watched her neighbor wheeling his handcart, making laundry deliveries to customers, in what she later described as an “intricate sidewalk ballet.” She realized that many of the things professional planners hated about cities were precisely what most benefited their residents.

And so Jacobs sat down before her Remington and pounded out The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her book, published in 1961, took aim at urban renewal and all that it destroyed in the name of progress. When, that same year, Jacobs learned that the city intended to designate her own neighborhood for renewal, she rallied a small group of residents to its defense. They wrote letters and showed up at hearings and plastered the neighborhood with flyers, creating the illusion of mass opposition. And it worked. Jacobs and her collaborators were among the first residents of a city neighborhood to successfully block an urban-renewal scheme. Jacobs’s book—its brilliantly observed account of urban life, its adages and conjectures—paired with her success as an activist to catapult her to fame. She became the apostle of urbanism, and eager disciples sought her out to learn how they might defend their own neighborhood.

But in halting the ravages of clearance, Jacobs advanced a different problem: stasis. For centuries, the built form of the West Village had continually evolved. Old buildings were torn down and larger structures were erected in their place. The three-story houses to one side of Jacobs’s, at 553 and 551 Hudson, which had once held small businesses of their own, had been bought by a developer in 1900 and replaced with a six-story apartment building. Zoning had already begun to put some limits on this evolution but had not stopped it.

Jacobs’s activism blocked efforts to add any more buildings like the one next to her house. Other three-story houses could no longer be consolidated and built up into six-story apartment blocks; the existing six-story walk-ups couldn’t be turned into 12-story elevator buildings. Such development would change the physical appearance of the neighborhood, and also risk displacing current residents or small businesses—eventualities to which Jacobs was fundamentally hostile. Before, the neighborhood had always grown to accommodate demand, to make room for new arrivals. Now it froze.

At an intellectual level, Jacobs understood that simply preserving historic buildings cannot preserve a neighborhood’s character; she warned that zoning should not seek “to freeze conditions and uses as they stand. That would be death.” A neighborhood is defined by its residents and their interactions, as Jacobs herself so eloquently argued, and it continually evolves. It bears the same relation to its buildings as does a lobster to its shell, periodically molting and then constructing a new, larger shell to accommodate its growth. But Jacobs, charmed by this particular lobster she’d discovered, ended up insisting that it keep its current shell forever.

To stave off change, Jacobs and her allies asserted a proprietary right to control their neighborhood. It belonged, they argued, to those who were already there, and it should be up to them to decide who would get to join them. Over the decades that followed, that idea would take hold throughout the United States. A nation that had grown diverse and prosperous by allowing people to choose their communities would instead empower communities to choose their people.

Javier Jaén

Jacobs’s book marked a shift in American attitudes. Where civic boosters once sketched fantastical visions of future development, competing to lure migrants their way, by the 1960s they had begun to hunker down and focus on preserving what they had against the threat of what the architectural critic Lewis Mumford called the “disease of growth.” State legislatures had authorized local governments to regulate land use at the beginning of the 20th century, but now activists pressed for even more local control—for what the writer Calvin Trillin has called “neighborhoodism.” They were justifiably concerned that unrestrained growth was degrading the environment, displacing residents, and leveling historic structures. More than that, they were revolting against the power of Big Government and Big Business, and trying to restore a focus on the public interest. They demanded that permitting processes consider more fully the consequences of growth, mandating an increasing number of reviews, hearings, and reports.

But in practice, the new processes turned out to be profoundly antidemocratic, allowing affluent communities to exclude new residents. More permitting requirements meant more opportunities for legal action. Even individual opponents of new projects had only to win their lawsuits, or at least spend long enough losing them, to deter development.

The preservation of the West Village itself, long celebrated as a triumph of local democracy, was in fact an early case study in this new form of vetocracy. What saved it from being bulldozed like other working-class areas in Manhattan was not the vitality of its streetfronts. Instead, it was saved because the displacement of working-class immigrants by college-educated professionals was already further along than the urban planners had appreciated when they’d designated it a slum. The night after the first public meeting of the Committee to Save the West Village in 1961, the activists reconvened in the apartment of a recent arrival who conducted market research for a living. He showed them how to survey residents to compile a demographic profile of the area. Jane’s husband, Bob, the architect, began looking at the condition of the existing buildings. Carey Vennema, who’d graduated from NYU Law School a few years before, began researching tax records. A sound engineer compared recordings he took in the West Village with those in affluent neighborhoods. This small group of professionals leveraged their training and expertise to mount a challenge to the planning process—a form of bureaucratic warfare unavailable to the great majority of Americans.

Their success in limiting new housing in the West Village hasn’t just kept the neighborhood from expanding; it’s helped empty it out. The neighborhood that Jacobs fought to preserve in the 1960s was already shrinking. Jacobs celebrated the fact that her neighborhood’s population, which peaked at 6,500 in 1910, had dropped to just 2,500 by 1950. This represented, she argued, “unslumming”—what today we would call gentrification. As households more than doubled the space they occupied, amid rising standards of living, the neighborhood would have needed to replace its existing townhouses with apartment buildings that were at least twice as tall, just to maintain its population. Instead, the neighborhood kept its townhouses and lost most of its population. Despite her strident insistence that not a sparrow be displaced from the Village of the ’60s, Jacobs cast the displacement of a dynamic working-class community of immigrant renters in the 1950s by a stable, gentrified population of professional-class homeowners as a triumph. “The key link in a perpetual slum is that too many people move out of it too fast—and in the meantime dream of getting out,” she wrote. Jacobs prized stability over mobility, preferring public order over the messiness of dynamism.

Yet in one respect, preservation proved more lethal to the texture of the community than redevelopment. Jacobs bought her home for $7,000 in 1947, rehabilitated it, and sold it 24 years later for $45,000. “Whenever I’m here,” Jacobs told The New Yorker in 2004, “I go back to look at our house, 555 Hudson Street, and I know that I could never afford it now.” Five years after that interview, it sold again, for $3.3 million; today, the city assesses it at $6.6 million. If you could scrape together the down payment at that price, your monthly mortgage payment would be—even adjusted for inflation—about 90 times what the Hechlers paid each month to live in the same building.

Jane Jacobs, of course, is not the only suspect in the death of American mobility; there are many others. People have always been most mobile while they’re relatively young, and the country is aging; the median American was just 16 years old in 1800 and 28 in 1970, but is nearly 39 today. The rise in two-career households might have made relocation more difficult. The prevalence of joint custody makes it harder for members of divorced couples to move. More Americans own their home, and renters have always been more mobile. Some Americans, perhaps, have simply grown more successful at locating jobs and communities that meet their needs, reducing their impulse to move someplace else. Some are relying on remote work to stay where they are.

But none of these answers can possibly explain the broad, persistent decline in geographic mobility. The country may be older, but the drop in mobility has been particularly steep among younger Americans. Two-earner households may be less mobile, but their mobility has declined in tandem with that of other groups. Mobility is down not just among homeowners but also among renters, and its decline predates the rise of remote work. And there is little to suggest that staying put over the past half a century has left Americans more satisfied with their lives.

Jacobs’s activism capped a century of dramatic legal change that eroded the freedom to move. Zoning may have been adopted, eventually, by well-meaning urban planners, but the process began in 1885 in Modesto, California, where bigoted local officials were looking for a tool to push out Chinese residents. The federal courts would not allow them to segregate their city by race, but they hit on a workaround, confining laundries—whose proprietors were overwhelmingly Chinese and generally lived in their shops—to the city’s Chinatown. Over the ensuing decades, other cities embraced the approach, discovering that segregating land by its uses and the size of the buildings it could hold was a potent means of segregating populations by race, ethnicity, and income. New York, for example, first adopted zoning in part to push Jewish garment workers down fashionable Fifth Avenue and back into the Lower East Side. As zoning proliferated, it was put to a wide variety of uses, some laudable and others execrable. The housing programs of the New Deal then spread the system nationally, by limiting federal loans only to those jurisdictions that had put in place tight zoning rules and racially restrictive covenants.

But zoning alone was not enough to halt American mobility, even if it did serve to widen inequalities. Zoning had introduced a new legal reality: Putting up any housing now required government approval. It was progressives like Jacobs who then exploited this reality, creating a new set of legal tools, beginning around 1970, for anyone with sufficient time, money, and patience to challenge government decisions in court, handing neighbors an effective veto over housing approval.

Not every place in America is having its growth choked off by zoning, or by the weaponization of environmental reviews or historic-preservation laws. The opposition to mobility appears concentrated in progressive jurisdictions; one study of California found that when the share of liberal votes in a city increased by 10 points, the housing permits it issued declined by 30 percent. The trouble is that in the contemporary United States, the greatest economic opportunities are heavily concentrated in blue jurisdictions, which have made their housing prohibitively expensive. So instead of moving toward opportunity, for the first time in our history, Americans are moving away from it—migrating toward the red states that still allow housing to be built, where they can still afford to live.

[M. Nolan Gray: Cancel zoning]

It is hard to overstate how much is lost when people can no longer choose to move toward opportunity. Social-science research suggests that the single most important decision you can make about your children’s future is not what you name them, or how you educate them, or what extracurriculars you enroll them in—it’s where you raise them. But if Americans cannot afford to move to the places with growing industries and high-paying jobs, or if they can’t switch to a neighborhood with safer streets and better schools, and instead remain stuck where they are, then their children will see their own prospects decline.

Not far from where I live, in Washington, D.C., two lawn signs sit side by side on a neatly manicured lawn. One proclaims NO MATTER WHERE YOU ARE FROM, WE’RE GLAD YOU’RE OUR NEIGHBOR, in Spanish, English, and Arabic. The other reads SAY NO, urging residents to oppose the construction of an apartment building that would house the new neighbors the other sign purports to welcome. Whatever its theoretical aspirations, in practice, progressivism has produced a potent strain of NIMBYism, a defense of communities in their current form against those who might wish to join them. Mobility is what made this country prosperous and pluralistic, diverse and dynamic. Now progressives are destroying the very force that produced the values they claim to cherish.

III. Building a Way Out

In December, the Census Bureau reported that the United States had set a dismal new record: The percentage of Americans who had moved in the previous year was at an all-time low. That same month, the economist Jed Kolko calculated that geographic inequality—the gap in average incomes between the richer and poorer parts of the country—had reached an all-time high. The loss of American mobility is a genuine national crisis. If it is less visible than the opioid epidemic or mounting political extremism, it is no less urgent. In fact, the despair it fosters is fueling these and other crises, as Americans lose the chance to build the best possible lives for themselves and their children.

Even partial analyses of immobility’s costs yield staggering results. Consider, for instance, just the economic growth that has been lost by preventing people from moving to where they would be most productive. The economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti recently imagined a world of perfect mobility, in which the three most productive U.S. metropolitan areas—New York, San Francisco, and San Jose—had constructed enough homes since 1964 to accommodate everyone who stood to gain by moving there. That alone, they calculated, would have boosted GDP by about $2 trillion by 2009, or enough to put an extra $8,775 into the pocket of every American worker each year. It’s a rough estimate, but it gives a sense of the scale of the distortions we have introduced, and the price we are each paying for them.

But the social costs are arguably even greater than the economic ones. Among academics, the claim that housing regulations have widened inequality is neither novel nor controversial. The economists Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag offer an illustration: If a lawyer moved from the Deep South to New York City, he would see his net income go up by about 39 percent, after adjusting for housing costs—the same as it would have done back in 1960. If a janitor made the same move in 1960, he’d have done even better, gaining 70 percent more income. But by 2017, his gains in pay would have been outstripped by housing costs, leaving him 7 percent worse off. Working-class Americans once had the most to gain by moving. Today, the gains are largely available only to the affluent.

Many of the country’s more dynamic cities, along with the suburbs around them, have continued to wall themselves off in recent years, using any means available. In Manhattan, for instance, 27 percent of all lots are now in historic districts or are otherwise landmarked, predominantly in the borough’s most affluent areas. And once a neighborhood in these areas is designated historic, new construction within it drops dramatically below the city’s already grossly inadequate rate. In D.C., where nearly 19 percent of buildings are similarly protected, residents of the well-off Cleveland Park neighborhood once stopped the construction of an apartment building by getting the old Park and Shop on which it was going to be built designated as historic; it was one of the first examples of strip-mall architecture in the country, the research of one enterprising resident revealed.

The good news is that addressing this crisis of mobility doesn’t depend on your moving anywhere, if you’d rather stay where you are. It doesn’t depend on your surrendering your single-family home, if you’re lucky enough to have one. You can keep your lawn, your driveway, your garden. Solving crises often requires great sacrifice. But the simplest solution to this one promises to leave everyone better off. All you have to do is make room for some new neighbors—maybe even new friends—to join you, by allowing other people to build new housing on their own property. Americans are generally skeptical of the hassles of development and tend to focus on the downsides of change in their neighborhood. But if you ask them about the benefits—whether they’d allow construction in their neighborhood if it meant letting people live closer to jobs and schools and family members—they suddenly become overwhelmingly supportive of the idea.

If we want a nation that offers its people upward mobility, entrepreneurial innovation, increasing equality, vibrant community, democratic participation, and pluralistic diversity, then we need to build it. I mean that quite literally. We need to build it. And that will require progressives, who constitute overwhelming political majorities in almost all of America’s most prosperous and productive areas, to embrace the strain of their political tradition that emphasizes inclusion and equality.

There are at least some signs that this message is taking root. California has enacted a series of legislative reforms aimed at paring back local zoning regulations. Cities across the country are banning zoning that restricts neighborhoods to single-family homes. Where older environmental activists rallied to block any new construction, a new generation of environmentalists sees building new housing near public transit as an essential tool in the fight against climate change. And national politicians have started to talk about our affordable-housing crisis.

These changes are encouraging, but insufficient. And sometimes the solutions on offer solve the wrong problem: Building subsidized housing in a place where land is cheap because jobs are scarce will help with affordability, but only worsen immobility.

Any serious effort to restore mobility should follow three simple principles. The first is consistency. Rules that apply uniformly across a city will tend to produce neighborhoods with diverse populations and uses, while providing equitable protections to residents. Rules that are tailored to the desires of specific neighborhoods will tend, over time, to concentrate less desirable land uses and more affordable housing in poorer areas. Just as the federal government once used its power as a housing lender to force local jurisdictions to adopt zoning laws, it could now do the same to reform those laws, encouraging states to limit the discretion of local authorities.

[From the November 1961 issue: “Moving Day,” a short story]

The second principle is tolerance. Organic growth is messy and unpredictable. Giving Americans the freedom to live where they want requires tolerating the choices made by others, even if we think the buildings they erect are tasteless, or the apartments too small, or the duplexes out of place. Tastes evolve, as do neighborhoods. The places that thrive over the long term are those that empower people to make their own decisions, and to build and adapt structures to suit their needs.

The third principle is abundance. The best way to solve a supply crunch is to add supply—lots of it, and in places that are attractive and growing, so that housing becomes a springboard, launching people forward rather than holding them back.

How much housing do we need? For 50 years, we’ve been falling behind demand. The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation estimates that it would take another 3.7 million units just to adequately house our current population, with the shortfall concentrated among starter homes. Treat that as the lower bound. The trouble is, most existing units are located where regulation is loose and land is cheap, not in the places richest in opportunity; a considerable amount of the nation’s housing is in the wrong place. Another recent estimate that tries to account for that, by the economists Kevin Corinth and Hugo Dante, puts the tally above 20 million. And even that might be too low.

Here’s another way to think about what we really need: As things stand, roughly 20 percent of American workers relocate from one metropolitan area to another over the course of a decade. If all the moves that would happen anyway in the next 10 years brought people to the most prosperous regions, where productivity is highest—places like New York and the Bay Area, but also Austin and northwestern Arkansas—we’d have to add some 30 million new units, or 3 million a year. That’s, perhaps, an upper bound. It’s an ambitious target, but at roughly double our current pace, it’s also an attainable one.

These three principles—consistency, tolerance, and abundance—can help restore American mobility. Federal guidelines can make the environment more amenable, but the solutions by and large cannot come from central planning; states and cities and towns will need to reform their rules and processes to allow the housing supply to grow where people want to build. The goal of policy makers, in any case, shouldn’t be to move Americans to any particular place, or to any particular style of living. They should instead aim to make it easier for Americans to move wherever they would like—to make it equally easy to build wherever Americans’ hopes and desires alight.

That would return agency to people, allowing them to pursue opportunity wherever they might find it and to choose the housing that works best for them. For some, that might mean reviving faded towns; for others, it might mean planting new ones. Whatever level of education they have attained, whatever city or region they happen to have been born in, whatever occupation they pursue, individuals—janitors and attorneys alike—should be able to make their own choices.

The genius of the American system was never that its leaders knew what was coming next, but rather that they allowed individual people to decide things for themselves, so that they might collectively make the future.

This article is adapted from Yoni Appelbaum’s new book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. It appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Stuck In Place.”

In Havana, Cubans celebrated life and death with a mock funeral for 77-year-old Ricardo "Pachencho" Herrera, a retired mechanic

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There are two Chicago neighborhoods that are, on the surface, quite similar. They are both more than 90 percent Black; the median age of both is roughly 38. About the same share of people have college degrees, and the median income of both is roughly $39,000.

But one experiences about twice as many shootings per capita as the other.

The University of Chicago economist Jens Ludwig opens his forthcoming book, Unforgiving Places, by describing the neighboring places of Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore, both minutes away from the elite university where he teaches. Ludwig’s argument begins by reframing the problem of gun violence away from the demoralizing story of American exceptionalism and toward the more granular variation that differs state by state, city by city, and yes, block by block.

“Whatever you believe about the causes of gun violence in America, those beliefs almost surely fail to explain why Greater Grand Crossing would be so much more of a violent place than South Shore,” Ludwig writes. “How, in a city and a country where guns are everywhere, does gun violence occur so unevenly—even across such short distances, in this case literally right across the street?”

Talking about gun crime almost always turns into talking about gun-control legislation, a debate that has been happening my entire life and I’m sure will continue past my death. But on today’s episode of Good on Paper, Ludwig and I spend little time on that topic, focusing instead on policy levers that could reduce gun violence but don’t require national gun-control legislation.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: In 2022, Louisiana had the second-highest rate of gun deaths in the country. I’m just back from a reporting trip to the Lake Charles area, and I had a few people remark rather pointedly to me that my home of Washington, D.C., is a violent place, seemingly unaware that D.C. has had a significantly lower rate of gun deaths than Louisiana for many years now.

Why do some places see higher rates of gun violence than others? It’s an incredibly important question to answer rigorously. Homicide is a leading cause of death for young adults, and the vast majority of those homicides happen with guns. But this is a topic where the politics rarely line up with actionable solutions.

After the COVID-19 crime wave, politicians have scrambled as they place crime at the top of the agenda again and are searching for public-policy tools to address violence in their communities.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at the Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. My guest today is the economist Jens Ludwig, from the University of Chicago, who has spent his career studying the economics of crime. He has a book coming out in a few months called Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of Gun Violence.

Jens and I talk about the classic explanations for why gun violence happens in some places and not others. He pushes back against the classic right-wing explanation that the problem is bad people and the classic left-wing argument that solving the problem of gun violence requires ending mass social inequalities first.

One note about the show: We’re going to begin adding the studies and articles and books we reference in the show notes, so you can easily access them for further reading. A link to Jens’ book will be there, too, if you’d like to investigate his argument further.

Okay. Jens, welcome to the show.

[Music]

Jens Ludwig: Thanks so much for having me. It’s such an honor to be here.

Demsas: Jens, you have a book coming out in April called Unforgiving Places. What’s it about? What are you arguing?

Ludwig: The book basically makes two arguments. One argument is that we’re despairing about the problem of gun violence because we’ve thought about it as just all being about gun control, and I think that’s not true. I think the problem of gun violence in America is partly about guns, and it’s partly about violent behavior. And if we can’t do anything about the guns, we can at least try and do something about the violent behavior. And the experiences of L.A. and New York over the last 30 years show us that there’s real progress that you can make there.

And then I think the other core argument of the book is that violent behavior is not what we’ve thought. I think most people have thought of violent behavior in America as being about thoughtful, deliberate action that leads you to focus on incentives, like bigger sticks or more enticing carrots. And in fact, I think most shootings in America are instead fast-thinking, reactive—it stems from arguments. And that leads us away from relying exclusively on incentives and towards a very different type of policy that we just haven’t been talking about or thinking about.

Demsas: When I was reading your book, there was a stat that just has been rattling around in my brain since I read it. You write that shootings account for fewer than 1 percent of all crimes but nearly 70 percent of the total social harm of crime. What does that mean? And how is that even measured?

Ludwig: Yeah. So the way that economists think about that sort of thing is very analogous to how environmental economists think about environmental harm. If you go back to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska a million years ago, there’s the tangible cost of cleaning up the bay or whatever it is, and then there’s the sort of social costs that don’t show up on any sort of budget spreadsheet anywhere. That’s the “harm to this pristine place now being ruined forever” kind of thing.

And so environmental economists have come up with ways of quantifying those sorts of intangible costs. And we can use the same sort of approach to measure the harm for crime as well. It basically comes down to what people are willing to pay to avoid exposure to different types of crime.

And so what you can see is people really don’t like disorder. They really don’t like having their bicycle stolen, their car stolen. I lived in cities for the last 30 years. I’ve had almost every sort of property crime that you can imagine happen to me. But the thing that people really, really are petrified about is staring down the barrel of a gun. And I can tell you that from firsthand experience. I was held up at gunpoint myself on the South Side of Chicago, going to pick up my older daughter from her piano lesson about five years ago.

My University of Chicago colleague Steve Levitt did a study where he showed that every serious crime that happens in a city reduces the city’s population on net by one person—so fewer people moving in, more people moving out. Every murder that happens in a city—the overwhelming majority of murders in the United States, unfortunately, are committed with guns—every murder that happens in a city reduces the city’s population by 70 people. And I think that’s another way to sort of see exactly how much the gun-violence problem in America is driving the crime problem.

Demsas: I also think it’s just remarkable to really think about this in perspective of how much effort we spend in trying to eliminate certain types of crime. I mean, if 70 percent of total social harm is shootings, then the vast majority of our efforts should just be focused on guns. And property crime should take a backseat, all this sort of thing. Intuitively, we understand that, obviously, murder is worse than other forms of crime, but I think the degree to which that is driving America’s violence problem and crime problem and the harms that ricochet out into communities is, I think, not well understood.

Ludwig: Yeah, I one million percent agree. And I think it also sort of helps you see a path to a criminal-justice system, a law-enforcement system that kind of sidesteps a lot of the current political fights that we’re having. I think everybody agrees that gun violence is a hugely serious problem, that we should be holding people accountable for this.

Even the mayor of Chicago, who I think within the political distribution is one of the more progressive elected leaders in the United States—he’s going around talking about the need to improve the odds that shooters get arrested and wind up behind bars. And so I think this much stronger focus on gun violence would be a way to concentrate everything on the thing that the American public really cares the most about. It sidesteps a lot of the fraught political debates about how we do enforcement over lots of other things that the public doesn’t like, but it’s not the first-order thing that they’re worried about.

Demsas: So there’s familiar pattern that I think most people are aware of when it comes to the gun-policy conversation in the United States, and it’s: There is a tragic mass shooting—maybe at a school, maybe at a nightclub—and then there’s this intense rallying to pass gun legislation.

And economists have quantified this. There’s a study that showed that a mass shooting leads to a 15 percent increase in the number of firearm bills introduced within a state the year following that shooting. Interestingly, in states with Republican-controlled legislatures, those are often laws that loosen gun restrictions. But even when looking at Democrat-controlled legislatures and laws that tighten gun restrictions, studies often struggle to find significant impact of these laws on reducing gun violence, reducing deaths, reducing mass shootings.

In your book, you also seem kind of pessimistic about the potential for gun legislation to have a large impact on reducing gun deaths. Why is that?

Ludwig: Yeah. Let me respond in two ways. The first is: Federal gun laws set a floor, not a ceiling, on what cities and states can do. And so lots of cities and states around the country, including my home city of Chicago, have enacted gun laws that are more restrictive than what you have under the national law. And the problem with that is that we live in a country with open city and state borders. So what Gary, Indiana, is doing about air quality affects the South Side of Chicago, and vice versa, right?

And in the same way, like, my family for the last 18 years has lived in Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago. Our favorite ice-cream place in the area is Dairy Belle in Hammond, Indiana. So we spend 20 minutes driving down there every summer, like, way too often. And when we come back from Indiana into Chicago, nobody stops us at the city border to check what we have in our trunk.

And when you look at where the crime guns are coming from in Chicago, almost none of them come from a gun store in Chicago. They come from places like, you know—there are gun stores quite close to Dairy Belle in Indiana that are big sources of crime guns in the city. So I think the way that you want to be thinking about gun regulation, I think, is very analogous to how you would do something like regulate air quality. And that’s to think about regulation at the national level in a world in which you’ve got what an economist would call lots of externalities across jurisdictions in their own laws.

Demsas: But even federal gun-control legislation has often felt, at least from my overview of the economics literature, like it hasn’t had a massive impact, whether it’s assault-weapons legislation or other forms of gun-control legislation that’s passed over the past few decades. Is that just a reflection of the fact that these laws are pretty modest in what they’re attempting to do? Or does that indicate that we can’t really attack this problem legislatively?

Ludwig: What I would say is: Most of the national gun laws that we’ve enacted in the United States are very modest, as you said. I think the biggest problem with the gun laws that we have in the United States is: Most of the laws regulating gun acquisition—you know, gun sales—only apply to gun sales that are, basically, carried out by a licensed gun dealer.

And that’s something like 50 or 60 percent of all gun sales in the U.S. And the other 40 percent are almost completely unregulated under federal law. Some states try and regulate that, but that’s not a loophole—that’s like a chasm that you can drive a truck through. And you know, when you look at where the guns used in crime come from, you wouldn’t be surprised to see that’s the most important source of crime guns that you see in Chicago and other cities around the country.

But you know, I think the difficulty of cities and states regulating their way out of the gun-violence problem, and the difficulty of substantially changing national gun laws, has led a lot of people to conclude that gun violence in America is a hopeless problem, because we can see that the gun-control politics are stuck.

So one way that I’ve come to think about this is that that’s too pessimistic a view. And the reason for that is that gun violence is not just about guns; it’s about guns plus violence. So it’s having lots of guns around, but also having people who use them to hurt other people. And if we can’t make much progress on the gun-access part of things, the good news is that there’s a second path to progress, which is to try and change the willingness of people to use guns to hurt other people.

We have something like 400 million guns in the United States, in a country of about 330 million people. And I think the existence proof that shows us that you really can make a huge difference on the gun-violence problem by figuring out how to control violence comes from the Los Angeles and New York City experience over the last 30 years.

So in 1991, the murder rate per 100,000 people in L.A. and New York was very similar to Chicago, actually, at that time. It was something like 30 per 100,000. So to give you a sense of what that means: In London, the murder rate is something like one or two per 100,000. So the United States is just totally off the charts. Almost all of those extra murders here are committed with firearms.

And in the 30-year period following that—so 1991 (the peak of the crack-cocaine epidemic), 30 years after that, up through 2019 (the last year before the pandemic)—the murder rate in Los Angeles declined by 80 percent; the murder rate in New York City declined by 90 percent. And those are cities that are swimming in the ocean of, you know, hundreds of millions of guns in America. And I think that speaks to a more optimistic take, that it is not a hopeless problem—not just that something can be done but that something substantial can be done.

Demsas: The other variation you point to in your book that is what really intrigued me is that Canada and Switzerland also have above-average rates of gun ownership, but they don’t have particularly high rates of murder in line with what we would expect if you just took America’s experience. And I think I had this kind of model in my head that it’s just like, If you have this many guns, there’s nothing you can do. Like, that’s the situation. There will be variations based on other things, like whether the economy is doing well or whether we’re incarcerating people or not, or how many cops there are on the street and what they’re doing. You’d still see variations in crime, but you would always have some kind of baseline level of criminality.

But I want to get to the core argument of your book, which I think is maybe encapsulated by a pretty provocative question on the back cover, which says, “What if everything we understood about gun violence was wrong?” This is a very bold claim, and I’m excited to explore it with you. But I think that the first part of that is unpacking what it is that you mean by “everything we understand about gun violence.” You lay out two competing theories that Americans hold about the causes of gun violence. One is the “root causes theory” and one is the “wickedness theory.” Can you just walk us through what those two are?

Ludwig: Yeah, the conventional wisdom in America right now says that violent behavior is thought through, right? So it’s either bad people who aren’t afraid of whatever the criminal-justice system is going to do to them, or it’s people in bad economic conditions who are desperate in doing whatever they need to do to survive. And both of those conventional wisdoms on the right and the left actually have something in common, which is: They think of gun violence as being sort of a deliberate behavior, and that leads us then to focus on incentives to solve the problem. You know, We need bigger sticks, if you’re on one side of the aisle, or if you’re on the other side of the aisle, We need more enticing carrots.

I think the thing that’s so striking is that it just doesn’t fit with what all of the data tell us gun violence in the United States is. Most shootings are not premeditated, and most shootings are not motivated by economic considerations. They’re not robbery. They’re not drug-selling turf. That’s all what psychologists would call “System 2” slow thinking.

Most shootings, instead, stem from arguments. They’re reactive, or what psychologists would call “System 1” thinking. And the fact that so many shootings stem from these sorts of in-the-moment conflicts that go sideways and end in a tragedy because someone’s got a gun, that helps explain why deterrence is imperfect. Someone acting very reactively is not thinking through a jail sentence. And it also helps explain why a social program that’s intended to reduce poverty—like give somebody a job, give somebody cash, whatever—that also isn’t solving the violence problem.

Demsas: I want to hold here a bit because I think this question, Are people making rational calculations? is both at the heart of a lot of economics and also the heart of what we’re going to talk about for the rest of this episode. And I accept that I do not think that I or anyone else is constantly doing a benefit-cost analysis about every action that I take, even if it is as important as whether you pull out a gun and shoot someone.

But I wonder whether that undersells the rationality that still exists, right? Because we know that deterrence is possible. We know that when we increase the certainty of capture—if you know you’re going to get caught for shoplifting, if you know that you’re going to go to jail if you shoot someone—that significantly decreases crime incidents. And what that indicates to me is that there is a level of benefit-cost analysis happening, even if people aren’t fully using that System 2 part of their brain.

Ludwig: Yeah, I one hundred percent agree that deterrence is really a thing. I’m a card-carrying economist. I work at the University of Chicago. I totally believe that incentives matter and that deterrence is a thing. But I think that this really connects very importantly to where we started, that gun violence is the part of the crime problem that is the thing that drives the total social cost of crime.

So in many ways, crime is an unhelpfully broad term. It’s almost like disease. What would you do about disease? I mean, I don’t even know how to think about answering that. Like What are we talking about? Like, pneumonia or cancer? And crime is a similarly unhelpful, super-broad umbrella.

And there was a study, for instance, done in Sweden a few years ago where they looked at what happened when you put cameras up in the subway system. And what you could see is that property crimes go down when you camera-up the trains, but violent crime doesn’t go down, right? And I think what that tells you, partly, is that different behaviors are shaped differently.

The key breakthrough of behavioral economics and behavioral science over the last couple of decades is to realize that our minds work in two different sorts of ways. There’s the deliberate, sort of rational benefit-cost calculation that psychologists call System 2, and a sort of very reactive, automatic, below-the-level-of-consciousness cognition that psychologists call System 1—or fast thinking and slow thinking.

And different behaviors are driven by different types of cognition. And so stealing a loaf of bread to feed your family is much more System 2 than what you do in an argument. Let me just point the finger at myself, first and foremost here. I’m not saying anything about other people’s behavior that is not true of my own behavior.

I’ve lived for 18 years in Hyde Park. It’s a little University of Chicago village in the middle of the South Side of Chicago. Every Wednesday morning, I take my dog, Aiko, out for a little walk. One day, I’m walking down the street, and about three or four doors down from me, there’s a neighbor whose dog is off leash, runs down the driveway, and attacks my dog.

Demas: Oh God. I hate that.

Ludwig: No, exactly. And this guy, the neighbor—his kids are literally in the same classroom as mine at the lab school. He lives four doors down from me. I have every incentive in the world to handle that gracefully and constructively. And that’s exactly what System 2 rational thinking would have done.

It turns out: That is exactly not what I did in that case. I assume this is a podcast where people don’t curse, but you can only imagine the stream of four-letter, seven-letter, and twelve-letter words that came out of my mouth at this guy who I’m going to be seeing for years into the future. I’m going to be seeing him at the parent potluck at school.

And so it really speaks to this idea of: In these super high-stakes moments, where people just don’t have very much bandwidth and they are relying on sort of very fast thinking to navigate, we are not always our best selves. We are not thinking about benefits and costs and things off into the future. We can make mistakes. All of us can make mistakes.

And in my case in Hyde Park, I was very lucky that neither one of us had a gun. But in a country with 400 million guns, you know, lots of people are in situations like that and behave the way I did and, unfortunately, they or the other person’s got a gun, and it ends in tragedy. And those tragedies, really, I would just point out, claim two lives. Somebody does something stupid in a moment and, you know, you spend the rest of your life in prison, and somebody else winds up dead. It’s multiple tragedies stemming from that.

Demsas: First, is your dog okay? Was everything fine?

Ludwig: Yeah, she’s a big chicken. She’s, like, a 70-pound shepherd mix who decided, rather than to try and defend herself or whatever, she would—I don’t want to throw my dog under the bus here. Everything turned out fine. She’s a lover, not a fighter. (Laughs.)

Demsas: (Laughs.) Your dog also is in System 1 thinking.

Ludwig: Yeah, exactly.

Demsas: Well, first, we’ll shout out the late Danny Kahneman here and his Thinking, Fast and Slow book, which provides much of the foundation of the System 1, System 2 model that you’re talking about here.

But I want to push here a bit because I think one of the common objections people have to this line of argument is that, yes, it is the case that, whether someone’s coming at you or you’re worried about your dog, and you don’t react the in the way that you might if you used your logical brain to react if you had time to think—but given that if you place every single American in the exact same conditions, you still see large variations in how people choose to respond, right? Like, all the people who are in conflicts in the South Side of Chicago do not shoot each other. A very small minority of people are choosing to shoot each other, even if they have access to a gun.

And so doesn’t that push against this idea that the problem is this System 1 thinking? Like, there is something particular about the choice to pull out a gun and kill someone in that moment. And it’s not just, Well, anyone can make that mistake, because even if you think about this demographically, we’re seeing mostly young men make this mistake and make this choice. There is something going on here that is not just, You’re not able to think under stress.

Ludwig: Let me take your question and sort of turn it on its head for a second. One of the things that I point out in the book is like a version of an observation that Jane Jacobs made 60 years ago in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which is: When you look at similarly poor neighborhoods in American cities, you see huge variation in crime rates, especially violent crime.

And as I mentioned, I lived for a long time in Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago. There are two neighborhoods just south of Hyde Park. There’s Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore that are socio-demographically, historically almost identical in terms of their racial and ethnic composition, their socioeconomic composition. They’re adjacent neighborhoods, so they’ve got exactly the same gun laws; they’ve got exactly the same social policies. When people get caught, they get sent to exactly the same court system. So all the incentives that conventional wisdom would say would matter are identical. And yet the shooting rate per 100,000 is, in most years, about twice as high in Greater Grand Crossing than literally across Dorchester Avenue in South Shore.

Demsas: Wow.

Ludwig: So that’s sort of taking the premise of your question and noting that the incentive explanation certainly doesn’t explain all of the variation that you see in gun violence either.

So what could it be then? I one million percent agree with you that—at its core, the argument here is: People are people, and a lot of what determines the outcome of this interpersonal conflict is the situation that someone finds themselves in. But if it’s not socioeconomics, and it’s not the characteristics of the criminal-justice system, what else would it be?

And I think in many ways, Jane Jacobs was really onto something 60 years ago in thinking about what that thing would be. To sort of connect an experience that I had in Chicago a couple years ago to Jane Jacobs’ insight, I was in the juvenile-detention center on the West Side of Chicago, I’m talking to a staff leader there, and he says, I tell all the kids in here, “If I could give you back just 10 minutes of your lives, none of you would be here.”

And one of the insights that Jane Jacobs had 60 years ago is: If the problem here is people do things in these 10-minute windows that they later regret, you could almost sort of think of fraught social interactions as like a high-wire act. And one of the ways that you can help people is by—what do they do in the circus for high-wire performers? They have a safety net there.

And one of the safety nets that you have much more of in some neighborhoods than others is essentially what Jane Jacobs called “eyes on the street”—prosocial adults who are around and able to step in and deconflict things when it happens. And you could see exactly that when you look at South Shore versus Greater Grand Crossing.

So there is, for instance, much more commercial development in South Shore than in Greater Grand Crossing. And what that means, in practice, is that there’s just lots more foot traffic in the community in South Shore than Greater Grand Crossing. And so if a group of teenagers is getting into an argument, there’s more likely to be, like, a neighborhood adult around to step in.

It’s also the case—so my friends Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir have a wonderful book that came out a couple of years ago, called Scarcity, where they point out that one of the many challenges of being poor in the United States is living in day-to-day circumstances that tax mental bandwidth. It’s just very stressful, right? And people with limited bandwidth wind up relying much more on System 1 than people who are less bandwidth taxed.

So when you look at the data, you can see all sorts of indicators that there’s much more stress and bandwidth tax for people living in Greater Grand Crossing than South Shore. And what that would lead you to conclude is that the people who are in Greater Grand Crossing are going to be more likely when they’re in these difficult, 10-minute, fraught interactions with somebody else to rely on System 1 to navigate that than their more deliberate, rational benefit-cost-calculating selves.

So I think the sort of left-of-center perspective that there are root causes that matter is definitely right. I think it’s totally right for property crime—you know, crimes shaped by economic considerations. I think it’s just a little bit incomplete with respect to the part of the crime problem that the public cares the most about, which is gun violence. And so I think we just need to expand our lens about what aspects of the social environment we want to be prioritizing for our public policies.

Demsas: I’m a housing person, so I’m a big fan of the Jane Jacobs book and the argument that she kind of draws out, and I think people can imagine this if they’ve been in streets and communities like this before, is when you have kind of mixed-use development—you have a coffee shop, and above that coffee shop, you have apartments, and across the street, there’s also a park, and there’s also a school nearby—is that that means that throughout the day, there are many different kinds of people watching the streets.

Versus if you had just a fully residential area, and then during the day, everyone’s basically gone because they’re either at school or work, so it really empties out of people to watch things. Or if you have a fully industrial area, where when people go home for the day, there’s nobody there. Or commercial area, same thing. And so when you have these kinds of mixed-use-development areas, it feels a lot safer because you can just always feel like there’s someone around doing normal business or taking their kids to school or whatever.

So I would love for housing policy to be the key. But is your argument, then, that the differences between neighborhoods that have similar socioeconomic problems, similar legal environments, etcetera but a large variation in gun violence is largely a function of their urban form?

Ludwig: I just—I absolutely adore that this is a sort of empirical, data-intensive, data-nerd podcast, and so in that spirit, I do think one of the big challenges for making progress on the sort of the crime and criminal-justice problem is: A lot of it is editorializing rather than guided by data. And so I think one of the key things that I tried to do in the book is really stick to the data and see what the data are telling us.

And so does the built environment matter? There was a wonderful study by Mireille Jacobson and Tom Chang that looks at what happens in Los Angeles when marijuana dispensaries open or close as a result of some regulatory change and when food places open and close.

That’s like the natural experiment of Jane Jacobs, like, let’s put in more mixed use—and what you can see is that when a retail establishment closes and foot traffic goes down, crime goes up.

There was a wonderful study by a great team at the University of Pennsylvania that worked with the City of Philadelphia to do a randomized experiment where they picked a bunch of rundown, vacant lots all over the city and picked half of them to redevelop and turn into little pocket parks. And what you can see is that the pocket parks then wind up bringing more people out of their homes and spending time there in public. And you can see that people feel safer, and they are safer. Gun violence goes down as a result of that.

My research center, the University of Chicago Crime Lab, we did a randomized trial with the City of New York a couple years ago where we helped put increased street lighting in some public-housing developments and not others. And one of the things that that would do is also potentially get more people out in public. We see violence decline there as well.

And then one other thing that I would just add—actually, two other quick things that I would add to this is: I think it gives you another way to understand all of the research and economics that suggests more police reduce crime. I know you had Jen Doleac on recently; you guys were talking about this.

I think most people would say, Oh that’s, like, deterrence or incapacitation. But when I look at the Chicago Police Department, for instance, the average Chicago cop makes about three arrests—not per week, not per month—per year. Three arrests per year.

Demsas: Wow.

Ludwig: So it’s, like, not a gigantic arrest machine that is generating all of this massive deterrence. What are police doing? Well, one of the things that they might be doing is helping interrupt these 10-minute windows. It’s something preventive, right? And I think that is a potentially important part of it.

And the thing that I would add to this, as well, is that sociologists believe that one of the most important determinants of a neighborhood’s violent-crime rate is what they call “collective efficacy”—this is research from the 1990s—the willingness of neighborhood residents to sort of step in and do something when there’s some sort of problem in the neighborhood. And I think that also is very consistent with this kind of behavioral-economics view of the gun-violence problem and what to do about it.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: the problem with focusing on the “root causes” of gun violence.

[Break]

Demsas: Someone listening to this will say, How is this different from the root causes analysis that you kind of critiqued? Right?

Because there’s a really great quote that you have in your book, which is that we “treat gun violence as something that will get better once we fix everything else that’s wrong with society.” And I think that’s a frustration that a lot of people have, is that they are sympathetic to the idea that if we invested more in education, or if we invested more in social-welfare programs and UBI (universal basic income), expanded health care, that there would be reduced crime in 20 years, in 30 years.

But that doesn’t really respond to the specific concern of, Tomorrow when I walk to school, am I going to get shot? Can you help distinguish between your analysis and that root cause analysis?

Ludwig: What I hear in Chicago is something that you hear in lots of cities around the United States, is like, Gun violence is just a symptom of poverty, and we’re never going to solve the gun-violence problem until we solve the poverty problem.

And let us all hope that’s not true, because, as you know even better than I do, we’ve been working really hard for decades to try and solve the poverty problem in the United States, and it’s proven to be very difficult. I think the key optimistic observation or suggestion that we get from this behavioral-economics perspective on the gun-violence problem is: We can make massive changes in the gun-violence problem by changing parts of the social environment that are much easier to change than poverty and segregation and all of these other super big, super important social problems.

If I could wave a wand and I could end poverty and segregation in Chicago, believe me—I’d be the first person to wave that wand. And so I’m not arguing against any of the policies trying to do that. They’re super important. It’s more like, What else can we do on top of that to really start to make a meaningful difference on the gun-violence problem?

And I can’t wave a wand and end poverty in Chicago, but what I can do is: I can make it easier to have commercial development in Greater Grand Crossing than we currently have here on the South Side of Chicago. I can strategically deploy money to turn a bunch of vacant lots that are littered with empty broken beer and tequila bottles and turn that into a little pocket park that people are willing to be in. I can put money into things like block clubs. I can do some version of what the University of Chicago does, like put unarmed private security guards on some key corners to make sure that there’s an eye on the street because of that. So there’s a bunch of pragmatic things that you can do that can really make a difference that sort of complement these other efforts to address these really big root causes.

And maybe the one other thing I would just add: You might look at that sort of strategy and say, To some people, that’s going to feel unsatisfying that it is addressing a symptom, not the underlying cause. Like, we’re leaving the root causes there, and we’re just treating the symptom of the root causes. But I actually think what that concern or that perspective misses is that the causal arrow runs in both directions between gun violence and root causes, if that makes sense.

And you can sort of see a lot of these communities are in vicious cycles right now, where it’s like: You’ve got a lot of gun violence. People and businesses leave—fewer eyes on the street, fewer community resources to build the kind of public infrastructure that helps address this problem, even more gun violence, even more people leaving. There are lots and lots of neighborhoods, lots and lots of cities that are trapped in that sort of vicious cycle.

But if you can get the gun-violence problem under control. I think you can see that you can turn those vicious cycles into virtuous cycles. I think of gun violence, you know, not as a symptom of some deeper thing but in many ways as the social problem for cities that sits upstream of so many of the other social problems that cities are trying to wrestle with.

Demsas: To give your model in layman’s terms: Gun violence and shootings happen because there’s a large availability of guns and because people are not interrupted in pulling those guns out in the midst of a heated moment. So as you point out in your book, the vast majority of shootings are happening in the course of an argument—not in a premeditated sense but in [the sense] that someone bumps you on the sidewalk, or they insult you, or something like that—and that violence, that shooting happens because there’s no one to step in and say, Hey. Let’s calm things down. Is that kind of the overview that you’re giving us?

Ludwig: Yeah. The highest-level version of this is: All of our policies have conceived of gun violence as a problem of System 2 slow thinking, when I think it’s, actually, mostly a problem of System 1 fast thinking.

And so for starters, we just need a big reorientation to understand differently what the problem actually is to be solved. And once you have that reorientation—once you sort of think of gun violence as a problem of not bad people unafraid of the criminal-justice system, not people in bad economic circumstances stealing to feed their families, but normal people making bad decisions in fraught, difficult, 10-minute windows—one thing that you start to do then is start to think about, How do I change the social environment so there are more people, more eyes on the street to sort of step in and interrupt? And the other thing that you start to think more seriously about is, like, How do I focus my social policies more on helping people understand their own minds better and anticipate what they’re going to do in these difficult 10-minute windows?

And one of the ways that we can do that is through a very different type of social program than we’ve typically thought of in the U.S.—these behavioral-economics-informed programs like Youth Guidance’s Becoming a Man or Heartland Alliance’s READI program or YAP and Brightpoints’ Choose to Change program. These are all things that we’ve subjected to randomized controlled trials in Chicago.

And what they basically are doing is: They’re helping people understand that they’ve got fast thinking as well as slow thinking and recognize that their fast thinking can get themselves into trouble in these fraught moments, and helping them anticipate that and sort of better navigate those 10-minute windows. And you can see in randomized experiments that that reduces risk of violence involvement by, depending on the study and the time period, like, 30 to 50 to 60 percent. How you scale that, I think, is the frontier scientific and policy challenge, but at least now we can sort of see the direction that we’ve got to go.

And the other thing I would just add is: I think this behavioral-economics perspective also helps us understand why education is so important for solving the violence problem, but not in the way that people have historically thought. Most people would say, Yeah, of course, education is so central to solving the crime problem, because education improves people’s earnings’ prospects, and blah, blah, blah.

And it’s true that education is hugely important for people’s earnings prospects, and education is good for making better citizens. It is good for lots and lots of reasons. But the other thing that the data tell us education does is: It helps people learn to be more slow thinking and skeptical of their own minds in high-stakes moments. That turns out to be sort of a key byproduct of everything that schools ask people to do.

And I think of education as, like, in many ways, the most important sort of crime-prevention, gun-violence prevention tool that we have. I think things like rote learning are not what we want either for educational purposes or from the perspective of making schooling as sort of crime preventive as possible. And so I think there are other ways of reimagining what school does, which would be good for making school sort of more helpful for a world in which things like problem-solving are increasingly important for economic outcomes, but also super valuable for making education more helpful in addressing the gun-violence problem.

Demsas: You alluded to this a couple of times now, but it’s interesting that there’s one way to interpret your result as just, as like, We need to put a bunch more cops on the street, and those can be the eyes on the street. And that is kind of consistent with the literature we explored in the Jen Doleac episode around why increasing numbers of police officers can reduce crime, and violent crime, in particular. And the other avenue—I mean, these are complementary—is that there needs to be more attention on how to improve people’s System 1 thinking. And the Becoming a Man program, which I think is now really popular, is a great example of that.

But scaling these sorts of things is really, really difficult, as you mentioned. Are you indifferent between these two policy avenues, like an increased number of police officers, versus investing in programs that improve people’s ability to understand their own System 1, System 2 thinking? Or is it that you really want people to do one of those over the other? And in which case, it does seem very difficult to scale Becoming a Man and other programs. We have not been able to do that, despite years and years of positive coverage of that program.

Ludwig: For starters, I would say, we should be pushing on every possible front to solve this problem. It’s a huge humanitarian problem, one of the key drivers of Black-white life expectancy disparities in the United States, hugely important for the future of our cities that are the key economic engine for the whole country. So I wouldn’t say, like, Let’s do this or this. If we have multiple things that could be helpful, I’d say, Let’s push on every front.

On the eyes-on-the-street stuff, I would say, There’s tons of scalable stuff there, and it’s not just hiring more cops. So you can hire more cops in cities that like cops. You can put unarmed security guards on the street. You can fund community-violence-intervention nonprofit groups. You can clean up vacant lots and turn them into parks. You can improve street lighting. You can change zoning laws and permitting rules and whatever to make it easier to have stores interspersed with residential in a neighborhood. Tons of different things there that you could do, depending on the local political environment in your city, all of which are super scalable, all of which would be super helpful, all of which would increase the chances that there’s some sort of prosocial adult around who can sort of step in and de-escalate something.

On top of that, I think then there’d be huge value in trying to figure out how to scale the social programs that also help people better understand their own sort of thinking. And I think one of the most exciting visions for the future here comes from artificial intelligence, weirdly. My University of Chicago colleague Oeindrila Dube did a fascinating study with Sandy Jo MacArthur, who used to be at LAPD for many years, and my friend Anuj Shah, at Princeton.

They basically did Becoming a Man for cops. And what was so interesting about it is: Becoming a Man works with teenagers in middle school and high school. And it’s, like, an adult working with these kids, and that’s super hard to scale, because the program counselor is expensive, and they vary in skill, and How do you hire enough people? and everything that makes a social program hard to scale.

But the Becoming a Man for cops—what they did is they had this artificial-intelligence-driven force simulator thing, where they give cops feedback to see when their System 1, their fast thinking, is leading them to an unhelpful response, through a bunch of simulation exercises that the AI can do. And you look at the randomized control data, and it seems to have remarkably helpful impacts.

And I think the thing that’s so exciting about that is: Thinking about AI as a human-capital development tool lets you see, Oh I see. Once you’ve got the software, the marginal cost for rerunning software is super low. And the great thing about software is that it basically runs the same way over and over again. So we might be looking at a future where AI can be a super valuable way to enhance human capacity in ways that include addressing one of the most important social problems facing cities, which is gun violence.

Demsas: We’ve gotten a little bit into this, but trying to compare all three theories that are kind of existing out there: When we’re thinking about the root causes theory, that leads us to believe that we should invest a ton in antipoverty measures and expand healthcare, job-training opportunities, UBI, whatever. And then the wickedness theory kind of indicates that we should just try to root out and incarcerate bad people for as long as possible to prevent them from doing crime. Your theory, the “unforgiving places” theory—what do you want policy makers to take from that?

Ludwig: The first thing I want policy makers to take from this is to recognize that the gun-violence problem itself is different from what we think. Again, it’s not a problem of System 2 deliberate, slow thinking, people responding to incentives. Gun violence is mostly driven by System 1, reactive, fast thinking. That’s the most important thing.

From there, I would say we need to do two types of things. We need to change those aspects of the social environment that reduce the risk that conflict escalates. And related to that is, too, just in the safety net, is whatever your position on the Second Amendment, I think this is also why guns out in public are particularly worrisome. If people want to have 500 guns in their basement locked up, that’s one thing. But when people are taking guns out on the street, that’s the thing that makes interpersonal conflict on the South Side of Chicago so much more dangerous than interpersonal conflict in the south side of London or whatever. So people around to deconflict conflict when it happens, and anything that we can do to get guns off the street would be super helpful.

And then I think policies that help people, you know, both K–12 education and things like, you know, Becoming a Man to try and help people better anticipate and navigate those 10-minute windows. And that’s a policy agenda that really doesn’t make much sense under either the conventional wisdom of the left or right, right now. Those things aren’t about changing people’s incentives, so it’s like, Why in the world would they possibly work? But I think they’re really central to making huge progress on the problem. And I think if you look at the experiences of L.A. and New York over the last 30 years, they validate that view, or they’re certainly very consistent with that view, at least.

Demsas: Jens, always our last and final question: What is an idea that you once thought was great and ended up being only good on paper?

Ludwig: Great—so we launched a big research project with the superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools a couple of years ago. The huge priority of this superintendent was truancy. So Chicago used to have something like 150 truancy officers for its 600 schools in 1991, and with budget cuts, they got rid of all of them. And then you look at the data and, like, there are tons of kids who are missing three or four weeks of school a year.

And so you look at that, and the superintendent is like, This surely is a key reason that kids are not doing well in school. So Jon Guryan and I launched this big research project with CPS, and we worked really hard to try and figure out how to get kids to come to school more often, without the punitive whatever of truancy officers. With a bunch of partners, we managed to figure out a way to get kids to come back to school more often. And then we look at the data, and we see it does not boost their learning at all.

Demsas: Oh wow.

Ludwig: So weird, so counterintuitive. You would think, If you don’t go to school, you can’t learn. It’s super intuitive. And yet, you get kids to come to school more often, and they don’t learn.

Demsas: Wait. What’s going on? Doesn’t that kind of conflict with a lot of ed-policy research?

Ludwig: Yeah. So super weird, right? And so it was only very recently that Jon and I were looking at data right after the pandemic, and what you can see in the data is, for instance, if you look at eighth graders in Chicago, the average eighth grader in Chicago academically is like a sixth grader. And something like a third-ish of Chicago eighth graders academically are, like, closer to fourth graders.

Demsas: Wow.

Ludwig: And the eighth-grade teachers—their feet are being held to the fire to teach eighth-grade content. And so then you ask yourself, Why is it the case that sending a kid who, academically, is at the fourth-grade level to school to be taught eighth-grade content doesn’t improve their learning? Like, to ask the question is to answer it.

Demsas: So it’s like, basically, the kids who are missing a bunch of school are more likely to be the kids who are way behind in school. And so they’re going to benefit less from being in school.

Ludwig: Exactly.

Demsas: Oh wow. That’s a very depressing answer.

Ludwig: Yeah, we were confusing, you know, What is a cause, and what is effect? And so it seemed good on paper. Now we realize that there’s a very different underlying problem that we’re working hard to fix. But that’s my depressing answer to leave you with.

Demsas: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was fantastic.

Ludwig: Thanks so much for having me on. It was great.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.