REVIEW: Stuck
Yoni Appelbaum, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity (Random House), 320pp.
Any discussion of the high cost of Orthodox living focuses on tuition, a major expenditure for families for whom private, Jewish education is the cost of their commitments. It has cynically been called the best form of Jewish birth control, notwithstanding above-average sizes of Orthodox families relative to the American norm. It has also been pointed to as one of the most significant incentives for Aliyah, Zionist commitments aside. In making a family budget work, though, housing costs can take up an even larger portion. Unlike tuition, there is no payment level based on income, no need- or merit-based scholarships, and no discounts for housing multiple children under one roof. According to the Nishma survey on Orthodox economics in 2021, two-thirds of Orthodox families (both Haredi and Modern Orthodox) said that where they live has a “somewhat negative” or “substantially negative” effect on their finances, which presumably means that the majority of Orthodox families would choose more affordable neighborhoods if they were not bound to live in an observant community with synagogue proximity. Only 13-15% answered that where they live has no impact on housing costs.
Stuck by Yoni Appelbaum describes how the American housing market got this way. It focuses on the other side of the same coin—just as there are observant Jews who are pushed into spending more than they really can afford because of limited housing availability in Orthodox neighborhoods, there are people (both Jewish and gentile) who are stuck in their current home because they can’t afford anywhere else, and are unable to move to pursue economic opportunities.
Appelbaum identifies the problem as insufficient housing supply. He is a senior editor at The Atlantic and former faculty member at Harvard, and dons both the hats of a journalist and historian. First, he describes the nature of communities in early America—how they policed their boundaries and attempted to regulate who could live in a particular place. He then explains how this system broke down, as Americans began to conceive of themselves as having a right to live where they pleased, even before civil rights laws actually protected that right for all Americans.
The results of this freedom should be familiar to American Jews. Cities grew new neighborhoods in quick succession as immigrants from Europe arrived. Immigrant families themselves would first live in crowded, cheap housing, but once their financial situation stabilized in their new country, they would rapidly be able to move into housing with amenities that would’ve been unimaginable to their cousins who stayed in Europe, and then would move with dizzying frequency to either get more space, find a nicer apartment, or chase economic opportunity.
This situation was attacked on several fronts. Some cities in California banned laundries from operating outside the established “Chinatowns,” with the aim of segregating Chinese immigrants (many of whom worked in the laundry trade) from the white population using a law whose text was racially neutral. Social reformers advocated for rules imposing basic standards on housing. Others, with more nefarious motives, realized that these new legal precedents could be used to push people they felt were undesirable away from certain areas—such as keeping Jewish garment workers away from shoppers on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, or preventing middle-class housing from being built in a development being marketed to the affluent. More recently, cities have used historic preservation and landmarking to require desirable neighborhoods to remain as they are, and preclude the construction of new housing that more of the population could afford.
The result, Appelbaum argues, has been to the disadvantage of American society. As cities and towns across the United States have adopted sets of zoning rules, which generally prevent constructing housing any denser than already exists, mobility is stifled. People who might want to move to another city with better employment prospects are unable to find homes there because no new housing is being constructed, leaving them stuck where they currently live. Young married couples find that when they have children they cannot find apartments to fit their growing family in the community they call home. This forces them to find somewhere with housing, instead of picking a community that fits their needs.
A perusal of the Facebook group “Move to a Jewish Community Out of Town” illustrates the problem as it plays out in the Jewish world. While many posters give descriptions of their ideal Jewish community, and ask if any meet the requirements, many show that people realize their options are constrained by housing costs. While requirements like “homes under $600k” in the secular world leave plenty of location options, in the Modern Orthodox world this basic affordability requirement makes entire non-Orthodox metropolitan or suburban off-limits. Who would choose a town with no active synagogue or day school options—to say nothing of kosher Chinse food and a good bakery—no matter how affordable? This means that a Modern Orthodox family with attractive career options, may need to take less attractive offers that accommodate a commute to a community that meets their religious needs, even as that housing choice is in inverse financial sense to the their now lower income. Some posts in this Facebook group simply seek anywhere affordable on a particular budget.
One of the interesting features of Appelbaum’s book is that rather than concluding with particular policy suggestions to alleviate the American housing shortage, he suggests areas where American society could improve in its “middot” (that’s my word, not his, but he is a day school graduate). The three areas he believes we need to improve on are “tolerance, consistency, and abundance”—that we should not expect to have our community conform exactly to our preferences, that government should set rules that are consistent for everyone rather than decided on an ad hoc basis, and that we should strive for a society where everyone’s needs are easily met rather than trying to achieve a bare minimum. This conclusion isn’t the technical policy suggestions one might’ve expected, and it applies just as well to areas in the Jewish world besides housing. Just as straightforward zoning rules that apply widely make it easier for housing to be built than very stringent rules with a system of variances, it is easier for people to make a financial plan for day school when tuition is based on a relatively simple formula based on income, rather than a complex and opaque system.
[Some of these issues were recently discussed in TRADITION in Erica Brown’s essay, “Suburban Orthodoxy” (Spring 2024).]
The description of the problems caused by housing shortages does at times feel unduly constrained by the particular narrative Appelbaum is telling. While there are mentions of people who are unable to stay in neighborhoods they’ve lived in as rent increases or as they have children, Appelbaum fails to fully explore these strands of the discussion, which is not true when he’s discussing people unable to move to improve their job prospects. But in fairness, his overall thesis needn’t factor in housing based on walking distance to shul. I felt this did the book a disservice—after all the discussion of the history behind the housing shortage in America, it would have been better to explore some of the social issues (such as young adults being priced out of a place when they have kids) more fully.
The ballooning cost of housing is an issue receiving increasing levels of focus in American political discourse. In discussion of Orthodox affordability tuition, simchas, and other social expectation costs tend to dominate the conversation. But since housing is inevitably a huge share of a family’s budget, a conversation about the affordability of frum life needs to address this head on. Stuck by Yoni Appelbaum is a good place to begin the conversation.
Nathan Kasimer, an engineer at a pharmaceutical production facility, is a board member of Anshe Sholom Bnai Israel in Chicago, where he serves as co-chair of the local eruv.