Yoni Appelbaum, a historian and deputy executive editor at The Atlantic, argues that one of the defining features of American life—the willingness and ability of ordinary people to move in search of a better life—has been systematically destroyed over the past century, with consequences for the economy, for social mobility, and for democratic politics. Americans used to move at extraordinary rates, two to three times more often than Europeans, and Appelbaum reconstructs the institutions that made that possible: weak land use controls, abundant cheap housing, and a culture that treated geographic mobility as normal. He then traces the slow tightening of restrictions, beginning with explicit racial zoning in nineteenth-century San Francisco aimed at Chinese residents, continuing through the spread of Euclidean zoning in the 1920s and racial covenants in the mid-century, and culminating in the modern apparatus of single-family-only zoning, historic districting, environmental review, and lengthy permitting that allows incumbents to block new neighbors. Appelbaum tells the story through individual lives—of people whose families moved and rose, and of people stuck in declining places without the option to leave. The book has become a central text in housing policy debates, marshaling historical narrative behind the case for legalizing apartment construction and reopening American geography.