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It’s no secret to REALTORS® that Seattle has notoriously high home prices, which, as Town Hall notes, makes the Emerald City “a difficult place to afford and move to.”

On March 12, Town Hall Seattle will feature author Yoni Appelbaum who will discuss his new book titled “Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.” He is a deputy executive editor of The Atlantic and a social and cultural historian of the United States.

In his 320-page book, Appelbaum “explores how housing affects the very fabric of our society.” He believes it is not right to say we have an affordable housing shortage and offers a key to “reimagining a vibrant, more egalitarian, future.” He argues the sharp decline in geographic mobility is “the single most important social change of the past half century.”

Town Hall notes Appelbaum explains in his book how zoning laws stop people from moving, “including the legal segregation of Jewish workers in New York’s Lower East Side and the private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in Flint, Michigan. These efforts have raised housing prices, deepened political divides, emboldened bigots, and trapped generations of people in poverty. And now we are stuck – literally unable to move.”