Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity by Yoni Appelbaum
Published in February 2025
Over the course of my three-decade academic career, our family has moved house 10 times. As a new Ph.D., parent and visiting assistant professor at West Virginia University, I moved four times in Morgantown to find more space. During our time in Connecticut, where I worked remotely for Britannica and helped establish Quinnipiac University’s online education unit, we relocated twice. Now in New Hampshire, we’ve lived in four houses, each time trying to get closer to campus.
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I bring up these 10 moves to connect the story that Appelbaum tells in Stuck to our world of higher education. My academic career progression has been tied to our ability to find homes close enough to campus to manage the commute and that we could afford. With the current cost of housing, my family could never afford to buy or rent the identical houses we purchased or rented in the past. The cost of housing has increased significantly in my small college town, so that my wife and I could never afford the 2025 price for the house we live in today, purchased in 2016.
When you speak with early and midcareer academic faculty and staff about the challenges they face, one of the big themes that always comes up is the cost of housing. At my institution, an increasingly smaller proportion of early- and midcareer staff and faculty can afford to live anywhere near campus. The cost of housing makes it harder to recruit talent, while also ensuring that fewer of us are on campus each day, as faculty and staff end up needing to live farther and farther away in search of affordability.
Reading Stuck helped me place the higher ed faculty/staff housing crisis in its broader context, while also providing insight into some of the steps that our universities might take to address the problem. The mismatch between housing supply and demand has less to do with market forces and more to do with a set of (mostly local) municipal zoning decisions. Stuck traces the history of local antidensity zoning ordinances, initially enacted (no surprise) to enforce racial (whites only) and class (wealthy only) homogeneity. The building regulations (including those in college towns) that require minimum lot sizes, setbacks and single-family dwellings only serve to maintain the home values for current owners, at the expense of severely constraining supply.
As described in Stuck, this imbalance between housing demand and supply has accelerated over the past two decades, as housing developers and builders focused on more profitable high-end McMansions at the expense of starter (or even midlevel) homes. Growing wealth inequality and concentration have enabled high-net-worth families to buy up houses as second vacation homes (something that has occurred in my small college town), further reducing the number of houses available for nonwealthy working families.
As described in Stuck, enacting pro-density housing regulations alone will not solve the housing affordability crisis. Absent significant government incentives and investments to encourage the development of new multi-unit, market-rate and subsidized units, families will continue to have few options when it comes to finding affordable housing.
For colleges and universities, all the choices related to workforce housing are difficult. Most schools are reluctant to play the role of faculty/staff landlord. (Although someone once described New York University to me as a “real estate company that has a school.”) Scarce university dollars are unlikely to be invested in workforce housing when there is a pressing need to build new student residence halls (and renovate old ones), along with every other funding-intensive priority.
How much is the housing affordability crisis driving the emergence of the new hybrid academic workplace? The pandemic enabled more flexible academic work arrangements, but many schools are now pushing employees (at least staff) back to campus offices.
How will the people who work in higher education manage to progress through an academic career if they can’t afford to buy or rent a place close enough to campus to manage everyday work and family responsibilities?
Will we end up with a two-tiered campus workforce, one consisting of older employees who have purchased an affordable home near the campus, making in-person work possible, and more recent hires forced into long commutes and hybrid arrangements due to sky-high housing costs?
To an extent that I did not recognize until I read Stuck, my academic career would have been stuck if I had been unable to move those many times to homes within commuting distance to campus. Reasonably affordable housing in the decades that I was building my academic career and family enabled me to get to work and pick up my kids from day care. What seemed like a normal relationship between university work and housing when I was building my academic career has devolved into an impossibility for many working in higher education today.
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