(This chart draws on data about metropolitan statistical areas, which align better with local labor markets than arbitrary city boundaries do. The population chart above uses city data, given that historical metropolitan estimates aren’t available from the census.)

Some people aren’t moving into wealthy regions because they’re stuck in struggling ones. They have houses they can’t sell or government benefits they don’t want to lose. But the larger problem is that they’re blocked from moving to prosperous places by the shortage and cost of housing there. And that’s a deliberate decision these wealthy regions have made in opposing more housing construction, a prerequisite to make room for more people.

Compare that with most of American history. The country’s economic growth has long “gone hand in hand with enormous reallocation of population,” write the economists Kyle Herkenhoff, Lee Ohanian and Edward Prescott in a recent study of what’s hobbling similar population flows now.

Workers moved north during the Great Migration and west out of the Dust Bowl. The lure of the Gold Rush made San Francisco a boomtown after the 1850s. The rise of the auto industry helped triple the size of Detroit between 1910 and 1930. Other Northern cities like Cleveland similarly swelled as they became manufacturing hubs.

Los Angeles grew to a city of more than a million in the 1920s as film sets, oil wells and aircraft manufacturing promised opportunity. Seattle boomed after World War II, as Boeing did. Houston’s population took off as it became the center of the country’s energy economy.

It’s unrealistic to think that New York or San Francisco could grow today by the same magnitude. It’s much harder for a region to double in size when it already has 10 million people. And the United States is a far more urban country today than it was a century ago, meaning that there are fewer rural residents to pour into cities.

But these productive places aren’t growing as fast now as economists believe they should — and as they would if they didn’t impose so many obstacles on new development. Since the 1970s, land use restrictions have multiplied in coastal metros, making it harder to build in, say, San Jose, Calif., than in Phoenix. And the politics of development have become tense, too. In the Boston suburbs, the Bay Area, Brooklyn and Washington, people who already live there have balked at new housing for people who don’t.