The fight to save the town : reimagining discarded America

The fight to save the town Reimagining discarded America

Michelle Wilde Anderson

Book - 2022

Decades of cuts to local government amidst rising concentrations of poverty have wreaked havoc on communities left behind by the modern economy. Some of these discarded places are rural. Others are big cities, small cities, or historic suburbs. Some vote blue, others red. Some are the most diverse communities in America, while others are nearly all white, all Latino, or all Black. All are routinely trashed by outsiders for their poverty and their politics. Mostly, their governments are just broke. Forty years after the anti-tax revolution began protecting wealthy taxpayers and their cities, our high-poverty cities and counties have run out of services to cut, properties to sell, bills to defer, and risky loans to take. In The Fight to Save ...the Town, urban law expert and author Michelle Wilde Anderson offers unsparing, humanistic portraits of the hardships left behind in four such places. But this book is not a eulogy or a lament. Instead, Anderson travels to four blue-collar communities that are poor, broke, and progressing. Networks of leaders and residents in these places are facing down some of the hardest challenges in American poverty today. In Stockton, California, locals are finding ways, beyond the police department, to reduce gun violence and treat the trauma it leaves behind. In Josephine County, Oregon, community leaders have enacted new taxes to support basic services in a rural area with fiercely anti-government politics. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, leaders are figuring out how to improve job security and wages in an era of backbreaking poverty for the working class. And a social movement in Detroit, Michigan is pioneering ways to stabilize low-income housing after a wave of foreclosures and housing loss. Our smallest governments shape people's safety, comfort, and life chances. For decades, these governments have no longer just reflected inequality--they have helped drive it. But it doesn't have to be that way. Anderson argues that a new generation of local leaders are figuring out how to turn poverty traps back into gateway cities.

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Subjects
Poverty > United States.
Municipal services > United States.
Local government > United States.
Social problems > Government policy > United States.
Published
New York : Avid Reader Press 2022.
Language
English
Main Author
Michelle Wilde Anderson (author)
Edition
First Avid Reader Press hardcover edition
Physical Description
vii, 352 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages (261-338) and index.
ISBN
9781501195983
  • Prologue
  • Introduction "Aren't We the Government?"
  • First Broke, Then Faithless
  • Learning from Four Places
  • "What Would I Do if I Won?"
  • Next Generation Gateway Cities
  • Of Hellholes, Crooks, and Heroes
  • Love and Misery
  • Chapter 1. "I Won't Give Up On You, Ever"
  • Stockton, California
  • City of Ancestors, City of Orphans
  • "The Air just Stops"
  • Más Tranquila
  • Facing Trauma
  • Worthy
  • A Movement for Open Windows
  • Chapter 2. Man in the Arena
  • Josephine County, Oregon
  • "Timber!"
  • Growing Pot in a Hazmat Suit
  • "This Is Not TV"
  • "People Can't Live Like That"
  • Tenth Time Is a Charm
  • "The (w)HOLE"
  • Chapter 3. "Marching, Marching, in the Beauty of the Day"
  • Lawrence, Massachusetts
  • Under America
  • Scabs, Welfare Queens, and Criminals
  • "We've Been Asleep"
  • Governing "The City of the Damned"
  • "Everything Else Flows from There"
  • "We Can't All Be Zoila Gomez"
  • Believe
  • Chapter 4. Do Not Bid
  • Detroit, Michigan
  • "City of Homes"
  • "The Water Is Warm"
  • Forty-Eight Percent
  • Fighting Land Loss
  • Res Miranda Populo
  • Chapter 5. Facing Forward
  • Broken Compacts
  • "First Who, Then What"
  • Networks with Unicorns
  • Epilogue
  • Author's Note
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

What happens to communities with citywide or multiple poor neighborhoods? This question gained international attention in the years immediately following the Great Recession. Recent scholarship examines struggling, largely rural communities with high rates of mental illness and opioid addiction. Anderson (Stanford Law School) acknowledges the consequences of deep and spiraling cuts in public service, community trauma, decaying housing, and skills gaps. However, she deliberately turns toward people-oriented investment, deftly navigating a balance between documenting entrenched problems and offering realistic views of how local advocates can build trust through direct outreach. Anderson completed more than 250 interviews, mostly from 2016 and 2020, which form the basis of four case studies: Stockton, California; Josephine County, Oregon; Detroit, Michigan; and Lawrence, Massachusetts. She also presents compelling historical narratives and epilogues about the pandemic era. The book remarkably captures the essence of these diverse communities, their complex challenges, and grassroots efforts. Anderson presents strong justification for both local activism and higher-level investment in education and jobs. Anderson's insightful critique of urban scholarship and call for reframing scholarship and policy are well worth considering. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers. --Marcia L. Godwin, University of La Verne

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Stanford law professor Anderson debuts with a hard-hitting yet hopeful look at how impoverished communities across the U.S. are fighting for their survival. Spotlighting Josephine County, Ore.; Detroit, Mich.; Lawrence, Mass.; and Stockton, Calif., Anderson details how decades of deindustrialization and declining state and federal tax revenues have led local governments to make drastic budget cuts, sell public land and other assets, take on risky loans, and delay critical infrastructure repairs. As a result, crime rates and drug use in these communities have skyrocketed while home ownership and employment rates have plummeted. Despite these strong headwinds, however, locals are banding together to save their towns. In Josephine County, citizen watch groups combat crime and provide "anti-overdose medical services"; in Detroit, housing advocates are working to pass new foreclosure policies that give homeowners more time to restructure debt from predatory reverse mortgages; in Lawrence, Mass., public and private institutions have coordinated on specialized training programs for bilingual teachers and medical assistants in an effort to help increase the median income of local parents by 15%. Throughout, Anderson contextualizes her detailed demographic and economic data with vivid portraits of local families and activists. The result is an astute and powerful vision for improving America. Agent: Wendy Strothman, Strothman Agency. (June)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Four decades' worth of antitax revolution have left U.S. communities large and small, urban and rural, blue and red, diverse and homogeneous without enough money to keep running and no more services to eliminate, properties to sell, bills to fend off, or questionable loans to secure. Stanford professor Anderson, an urban law expert, examines four communities to reveal both the consequences and new ways of coping. Stockton, CA, for instance, has found ways beyond policing to reduce gun violence, while Detroit, MI, is responding to foreclosures and housing loss with targeted efforts to stabilize low-income housing. With a 60,000-copy first printing.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Arresting examination of how poverty-stricken cities are reinventing themselves. Stanford Law School professor Anderson offers a corrective to bigoted narratives portraying cities as toxic boondoggles, showing how postindustrial decline blurred many complex factors. "Places of citywide poverty," she writes, "help document the cause and consequences of widening inequality….This is a book about four places, for the sake of many others." The author presents historically rooted examinations of Stockton, California; Detroit, Michigan; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Josephine County, Oregon. She focuses on community activists redefining grassroots efforts after decades of disinvestment. As Anderson demonstrates, during the Great Recession's foreclosure crisis, stricken local governments navigated state programs for survival. "In the face of all these hardships," she writes, "advocates in the four places profiled in this book found a way forward." Each of the author's detailed urban narratives is compelling. Stockton "has mostly lost its better-paid manufacturing jobs" following decades of redlining and segregation, and local officials slashed spending between 2008 and 2011. Violence spiked but has been countered by community activism and new policing approaches. In rural Josephine, a "rough and tumble" place with fortunes tied to the volatile timber industry, Anderson tracks "a grassroots movement in favor of new taxes in one of the most anti-government places in America." In the former textile city of Lawrence, the author links forgotten labor activism to a traditional openness to immigrants, who now struggle with service-economy jobs: "Lawrence's public and private leaders have done what immigrants are known for: form tight social networks and look out for the people in them." Finally, Anderson looks at the better-known narrative of Detroit, focusing on the devastating decline of African American homeownership. The author's discussion is complex, though the impact of her arguments is lessened by the repetitive aspects of these narratives of place. Nonetheless, it's a welcome study of life in late-capitalist America. An ambitious, empathetic work documenting community-building versus political intransigence and racial strife. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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