INTRODUCTION 
“Aren’t We the Government?”
The least visible way to steal gas from a car is to puncture the gas line with a bucket underneath. The owner ends up with an expensive repair, not just an empty tank. In Cave Junction, a town on the valley floor of Josephine County in Oregon, no one has money to waste on problems like that. When it happened to his son-in-law, Jimmy Evans had tired of that kind of trouble.
Evans, a fifty-something father of three, works at a popular butcher and meatpacking shop called Taylor’s Sausage. He often covers the graveyard shift starting at three o’clock in the morning. He didn’t have formal training in law enforcement, but nighttime patrols before work seemed like a way he could help. Evans and some neighbors started a group called Cave Junction Patrol to deter and interrupt crime. Eight years later, his “CJ Patrol” baseball cap has faded to match his long gray beard.
In church one Sunday in 2018, Evans heard a Harley roar past outside. “I’ve been doing patrol a long time,” Evans says, “and so you know the sound of the vehicles. He’s the guy who drops the drugs. When he comes through town, the whole place lights up with meth and heroin.” It seemed like the engine slowed down by the woods behind the church. Evans knew who slept there. Her name was Maya.I She had bipolar disorder and lived on an old couch surrounded by a pool of clothes. The man on the bike was a local predator, Evans explained, who had turned Maya into a prostitute after he got her hooked on drugs.
Excusing himself from church, Evans tried to identify the rider or see his license plate, but the Harley was gone. Soon enough, Evans heard another car park near the woods. He rushed out, thinking he could not “let this one go.” He saw a pick-up truck near Maya’s camp, and Evans approached to ask the driver what he was doing. The man told Evans that Maya was the mother of the baby in his backseat. The man had a restraining order against Maya, but he wanted to check on her. “It was the most beautiful baby ever,” Evans told me later, going quiet.
Evans believed that he could get Maya a chance for recovery by catching the Harley rider. But if Evans had gotten the bike’s plate that day, it is unlikely that much would have come of it. He had been through this drill before. He would call the sheriff’s office. He’d get turned away because there was no violent crime in progress. Then he’d call the Oregon State Police, which had been patching in investigations and emergency response for the county. But their limited staff could not always dispatch for calls from Josephine County. Trying to confront the dealer or calling in his license plate put Evans at the limits of what he was willing or legally allowed to do. Any other efforts to catch, judge, or punish the man would turn Evans from a volunteer into a vigilante.
Revenue losses in 2012 had forced Josephine County officials to enact drastic budget cuts. They closed the public library and required local parks to charge admission fees. They shut down a wing of the county jail, eliminating its capacity to hold people for offenses like drunk driving and theft. More than one-third of county employees lost their jobs within five years. “I let one hundred and twenty-seven people go in one day,” former County Commissioner Simon Hare said, recalling a layoff round that year. “It took me twenty-five minutes to do all of the signatures. It was really intense. I looked at every name. One hundred and twenty-seven families that’ll never be the same.” By 2014, Commissioner Hare had taken to quoting a song about the Great Depression, performed by the band Alabama: “Well somebody told us Wall Street fell, but we were so poor that we couldn’t tell.”
Back then, the county could barely provide any services other than minimal public safety and public works, plus state-mandated functions like holding elections. Even those ran on a skeleton crew. Funding evaporated for services related to public health, mental health, and child welfare. Despite the local history of catastrophic wildfires, most of the county had no publicly funded fire and ambulance services. Residents in those areas who wanted fire protection had to purchase it on a subscription basis from a for-profit company owned by a private equity firm based in New York City and a global firm based in Colorado. Hare had gone to business school before becoming commissioner. “They don’t teach you how to reduce,” he said. “They just teach you how to grow.”
These cuts took place in the second-poorest county in Oregon. At the time of the cuts, one in five people lived below the poverty line and one in three relied on food stamps. The county’s rural areas struggle with violence related to alcohol and meth addictions, and opioid use outpaces most of the country. Local common sense requires being able to distinguish a person on meth from a person on an opioid. Volunteers like Evans have trained to carry and administer Narcan injections to counteract an overdose. Ken Selig worked for the county as a deputy sheriff and medical examiner for thirty years. He is a father, so one of the hardest parts of the job was finding teenagers who had died of an overdose. He tried to tell himself it was a peaceful death, at least, as if they died in their sleep.
Across years of deep cuts to the county government accompanied by serious hardships, a particular kind of faithlessness settled in to Josephine’s political culture. Between 2004 and 2016, county voters went to the polls nine times to consider revenue measures that would help revive law enforcement, reopen the library, and improve other services. Every time, a majority voted the taxes down. By 2016, the county’s sheriff, Dave Daniel, was flummoxed. One argument in particular bugged him. “People say, ‘Something really bad is going to have to happen before our citizenry starts supporting itself.’ Really bad. Well it’s already happened! It’s come and gone, and it did not shake the tree at all.”
Sheriff Daniel could have been referring to lots of “really bad” events. He might have meant one of the recent homicides, especially the murder of two elderly people by a stranger in their home. Or maybe Sheriff Daniel was thinking of the infamous 911 call in August 2012, when a woman reported a violent ex-boyfriend trying to break into her home. The 911 dispatcher had no one to send—the sheriff’s department had no one on duty on weekends and the nearest state police officer was hours away. The dispatcher stayed on the phone for ten minutes, coaching the caller to hide or ask the man to go away, until the intruder broke into the woman’s home and assaulted her. The following week, the sheriff in office at that time issued a press release warning victims of domestic violence with restraining orders to “consider relocating to an area with adequate law enforcement services.” As the tragedies accumulated, local voters kept saying no new taxes.
Those events probably did shake the tree. Pretty much everyone agreed that crime was an urgent problem. Concealed carry permits for self-defense surged. That adaptation wasn’t good enough, Evans explains, for the many retirees in town who “can’t defend themselves the way they used to.” Many people, including Sheriff Daniel, felt that as law enforcement in Josephine continued to dwindle, the county would attract more serious crime. Drugs would get worse, the sellers more violent. “If you don’t pull out the dressers every now and then to clean out the house spiders,” says local leader and activist Kate Dwyer, “you get black widows. There is a niche for a top predator.” What residents did not agree on was whether new funds for government could help.
Meanwhile, state and federal lawmakers were losing their will to keep sending emergency funds to Josephine and other rural Oregon counties. They argued that people in Josephine needed to do more to help themselves by passing a ballot measure for new local taxes. It was not enough that sizable minorities had voted to approve levies in the past. Residents who supported new taxes had to find a way to start winning.
To solve their problems, residents would have to work together. But people in Josephine had been on their own for years—whether it was Maya battling addiction, or Evans trying to help her, or any resident worried about rising crime. Isolation started a vicious cycle that undermined the trust needed for cooperation.
There is more to say about how Josephine County got to this point. There is much more to say about the road residents are building to get past it. This book is about what happens when local governments and other shared institutions empty out in places where people still live. It is about what happens when residents fight to save their town.
FIRST BROKE, THEN FAITHLESS
The problem of citywide poverty
Josephine County is one of four places explored up close in the chapters that follow. I’ll introduce the other three in a moment, but their stories and this book are rooted in a national problem. American poverty is stacking up in particular cities, towns, and counties. When local governments are populated mostly by low-income people, there is typically much less money for public services. Weak, broke local governments make it harder for residents to lead decent lives on low incomes or get their families out of poverty. Entire towns become poverty traps.
I’ll shorthand this problem as “citywide poverty” or “border-to-border low-income” towns.II Incomes are depressed across much of the town, not just in small pockets. Sociologists can (and I hope will) develop a more refined metric for this idea, but for the purposes of this book I will use these two terms to refer to (1) a single municipality (whether a city, town, or village) or the unincorporated areas of a rural county government (2) that serves a population in which at least 20 percent of residents live under the poverty line, where (3) median incomes are less than two-thirds of the state median income. Combined, these metrics describe a local jurisdiction with widespread poverty as well as fewer people living at higher incomes.
Even before the Great Recession, citywide poverty was a growing problem. Between 2000 and 2009, there was a 31 percent increase in the number of municipalities, counties, and census-designated places where at least one in five people live under the poverty line. In 2020 numbers, the term “poverty line” stands for the hard reality of a family of four living on less than $26,246 per year—less than $2,200 a month in pretax income. The Foreclosure Crisis made matters worse, by divesting so many low- and middle-income homeowners of both their home and their only economic asset.
Places of citywide poverty vary. Some are big cities, small cities, or historic suburbs. Others are rural. Some vote blue, others red. Some are nearly all white, all Black, all Latino, or all Native American.III Some are the most diverse communities in America. Racial and ethnic violence, segregation, and discrimination helps explain how some border-to-border poor places developed, and why they remain poor. Citywide poor places may have held their population or shrunk. They may have always been low-income, or were once known for a strong working class, or once had pockets of wealth. Some are literally poor from border to border, others still have a few comfortable blocks or neighborhoods with lovingly tended homes. Most have low rates of college attainment, which makes it harder for residents to find a job with a livable income.
Citywide poverty is distinct from, but related to, the way people sort at bigger scales (the region) and at smaller ones (the neighborhood). Since 1980, the wealthiest regions of the country have seen incomes increase much faster than the modest gains elsewhere, leading to stark regional inequality. In thirty-one states, one or two metropolitan areas account for more than half the state’s gross domestic product (GDP). The most familiar example of this pattern is New York City, where the metro area accounts for 80 percent of New York state’s total GDP. Most of the country is heading in the same direction. The Boston region drives more than three-quarters of the Massachusetts economy, though the state has 10,000 square miles with about 350 towns and cities. In Oregon and Washington, the metro regions of Portland and Seattle are thriving while huge areas of their states struggle. Same in North Carolina beyond the Charlotte and Triangle regions; Iowa apart from Des Moines; Georgia outside Atlanta. Chicago’s economic output not only drives the Illinois economy but surpasses adjacent Ohio’s entire GDP.
Weak regions lacked the assets, good fortune, and strong networks needed to transform historic manufacturing centers into nodes of the knowledge economy. They never developed a nationally competitive hub for finance, insurance, law, and real estate services, as in New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Some had colleges, but not the STEM-focused research universities of Boston, Pittsburgh, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Some regions had spectacular natural amenities, but they were too far from growing metros with growing paychecks to take off as major tourist destinations. They never had the luck of rearing business giants who came back to their hometowns (as in Seattle), nor the substantial government operations of cities such as D.C. or Atlanta. What is the future for the towns beyond the biggest metros in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, California, Texas, Maine, and many other states?
Many municipalities of citywide poverty are located in weaker regions, including in historic industrial areas carved up into dozens of small municipal governments. Each one must carry its own budget, elected officials, and employees. But citywide poverty can be found in strong, growing regions, too, which often have a mix of high-income and low-income suburbs. When wealthier suburbs use their land-use authority to block multifamily housing that low-wage workers can afford, these workers must crowd into low-income suburbs with cheaper housing.
Just as border-to-border poor municipalities are affected by the regions “above,” they are affected by the neighborhoods “below.” By definition, border-to-border poor cities encompass multiple poor neighborhoods. At least since the publication of William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged in 1987, sociologists have shown how much neighborhoods matter. They shape safety, economic opportunities, and environmental conditions. With the rise of giant data sets and the computing tools to investigate them, economists and sociologists have confirmed and further explored how the neighborhood around a household can depress a child’s lifetime income and educational outcomes.
Citywide poverty is not demonstrably “worse” (however one might define that word) than neighborhood or regional poverty. A household can face serious hardships whether it is rooted in a poor region, a poor city, a poor neighborhood, or all of the above. But the problem of local governments that serve high-poverty neighborhoods across most of their territory represents a specific and understudied pattern. Shallow tax bases in jurisdictions of high need depress revenues. Federal and state governments can and do share revenues with all local governments, including poor ones. But apart from a temporary bump during the COVID-19 pandemic, the state and the federal proportion of local revenues has been in decline for decades.
That means cities and counties become more reliant on revenues from local taxes, fines, and fees. If a city’s housing stock and job base is in decline, those forces will drag down property values, which in turn drag down property tax revenues. Decreased investments in new buildings and renovations not only reinforce physical decline, they generate fewer permitting fees for local governments. Shrinking commercial districts generate fewer sales tax revenues. Same for revenues on other transactions that some states allow their municipalities to tax, such as payrolls, hotel stays, restaurant tabs, alcohol sales, real estate transfers, and business licenses.
When local governments have less money coming in, they can take out debt, raise local taxes and fees, lay off staff, and sell public land. They can (and nearly always do) defer improvements to obsolete infrastructure and technology, and keep using worn-out buildings, vehicles, and equipment. High-poverty cities and counties pay their employees less for work that is higher risk and more challenging. Many defer compensation for employees by offering pension benefits rather than competitive salaries, and then they can’t save the money needed to meet those pension contracts. Their politicians try to bundle subsidies and tax breaks to lure big employers, but they compete with so many other local governments that the “winning” municipality typically gets a political victory but loses money over the life of the deal. Border-to-border places have become infamous for the worst revenue-raising technique of all—many have developed elaborate, regressive schemes of civil and criminal code enforcement for the purpose of extracting fines and fees from residents and drivers passing through town.
Each of these moves makes the city less livable for residents and businesses. In public services, as in so much of life, you get what you pay for, which drives the gaping inequality among cities. Decades into a process of fiscal decline, a local government will have no more loans to take, taxes to raise, services to privatize, or assets worth selling. As the city reduces or eliminates staff, local government seems less competent and more irritating. Infrastructure and public space decays. “It’s death by a thousand cuts,” says Reverend Joan Ross of Detroit, referring to the city’s collapse in services. “It takes you a long time to bleed to death. But you do.”
This book chronicles the human wounds left by decades of deep cuts to local government. Excluding education, broke local governments typically spend most of their budgets on emergencies and public safety alone. That would include police dispatch for violent crimes, under-resourced fire protection with aging equipment, emergency public works (such as repair of an erupting water main), and the maintenance of aging sanitation systems. School districts continue to manage education, albeit with terrible budget woes of their own, but many city and town governments are no longer pursuing a vision beyond reactive public safety. Containment, rather than betterment, defines the character of public services. People with choices choose to leave. For those who stay behind, this war of attrition makes them more trapped and more poor.
We have left local governments and other shared institutions to fade where people need them most. To achieve self-sufficiency—including the option to move to a place with better opportunities—poor residents need local governments that work. They can’t afford to pay out of pocket for everything they need, including safe drinking water, sewage disposal, flood control, sidewalks, internet access, and good police. They may need libraries, buses to get to work, or community colleges to reach for better jobs. If those opportunities come at too steep a price, they cannot pay it. Yet among local government functions, only K-12 public school (about 6.5 hours per day for 180 days a year) is broadly guaranteed by law.
Depleted local governments do not mean that residents live without any government at all. On the contrary, the state is dominant in our poorest places. But it is not necessarily there to help. Other than local police and public schools, the face of government in urban and rural areas of concentrated poverty has increasingly become state systems—like civil courts enforcing eviction and foreclosure orders, criminal courts, prisons, child welfare systems. From afar, the federal government enacts tax, environmental, labor, or trade policies that many low-income households expect will reduce their incomes. Foreign policy actions affect immigrants’ home nations, and immigration laws separate residents from loved ones. Actions by higher tiers of government have the power to trigger severe hardships in a person’s life, including the loss of liberty, a child, a parent, a home, or a job.
In declining areas, residents look around and ask, “What is standing between me and the life I want?” They find answers. Across the political spectrum, it is easy to conclude that the problem is government action, not government absence. Low-income people have too many experiences of government that punishes, delays, or collects. They have too few experiences of government that prevents problems, invests in their future, or improves their quality of life. The far left and the far right, the poorest urban and the poorest rural communities, rarely agree about government’s potential to improve. But they often share a deep cynicism that, as currently run, their governments have the public interest at heart.
Our smallest governments are at the frontlines of both the perception and the reality of American government. They affect people’s safety, comfort, and life chances. They can create, protect, or destroy wealth. When they work well, city and county governments help children do better than their parents. When they do not, they help seal the economic fate now associated with childhood zip code. Local governments do not just reflect inequality. They help drive it.
LEARNING FROM FOUR PLACES
Discarded, Reimagined America
The chapters that follow are written portraits of places. For better or worse, the writer fell in love with her subjects. They reassured me that progress against the hardships of citywide poverty is possible.
Each town was a toiling labor colony of the First Gilded Age, a hometown of the mid-century middle class, and, by late century, a crater of postindustrialism. Each was once famous: for industrial prowess, for labor uprisings, for the booming West, for immigrant diversity, for wartime productivity, for working-class homeownership, and for the textiles, timber, shoes, food products, or cars that their people made. Their physical environments show this common heritage: neighborhoods with modest houses, shuttered mill buildings, contaminated land, and obsolete infrastructure. Their social environments do, too. Households are held back not just by lower levels of college attainment, but also lower levels of literacy. The same freeways, train lines, and rivers that once made these places good at moving products in the industrial economy now make them convenient for moving illicit drugs. Drug trafficking brings addiction and child neglect, as well as guns.
Marking their century-long cycle of poverty to prosperity to poverty again, this book brings these places together on the terms of their latest linked fate. The twenty-first century, and especially the Great Recession, has slammed these towns’ residents and their government finances. If you look at a curve of the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States, it bounces up and down between 1970 and 2000, ranging from a high of 19.6 million jobs to a low of 16.8 million. Then in 2000 it crashes, diving to 11.5 million jobs by 2010. The manufacturing sector had continued to grow, but the number of manufacturing jobs had fallen steeply. Those job losses were concentrated in places where industry had flourished in the early twentieth century—hubs of steel production, coal mining, consumer product manufacturing, and related industries. The low-wage service sector became the main supplier of jobs for workers without college degrees. Labor economist Enrico Moretti captured the result: “Today an American is significantly more likely to work in a restaurant than a factory.”
Places of citywide poverty in the Rust Belt and Sun Belt took some of the hardest losses from the Foreclosure Crisis. Despite the historic economic expansion that followed the recession, 2010 to 2020 is referred to as a “lost decade” for state and local government finance, because those governments were never able to make up for deep, sustained losses after the crash. The places in this book, like dozens of other towns in America, had fallen so short of revenues by 2012 that their local governments began slashing their staff and budgets. Just before or during these difficult years, each of the places in this book went through a harmful cycle of weak management, if not corruption, which further stigmatized their governments at a time of peak economic vulnerability.
The fifty states reacted to local fiscal crisis in different ways. Some, notably California and Alabama, authorized their most financially distressed cities to file for bankruptcy. Northeastern states (including Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island) refined receivership programs in which state officials support or take over a city’s finances. Michigan intensified its receivership program while also allowing its biggest city to file for bankruptcy. Other states, such as Oregon, took over specific public services that insolvent local governments could no longer afford. Most southern states did nothing, leaving local governments to cut their budgets and face their creditors in court. A few, like Missouri and Tennessee, arguably did worse than nothing, by further constraining their local governments without giving them better choices.
In the face of all these hardships, advocates in the four places profiled in this book found a way forward. This book tells the story of that progress in the 2016–2020 period. Leaders took advantage of post-recession growth to stabilize their finances. New leadership improved the reputation of their governments. Community groups sought new strategies to stop violence and heal its damage. Drawing on a heritage of resilience wired in town culture, local institutions went to the heart of the employment and housing challenges straining their families. Stockton, Lawrence, and Detroit pursued the moral imperative of distributing opportunity into communities of color in ways that earlier generations of working-class cities had failed to do. When the COVID-19 pandemic health and unemployment crisis hit these towns in 2020, the institutions and networks built in the years before became more important than ever.
The communities in this book are unique, distinct from one another and the rest of America. I am not claiming they are representative of other places, nor that they are progressing systematically faster than other places. I chose them for this book because I found them to be good teachers. In their particulars and in juxtaposition, these places demonstrate how chronic, citywide poverty emerges. The communities’ differences (in terms of urbanization level, racial composition, and politics) help see similar problems from different angles, and distinct characteristics from one. Each place has advocates focused on four of the biggest problems in poor places: trauma from violence; mistrust of law enforcement; the skills gap; and unstable, unsafe housing.
While the places covered here run west to east, they are only in the political “blue” or “purple” states of the American north. Towns in so-called “red states” have good work underway too, and their challenges are comparable. Some of the most entrenched poverty and brokest, smallest local governments in America are in the Deep South, the Southwest, the inner-mountain west, the plains, and the solid red states of the Rust Belt and Appalachia. But pathways toward solutions in those places will have to be different. Their constitutions and state laws lock their governments in even tighter revenue and tax controls than other states, which means they lack the legal authority to do much beyond rudimentary services (often by contract) and business development. State electorates can reform those powers, but state-level reform movements are a subject for another book. So in the end, this book drops anchor in two conservative local communities, but none where citywide poverty is wired into state law.
STOCKTON (CHAPTER 1)
Satellite images of California show a network of water veins that carry the state’s inland rivers to the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. These are the wetlands of the Delta, a region at the northern end of the San Joaquin Valley. The Delta hosts a giant water engineering system that transforms what would be floodlands into one of the world’s most important breadbaskets. Stockton is a waterfront city on this Delta, set apart from the eastern cities of the San Francisco Bay Area by a long stretch of dry grasses across a mountain pass. Sometimes these yellow grasses look inhospitable, without a tree in sight. But when the sun hits them at the right angle, they look like another reason California is called the Golden State.
If you could trace Stockton’s bloodlines like its waterways, they would fan across the globe. Across its history, the city and its region have drawn refugees and seekers from around the world, making Stockton the most diverse city in America. A representative group of twenty residents would include about eight Latinos, four Asian-Americans, four white people, two African-Americans, one Native American, and a multiracial child of one of the nation’s highest metropolitan rates of intermarriage. The chronically low wages of farm work and food processing, the automation and offshoring of much of the city’s manufacturing, and entrenched racial segregation have kept much of Stockton’s population both poor and politically weak. During the Great Recession, Stockton faced a higher rate of foreclosures than any city in the nation, except Detroit.
Modern Stockton, home to more than 300,000 people, is a politically “purple” city in a conservative rural region. Until the Great Recession pushed the city into bankruptcy, which challenged business-as-usual city politics, Stockton’s elected officials of both parties were beholden to real estate developers. They pushed the city to subsidize new suburban neighborhoods and redevelop the downtown, rather than to reinvest in the people or environments of older neighborhoods.
For decades, police and prisons were the city’s main answer to the dangerous synergy of chronic economic stress, drug markets, and gun violence in the city’s many poor areas. This approach will one day be as discredited as the era of treating pneumonia with bloodletting, or syphilis with mercury pills. Stockton is seeking better answers. For the first time, the city has a critical mass of leaders inside and outside government who are facing the high levels of exposure to local violence. Trauma counseling now works to heal victims, witnesses, and survivors of violence. Community groups are reclaiming sidewalks and public spaces to allow people free movement outdoors. Their work is not only a humanitarian intervention, it is a public safety strategy. A community of people is finally trying, in the words of youth and racial justice leader Raymond Aguilar, “to really fix the broken pieces of what Stockton has become.”
JOSEPHINE COUNTY (CHAPTER 2)
Southern Oregon, which includes Josephine, is one of the most beautiful regions in the United States. The Siskiyou Mountains lift some of the tallest trees on earth closer to the sky. Three wild rivers cut whitewater canyons above seams of gold and copper. Fertile valleys can grow everything from berries to hops, gladiolas to melons. The economy has boomed and busted twice, first on gold, then on timber. A new rush is now afoot: the region has proven ideal for cultivating marijuana. “It’s the Climate,” explains the sign across the largest town’s main street. Rain and sun. More than 80,000 people call Josephine home.
Rural Josephine County has long attracted people looking for more than fertile land. They wanted to escape things: taxes, suburban materialism, child support debt, homophobia, arrest warrants, the urban cost of living, day jobs, nuclear annihilation, clothing, California. They came to find liberty, off the grid and in the forest. Since others did too, they found a freedom lacking social conformity. “We all celebrate to our own peculiar temperaments,” a local publisher wrote in 1907. As a modern-day local put it, “Josephine County has very little racial diversity, but there is every conceivable way of being a white person here.”
Josephine County, far West and far right, has managed one of the most extreme anti-government experiments in contemporary America. At first glance, the budget cuts to law enforcement and jails described earlier in this introduction may look like the changes called for by criminal justice reformers. But calls to “defund the police” accompany calls to shift resources toward other forms of violence prevention and conflict mediation. In Josephine, local officials cut law enforcement funding as an emergency budget measure following cuts to everything else too. To recommit to any public role at all in reducing crime has required nothing less than a grassroots, pro-tax social movement in one of the most anti-government counties in America.
LAWRENCE (CHAPTER 3)
Arriving in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on I-495 from Boston, you see the Merrimack River turn a broad curve through the center of town. Brick mills stand on either side of the river, with hundreds of symmetrical windows set under hand-built arches. The scale of the buildings conveys the city’s former significance: if you stood one of these mills on end, it would be taller than the Empire State Building. Some of the glass in the windows is broken or boarded, but most of it still reflects the sky.
In the early twentieth century, those mills teemed, each like its own small city, with workers drawn from fifty-one nations. In the Bread & Roses Strike of 1912, mill workers rose up to help battle the dangerous poverty of the First Gilded Age in one of the nation’s most effective labor uprisings. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, one of the strike leaders, paraphrased Voltaire to remark on the advance of history in Lawrence. Referring to the clatter of Belgian immigrants’ wooden shoes in the mills, she said, “Ever the velvet slippers coming down the stairs of history and the wooden shoes going up!” Yet the city’s businesses moved and shrank so much that by the 1980s, there were fewer footsteps of any kind in the mills. The velvet-slipper set was back in charge. The people of Lawrence became low-wage workers in the Second Gilded Age service economy of the high-tech Route 128 corridor. Former President Trump and recent governors in Maine and New Hampshire have blamed Lawrence for the regional opioid crisis, stigmatizing the city as a place that needs more police to crack down, as Maine’s former governor Paul LePage put it, on “Black and Hispanic” drug dealers.
Lawrence’s population changed during the century, but the city never stopped earning its nickname the “Immigrant City.” Puerto Ricans recruited as farmworkers to Massachusetts in the 1940s and ’50s began to settle in Lawrence, establishing a Spanish-speaking home base that drew in later Puerto Ricans, as well as Dominicans. Some came straight to Lawrence to escape poverty, or U.S.-backed authoritarianism in the Dominican Republic. Others fled unemployment and the heroin and crack cocaine epidemics of the 1970s to the 1990s in New York City. Caribbean footfalls later carved space for other refugees and economic migrants from Central America and points south, earning Lawrence a second nickname as the “Latino City.”
The strike tactics of Bread and Roses days are mostly unusable in today’s economy. The city’s population works for hundreds of employers in dozens of industries, scattered all across the region. Yet today, as then, Lawrence should be known for mobilizing its people to raise adult wages. And today, as then, Lawrence’s leaders are forming strong, multiethnic networks among residents, then mobilizing those networks to make government better. In so doing, they have taken their city back from “machine politics” and transformed the work of the city’s government: focusing it on the needs and futures of the city’s residents, not on outside private interests.
DETROIT (CHAPTER 4)
I was not a fan of Motown before starting this book. Like most Americans, I could hum and sing along to classics like “Dancing in the Street” and “You Can’t Hurry Love.” But I thought Motown songs were just too sweet and… peppy. I began to hear those songs differently as I let Detroit’s writers and people teach me the history of Black Detroit. In the Hitsville heyday of the 1960s, the city’s most important Black neighborhoods had just been ground under by bulldozers. Discriminatory rents and wages had long gouged Black households, and the demolitions intensified desperate shortages of housing just as the city lost its industrial job base. Motown’s romantic, vibrant beats were rebellious in their way—an insistence on Black joy and perseverance. Motown was a celebration of life, love, neighborhood, and family, come what may.
To hear this meaning in Motown reveals an even more moving truth about the music and the city still to come. In 1971, Detroiter Marvin Gaye left behind the defiant optimism of his Motown Gold hits to release “Inner City Blues.” Human resilience, Gaye seemed to be showing, comes not just from celebration and gratitude. Resilience is rooted in mourning for that which has been lost. It encompasses self-respect. Gaye, and generations of the city’s musicians and artists, offer nourishment for survival as well as a demand for change. That, I have gotten to see, is Black Detroit.
That fortitude has been more necessary than ever, as the city’s housing markets cycled through a devastating era of exploitation in the 1970s, only to be outdone during the Foreclosure Crisis of the late 2000s. The Great Recession brought a decade of housing foreclosures (and a bankruptcy crisis) that turned over the ownership of nearly half of the homes in the city. Outsiders came buying, and today, in this symbolic capital of Black homeownership, a majority of households in the city are tenants. As has been true across most of the city’s modern history, Detroit is better understood as a symbol of the African American struggle to escape the debt peonage of the Jim Crow South and to secure basic autonomy through land ownership.
Detroit is diversifying faster than any other big city, but that future stands on the rubble of what Black Detroit has lost. So Detroit’s residents are drawing on a heritage of resilience to invent ways to block displacement and restore Black land ownership. As scrappy and insurgent as it has ever been, Detroit is reaching for a twenty-first-century vision of reconstruction and reparations.
Individuals and industries have long tied these places, and others of citywide poverty, together. Lines of internal migration have moved whole communities among these places, some on journeys that were hopeful, others that were desperate. The Ohio River, which originates just downstream from the low-income town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, later runs through the broke city of Portsmouth, Ohio, and on to Mississippi. The Ohio served as a conduit for enslaved people “sold down the river” from Kentucky to face the cruelty of Mississippi cotton plantations. One or two generations later, some of their descendants fled the violence and entrapment of sharecropping by heading west to Stockton and California’s Central Valley. Once there, they joined migrants from Southeast Asia in a cannery strike for fair wages led by a subsidiary of the union at the helm of the Bread and Roses Strike in Lawrence. Today, the border-to-border low-income towns of Yazoo City in the Mississippi Delta and the rural areas of Kings County in California’s Central Valley both rely on federal prisons as their primary job base. Andrew Carnegie built an early twentieth century anti-union steel empire in the Monongahela Valley, then established a philanthropic legacy that is chipping away at the margins of citywide poverty in towns across the country. A billionaire currently remaking downtown Detroit built his fortune in a mortgage industry that confiscated a generation of wealth in Sun Belt and Rust Belt cities alike.
This is a book about four places, for the sake of many others. At a time of faithlessness about the future, the people in the pages to come have helped me imagine—believe—that a time could come when we’d look back on the narrowing of racial, economic, and spatial inequality and describe how we did it.
“WHAT WOULD I DO IF I WON?”
Listening for Solutions
The road to this book began in the Great Recession and Foreclosure Crisis, which triggered the biggest surge in municipal bankruptcy and fiscal distress since the Great Depression. I did a national study of all the local governments that entered a state program for fiscal crisis, then looked in depth at several states’ specific legal systems governing taxes, budget insolvency, and local government power.
Across these years of research, I observed one dynamic above all. These local governments were not just broke, they governed poor people. They were broke mostly because their people were poor. And their people stayed poor in part because they were broke. But state legal systems for local fiscal crisis were not designed for anti-poverty work. They tried to clear out some debt, shirk a few contracts, and generate some cash from selling the governments’ properties.
I thought this book would be about the problem of citywide poverty and broke governments. Why, where, and how does poverty stack up within single jurisdictions? What happens when it does? What kinds of mistakes have local governments made trying to manage it? How do border-to-border low-income governments raise and spend money compared to mixed or wealthy ones? Advocates facing these issues already know what they are up against, but they did not seem to realize how many communities were in the same situation.
Those plans for a problem-centered book evolved in 2017 in Lawrence. I was at a fundraiser for a nonprofit where I ended up chatting with Joshua Alba, a wise twenty-something working at a youth arts program. “Anything top down will be an injustice here,” Alba said. Policymakers “can’t just come in and address the big issues quickly.” But at the grassroots level, there was no obvious strategy. Alba told me he had considered running for city council, but he was wrestling with the question: “What would I do if I won?” He thought Lawrence needed a progressive city government platform, but wasn’t sure what that looked like for such a poor city.
I wanted to be useful to people like Alba, whether they plan to run for elected office or want to fight for their town in other ways. A book that began with the (admittedly terrible) placeholder title Living Places, Dying Governments evolved into one called The Fight to Save the Town. Meanwhile, Alba ran successfully for the school board, where he is developing his own vision of a progressive platform for Lawrence. I came to think of this book as a way of sharing information among people already serving their towns and a way of recruiting others to join their work.
Alba was right about the limits of top-down solutions. The answers that people in border-to-border low-income places had found through trial and error were more valuable than those I could find by reading. So I went looking for people who understood the challenge of citywide poverty. Answers could not just come from local governments, because they were too broke and denuded of staff to accomplish enough on their own. Any fight to save the town in the United States today involves the private sector too; especially nonprofits working alongside government to make sure people in town have more choices and chances.
Such experts were easy to find. The research base for this book includes more than 250 interviews, primarily between 2016 and 2020. The people I met with showed me around their towns, took me to community meetings and events, and reflected on their work. These experts included mayors and nonprofit leaders, cops and teachers, priests and parents, shopkeepers and artists, bankers and builders, coaches and counselors. Some have book smarts and others street smarts, but they all apply what they know to their community’s problems. Some are elected themselves, while others work in coalition to keep elected officials accountable to residents.
To borrow the words of Lawrence-born poet Robert Frost, these advocates are moving even on this, “the darkest evening of the year.” They “have miles to go before [they] sleep.” No matter. These chapters are stories of journeys, not destinations. Pretty quickly, and also by chance in Lawrence, I found a good term to describe the core of what their work was all about.
NEXT GENERATION GATEWAY CITIES
Resident-Centered Governance
Lawmakers in Massachusetts (and, increasingly, in other places) call early industrial hubs “gateway cities,” because they gave new immigrants a first home and job in America. I came to think of the term in a second, socioeconomic way as well. A gateway city also helps poor families build economic security and find a decent quality of life, whether they stay in town or move away. A gateway city is a good way to describe the alternative to a poverty trap.
What work is needed to turn declining blue-collar communities back into gateway cities? The American commitment to economic mobility turns on this project. The American commitment to equal opportunity depends on it too, because our poorest communities are among our most racially and ethnically diverse.
A gateway city neither pushes people to move, nor locks them into place. It gives them choices. Jessica Andors, a local leader in Lawrence, put it well: “Lawrence should be good enough to get a good start. It should be a healthy enough community that people can come in here, be welcome, learn English, retain their own language and culture, pass that on to their kids. And get a start, even if they do move out and go other places.” It’s not that she or others described in this book want their college graduates or most economically stable residents to leave town. These advocates are working hard to build the town’s business community, improve the efficacy of the government workforce, role model the value of education for children, and reinforce civic engagement. But people should not be staying because they cannot afford to leave. And above all, they should not be staying because their hometown broke them with trauma, addiction, and hopelessness.
This book chronicles good work toward a gateway-city vision for Stockton, Josephine, Lawrence, and Detroit. It is about several of the most fundamental ingredients of flourishing and opportunity: mental health, personal safety, access to living wage jobs, and secure housing. It is about ways to put current residents at the center of governance—not some future population who might be recruited to live in the city, not outside businesses who might be incentivized to move to town, not suburbanites or tourists who might spend a few dollars in town, not contractors who want a piece of the city budget.
Education, of course, is central to gateway-city work, but this book is not about K-12 education. The Fight to Save the Schools is a book for another day. The way school districts are run and financed is connected to local organizing and town government to be sure, but in most states, school districts have much higher levels of centralized state funding and different management constraints. And K-12 education, unlike any of the other services explored in this book, is guaranteed by state law. There are legal grounds, not just political ones, to fight back when it is cut and minimized beyond recognition.
But the efforts described here do support schools and children. Even the best teachers and schools cannot save children from the migratory instability created by evictions, unlivable family wages, and traumatizing violence. This book explores what can be done outside a classroom in order for children to thrive inside. It asks what role local governments can play in preparing their residents—adults and children alike—for the higher skilled occupations for which the United States remains competitive in the global economy.
Because these stories of social change are true, they are not facile stories of brave leaders in red capes. Instead of waiting for transformative leaders or programs, the people in this book keep working at their challenges. Individuals matter—there are many described here in the admiring tones they deserve. Programs also matter. Some approaches to social problems are more effective than others. But when complex problems accumulate over decades, with no single villain to vanquish, they take time, networks, and experiments to solve. Although this book names individuals and organizations, it is ultimately about how they work together. It is about all the unnamed people who stand with them.
Nothing in these chapters will make a reader think, “They’ve got this.” High-poverty places are up against ferocious headwinds mostly beyond their control: the widening income gulf between the richest Americans and the service workers their lifestyles demand; the federal and state anti-tax activism that has constrained government from creating the kind of middle class the United States enjoyed fifty years ago; two generations of disinvestment combined with racial and socioeconomic discrimination in public policy; the deceptive marketing and overprescription of opioids, which has led to a historic addiction and overdose crisis; the loans taken and pensions promised by prior generations of leaders; the easy availability of guns, both legal and illegal; and more. The hardships in these cities will overwhelm readers sometimes, as they did me.
They don’t “got this,” but as with the “Symphony for a Broken Orchestra” described in the Prologue, these places make me think: if advocates can do the work described here under their current constraints, what might be possible if outsiders did more to help? What might be possible if we reduced those headwinds and freed the capacity in these places? The point of the Symphony was not to get a standing ovation for triumphing over mangled instruments. It was to remind the public of the meaning and potential of music so they would give a damn.
So I think of the chapters that follow more like a “proof of concept” than a “how-to.” The concept to prove is that progress is possible. To restore political will for action, we need to replace a discourse of lost causes with one about good causes. We have to look for improvement, not just transformation.
If the resident-centered networks described in this book could be summed up by a single photo, it might be one from a different border-to-border town. The photo depicts a blue message spray painted on the concrete walkway of an old pedestrian bridge in Braddock, Pennsylvania. The scene is gray and rainy. Pools of water reflect crisscrossing steel overhead and a chain link fence enclosing the sides. Braddock is one of the highest-poverty towns in the state, but the message does not say, “Welcome to Hell” or “God save us.” In careful, looping blue cursive, it says, “we will grow.” Braddock has been losing population for decades. Surely the person who wrote that knew the town was unlikely to grow its population or GDP. But I don’t read the message to be about those metrics. I like to think the growth they had in mind was more like healing, changing, and learning. And whatever they meant, “we will grow” is a better way to live.
The people in this book are working together to make their towns better places to grow—for anyone who needs or chooses it as their home, for as long as they do so. If they choose to leave to seek new opportunities and experiences elsewhere, an American gateway city will have done its job.
OF HELLHOLES, CROOKS, AND HEROES
Stopping the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Decline
I hate to delay you from meeting Stockton, a city that embodies so much of American history. But I feel compelled to offer one last frame. It’s my answer to this question: why is this a narrative book, rather than a data, law, or policy book?
The more I learned about these four places and those facing similar challenges, the more I came to believe that the way we talk and write about them is not only wrong, it is destructive. The prevailing narratives about high-poverty places fuel the cycle of poor and broke, broke and poor.
Our first distortion is to characterize America’s poorest places as “dying,” as if they were coming to the end of a lifespan. Cities have no inherent expiration date. The oldest on Earth are more than 10,000 years old. Yet academics and journalists describe hollowing cities and rural decline as if nature was just taking her course. Some of this eulogistic writing records memories of a place, as though it is already lost. It is a version of “ruin porn,” a critical way to describe photography of vines growing over abandoned buildings, burned out cars catching the sunlight just so, swingsets with no swings. Such work may be art or historical documentation. Its melancholy nostalgia may be beautiful. But it is misleading and harmful if taken as a portrait of a place where people still live.
The dismantling of civil society does not matter where tumbleweeds have taken over. A ghost town needs no cops because it has no robbers.IV But the United States has a much harder and more common problem today, in which shrinking governments are charged with protecting living people. Whatever their future, those communities have a present. Waves of residents may have left, but hundreds of thousands remain. Detroit is haunted by absence, but its population is still larger than that of Washington, D.C. It remains the biggest city in its state, like the troubled city of Newark. Cleveland and Buffalo have less than half their peak populations, but each retains more than 250,000 people. California cities like San Bernardino and Merced never depopulated; indeed, they have desperately tried to solve their fiscal problems through growth. Despite decades stuck in poverty, Helena, Arkansas, and Harlan County, Kentucky, still raise tens of thousands of school children.
Along with sad stories of urban “dying,” writing and speeches about high-poverty cities often read like gritty true-crime drama, with corrupt politicians, drugs, and guns. “City of Ruins” and “Apocalypse, New Jersey” (headlines about Camden, New Jersey) or “American Carnage” (the theme of Former President Trump’s inaugural address) are spectacles of this kind of writing. Forbes magazine and various click-bait blogs publish annual rankings of the “most miserable cities in America.” In at least three of the “winning” places ranked by Forbes, I heard about people who had burned the magazine at a community event. They were trying to turn the moment into underdog solidarity to shake off the insult of more dehumanizing press.
If voters and policymakers think the problem with a poor place is that it’s empty or mismanaged, they’ll also assume heroes can turn the city around. Urban “pioneers” can repopulate it, they’ll imagine, building “homesteads” that reclaim unused land. A great mayor can clean up city government, making good policy choices that lead the city back to prosperity. Benevolent CEOs can open warehouses or factories there and valiantly restore the job base.
Stories of hellholes, crooks, and heroes often have a veneer of empathy for the people living there. We feel sorry for them. But outlandish violence, with no acknowledgment of the people who care emotionally and physically for the wounded, makes a place seem unrecognizably dystopic. Stories of mismanagement make poverty and fiscal crisis seem self-inflicted. Outsiders take away an excuse for inaction, because action seems hopeless, dangerous, or foolish. This style of writing is tinged with voyeurism, as if written for readers who will never go to that place but feel curious about it. It gives a peephole through deep social divides. I think it is pitched particularly at high-income readers wanting to see inside low-income urban neighborhoods or rural areas known for intergenerational poverty. The wondering itself is not wrong—we’d be better off if social walls had many more holes in them. Better still if the holes were so big we walked through them to help and be helped. But any holes made by writing have to describe true pictures. That means more than bullets and blight.
Cities don’t get eviction orders enforced by a sheriff, but our stories of urban and rural “death” function as a self-fulfilling prophecy of atrophy and attrition. Residents who believe a place is going to hell will want to get the hell out. Those who are less likely to stay are less likely to vote, invest in improvements, open businesses, or run for office. The same disinvestment sets in for outsiders, as state and federal taxpayers decide they are tired of subsidizing government services to try to slow decline that seems unstoppable. In interviews for this book, several people told me that their local government could not “cut its way to prosperity.” They rarely bothered to say the corollary they took for granted: a local government can cut its way to further decline.
When so much stigma accumulates under a town’s name that progress seems impossible, it not only promotes non-intervention, it also undermines every one of the more activist public policy solutions to urban and rural decline. Dystopic writing helps perpetuate a dynamic similar to the one Mitchell Duneier has called the “pernicious circular logic of the ghetto.” Disinvestment, isolation, and segregation bring about deterioration and crime, which in turn help rationalize further disinvestment and exclusion.
Hellhole stories feed both the invention and failure of what I think of as suitcase solutions. Some commenters argue that when decline seems more like a trajectory than a rough patch, residents should move out of the city or region. Since no one seems to know “quite how to pick rural America up,” wrote one editorial, “maybe it is time to pack rural America up.” Rust Belt towns have heard such arguments for decades. Across the political spectrum, moving toward jobs is supposed to be built into American culture. But when people associate poor cities with high rates of crime and corruption, it is hard to motivate the largescale investments that would be needed to bring suitcase solutions to life, such as cash assistance to help millions of people move toward jobs. Without subsidies, telling people to buy their own way out of town is increasingly unrealistic when 39 percent of the country could not scrounge up $400 in cash in an emergency, let alone the costs of an initial place to stay or a security deposit in a job-rich area. And once they move, what family or friends will take care of their children for free? Who will care for their aging parents left back in their hometown? Leaving behind extended family, homeownership, and heritage looks like a high price to pay—especially for the “privilege” of renting an apartment on a floodplain outside Houston, or paying half of one’s income toward an apartment fringed with black mold in San Jose.
Some people, especially younger ones and newer immigrants, will move to opportunity anyway—at a human cost. To see the suitcase strategy as practiced in real life, visit the rest stop off the I-80 freeway in Vallejo, California, at two in the morning on any day of the year. You’ll see dozens of vehicles with sheets and shirts pinned in their windows so individuals, couples, and children can maintain some privacy while they sleep inside. Some have just finished work shifts, others will be starting them soon. All are scraping out a living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Some have no other home at all. Others, after a round of work shifts, will drive several hours to a small town with a weak job base in Northern California. People living in those cars are stuck without housing near their source of income, because local governments in job-rich areas are refusing to approve enough higher density housing. Those approvals are held back by the same racial discrimination and class bias that justified the abandonment of their hometowns in the first place. While the righteous battles continue to pursue higher density housing in growth areas, the people living in those cars should have other towns and other options.
Focusing on the ravages of concentrated poverty also undermines new maps and other regional solutions to place-based poverty. Several generations of academics, think tanks, and activists have argued we need to reorganize the territories that local governments serve. They have shown all the ways that local borders matter, because they determine which people and taxpayers are enclosed within a municipality or school district. These advocates fought for proposals to merge specific local governments together, or consolidate the rich and poor governments across a metro area into a single tax base. But by the time I went to graduate school in the early 2000s, dozens of these maps had been rejected by lawmakers or voters. The number of successful regional governments is so short I can list them on two hands, even as none of these really created a single joint government encompassing both schools and services. If representations of a region’s people and government are all about conflict and chaos, why would a neighboring government work with them?
Stories about heroes set us up to think we wouldn’t have to do anything as drastic as rearrange borders if we just had better decision makers. An expert can bring in some spreadsheet solutions, cutting costs or finding better deals without adding new funds or changing the rules of the game. If states intervene at all in local fiscal crisis, their go-to solution in recent years has been to appoint a fixer to take over a struggling municipality’s management. This person is typically chosen for technical expertise, whether or not they have the bedside manner to handle democratic input from a community in distress. Indeed, these appointees are chosen in part for their thick skin, so they can make budget cuts despite fierce opposition. To the degree the city’s bigger problems relate to chronic poverty, underemployment, and violence, selling a few assets or renegotiating some contracts are marginal gains.
How about DIY-ing local services for a heroic rescue? I think of this as the substitution solution. Private substitutes like churches, philanthropy, nonprofits, and volunteers try to take government’s place when it recedes. Indeed, broke cities create a natural experiment for the hypothesis that the private sector could do more and do it better if government hadn’t already crowded in first. If only we had a thinner state, this argument goes, charity and volunteerism would flower. The problem in broke cities is that private poverty precedes public poverty. The level of need accumulated across so many years overwhelms volunteers and local organizations. The terrible stigma and a fatalistic prognosis that travel with concentrated poverty undermines nonprofit and other private local institutions, not just government. The substitution that emerges in these places can be a moving expression of human compassion, creativity, and resilience. But soup-kitchen level charity rarely transforms lives or places.
Lastly, stories of hellholes waiting for heroes undermine the most interventionist strategy of all: give the local government more money. The right pejoratively calls this funding a bailout, the left calls it aid. Either way, dystopic stories feed a logic of tough-love fiscal rationality that blocks money solutions. If a place is bleeding population or resources for decades, shouldn’t we reserve public investment for somewhere else? Pay for success. Pick a winner. Don’t throw good money after bad. We treat cities and rural communities the same way Henry Ford II described consumer goods in 1955: “Obsolescence is the very hallmark of progress.” Public policy is rarely so candid. Yet a General Plan for Tulare County in rural California once said openly what many officials practice implicitly. That 1971 plan declared that its most impoverished farmworker communities had “no authentic future” and thus should not receive public investment in the water access they needed. The plan was to neglect these places into nonexistence. Fifty years later, most of these communities carry on, still without reliable water.
Today, among those states that even bother to have a fiscal intervention program to help their local governments facing insolvency, all of them now emphasize spreadsheet solutions over new maps or new money. Substitution and DIY services are popping up in a creative but haphazard mishmash across the country. Stories of crooks, heroes, and hellholes are part of the reason so many people inside and outside these communities have stopped believing that progress is possible.
Our hypothesis that internal migration or tough love would solve regional concentrations of poverty was wrong. Regional governments, fiscal experts, outpourings of volunteers, and emergency aid never came to the rescue either. Some industrial and rural regions dutifully lost 30 to 60 percent of their population, even as millions of people still live there. Others are still populated, but crumple under the weight of poverty that is now intergenerational. Along the way, the residents and public servants who stayed have suffered the despair and violence associated with urban crack, rural meth, and everyone’s opioids. They have lost jobs, homes, and loved ones.
Our failed politics added up to atrophy, which looks more like a bludgeon than a hospice program. Atrophy has yielded one clear result: multigenerational disinvestment in the living people rooted in so-called “dying places.” Above all, that disinvestment in their people is the root of their greatest problems, and ours.
LOVE AND MISERY
Tools for a season of austerity
The book you have here is not an obituary, or a memorial to fallen glory. I have experienced sorrow in learning and writing it, but this is not nonfiction set to Springsteen’s “Youngstown.” I have also experienced anger, seeing up close how extreme wealth for some has been built at the direct and indirect expense of others. But I have tried not to write a screed either, because I still align myself with what civil rights leaders call the “call in,” rather than “call out,” tradition of social change. I believe in the better angels of American poverty, but so too, I hold on to hope for the better angels of American wealth. And anyway, seeing how big the loyalty, friendship, and purpose had to be to show up for problems this big, I felt another emotion sink in: I began to feel envy. So this book is, in its way, a tribute.
There is no disguising the hardship in these towns, and any attempt to whisk it out of view understates the urgency of the work needed. I have tried to stay close to a reflection by Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Supreme Court. She was writing about her alcoholic father, but the sentiment seems just right for this book. “You can’t say: This much love is worth this much misery. They’re not opposites that cancel each other out; they’re both true at the same time.” A book that is true to these places must see both the love and the misery. They don’t cancel each other out.
In Josephine County, I think a woman named Kate Lasky would agree with that idea. Lasky became the library director there in 2010, after the public library had shut down and volunteers reopened the main branch as a small nonprofit. In 2011, the circuitry failed in the main branch and half the overhead lights blacked out. She and the library volunteers debated what to do. They could use up their reserve funds to make repairs, but some volunteers thought they should start using flashlights instead. That would show people how defunded the library had become, they thought. Repairs, on the other hand, might suggest the library didn’t need new funds. Lasky disagreed. She believed they could not progress by proclaiming, “Save us we’re dying!” She thought it would feed into a destructive psychology she observed in town—a fatalistic acceptance that the needs were so dire that things could not get better. Even worse, the cuts to shared institutions seemed to reflect the view that residents didn’t deserve more.
In a democracy, Lasky reflected, aren’t we the government? “It’s supposed to serve us,” she said. “If it’s us, and then we tear it down, what does that say?” Lasky took a stand. “We’re going to invest in ourselves, no matter what,” she said. The risk that people would think the library was “rich,” she thought, was outweighed by the hope that a good library would help people in the community feel that they were rich. So they fixed the overhead lights. Then they fundraised to renovate the main library’s reading nook for children. Then volunteers made 14,000 phone calls to voters on a ballot measure to restore public funding to the library and open hours at the rural branches. After years of losing at the ballot box, they won. It was just one of the victories heading their way.
So this book is written to celebrate and support a new generation of people-centered leadership like Lasky’s. It is both for and about young leaders like Michael Tubbs, a city councilmember in Stockton from 2013 to 2016 and then mayor from 2017 to 2020. Tubbs grew up in Stockton, in one of the poorest neighborhoods in California. He was elected to serve his city at a time of acute crisis. His incumbent opponent had been arrested. A homicide surge had terrorized residents. The city had broken records for its foreclosure rates, then made national headlines again as the biggest municipal bankruptcy since the Great Depression. Tubbs and his coalition knew that underneath these challenges was an even harder reality: intergenerational poverty trapped in racially segregated neighborhoods traumatized by violence. But they had never given up on Stockton, and they refused to do so now.
On the night of Tubbs’s mayoral inauguration, the region experienced torrential rainfall, with roadway flood warnings across Stockton. It didn’t seem to matter. More than 1,000 people trekked to see his speech, and the arena was filled with cheering and tears of joy. “The energy they brought!” says city councilman Jesús Andrade, also a native son who returned to help heal his city. “The rain was symbolic—like the water was washing away the garbage, the stigma. It’s a new era of leadership.”
Change is hard, and sometimes four steps forward is followed by two back. I regret that Tubbs lost his bid for reelection in a narrow race four years later. But I think Andrade was still right. Those people at the Tubbs inauguration, and Tubbs’s and Andrade’s years in office, were all steps to set the city on a better path. A growing movement of people keep working at the city’s challenges. Curtis Smith, a pastor in Stockton, put it this way as we discussed his candlelit walks at night to interrupt a period of peak gun violence: “In this season of austerity,” he told me, “we have to hold each other up. We have to ask: ‘What will this city look like if…’? We have to be that voice of hope. We cannot believe the narrative that has been written about us. We have to face the facts, but also faith the facts.”
No one has a playbook for creating twenty-first century, racially equitable gateway cities. But the four communities that follow have helped me believe we could write one.
- I. In nearly all cases, this book uses the full names of real people. Those persons identified only by first name have been anonymized.
- II. In this book, I’ll use the words “towns” and “cities” to refer to municipal governments.
- III. This book capitalizes Black in order to acknowledge the global history, politics, and culture behind that term. I do not capitalize white, however, given the history of that term when capitalized as a signal for hate and subordination. I have chosen to use the word Latino rather than Latino/a or Latinx as a reflection of the predominant self-identification my interviewees used in Stockton, Lawrence, and Detroit.
- IV. I do not believe that the best answer for robbers is always cops. But my argument in the text stands.