Rebuilding Broken Cities.

• Date: 01 June 2022
• Author: Bader, Eleanor J.
• Published date: 01 June 2022
• Author: Bader, Eleanor J.

In The Fight to Save the Town, Michelle Wilde Anderson chronicles a vicious cycle:

A local community's job base vanishes, evictions escalate, and mortgages go into default. This triggers a decline in property taxes, which leads to shrinking public services. Libraries are shuttered, public school class sizes increase, the school year is shortened, the professional fire department becomes a volunteer force, and publicly funded ambulance services vanish. Not surprisingly, people of color and immigrants bear the brunt of this disinvestment.

"Between 2000 and 2009," Anderson writes, "there was a 31 percent increase in the number of municipalities, counties, and census-designated places where at least one in five people lived under the poverty line."

The Fight to Save the Town zeroes in on four diverse localities--Detroit, Michigan; Josephine County, Oregon; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Stockton, California--looking at both...