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: Reimagining Discarded America," by Michelle Wilde Anderson, Avid Reader Press/Simon and Schuster, 368 pages, publication date: June 21, 2022
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 their economic downfall and the determined mutual aid and resistance that have developed to resuscitate them.
In 2012, when the 310,000-resident racially segregated city of Stockton declared bankruptcy, “small-government” Republicans ceded water management to a private firm. This saddled the city with a twenty-year, $600 million contract that raised residents’ water fees. Community outrage led to the ousting of these officials and the election of a progressive mayor and city council.
Empowered volunteers quickly raised funds to create soccer teams for kids, clear dilapidated parks, build new playgrounds, and begin working to bring a health clinic to a neighborhood without one. Under the leadership of Michael Tubbs, a Black Stanford graduate who won a seat on the Stockton city council in 2012 and later became the city’s mayor, the library reopened, youth services were restored, and the city’s lowest-income area got its first credit union and bank. Anti-gang diversion efforts soared, and a universal basic income pilot program was launched.
But opposition to these measures was fierce, and it led to Tubbs’s 2020 electoral defeat. Nonetheless, many of his administration’s changes remain in place, guarded by vigilant residents.
Similarly, residents of Lawrence, Massachusetts, a once-thriving mill town with a largely Spanish-speaking immigrant population, came together in the wake of factory closures. Budget cutbacks led to the city closing its only swimming pool, canceling after-school and summer enrichment programs, eliminating free school buses, laying off firefighters, and slashing the police department by 30 percent.
In response, local residents formed Lawrence CommunityWorks and Centro Panamericano Inc., two people-powered organizations. Together, volunteers cleared parkland, created waterfront trails, organized community dinners, and pushed the city to install stop signs and street lights at busy intersections. Here, too, the community withstood backlash from anti-tax conservatives and landowners, to make significant headway in revitalizing their city.
Then there’s Detroit, where longtime residents, mostly people of color, are pitted against investors who want to rebuild the city’s downtown for nonresident business people and corporations. Together, these residents are raising revenue to purchase land and setting up land trusts to ensure that property remains in the hands of people who actually live in the Motor City.
And in Josephine County, Oregon, once-prosperous logging towns have seen iconoclastic locals form anti-crime watch patrols. Despite a high turnover rate and more than a few unanticipated glitches, the effort has promoted community cohesion and a sense of collective survival.
Still, as Anderson concludes, the efforts of individuals, no matter how well-organized or determined, cannot replace government infrastructure. “The concept to prove,” she writes, “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.” Fighting poverty and neglect fit that bill.