THE FIGHT TO SAVE THE TOWN

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.