Michael Livermore 0:10
Welcome to the free range podcast. I’m your host, Mike Livermore. This episode is sponsored by the program on law communities and the environment at the University of Virginia School of Law. With me today is Michelle Wilde Anderson, a law professor at Stanford and author of the recent book “The Fight to Save The Town: Reimagining Discarded America”. Michelle, thanks for joining me today.
Michelle Wilde Anderson 0:31
Oh, thanks, Mike. I’m so glad to be here.
Michael Livermore 0:35
So it’s such a such a beautiful book, it’s just, you know, wonderfully written, the stories are just incredibly compelling. It’s just really a pleasure to read. And I encourage the listeners to pick up a copy, I actually listened to it on Audible on an audiobook version. And it really, it really sinks in that format. But maybe just to orient us. Could you give us a little maybe thumbnail description of of the project and what the book is all about?
Michelle Wilde Anderson 1:02
Yeah, sure. Thank you so much for that generous introduction. That’s really sweet of you. I did edit it to death. So I hope this did show all of that TLC. So the book is I’ll start with the subtitle, it’s it’s called reimagining just that the subtitle is reimagining discarded America, as you said, and that’s really a look, the book really sits with that problem of the giant areas of the country that have not yet found a foothold in the modern economy. And, and in particular, it’s sitting with one specific, really hard policy problem, which is that we have a lot of cities, including small towns and rural counties, where there’s so much poverty layered across the entire tax base, that it’s hard for the local government to sustain basic services. So I think of this problem as governments that are both poor and broke, or places that are both poor and broke. And those are mutually reinforcing problems that when a place is really poor, it is more likely to be broke. And when a place is broke, it is more likely it its people are more likely to stay poor.
Michael Livermore 2:22
You part of the format of the book is that you select you four, quite different places to kind of tell the story of places that, as you say, are both poor and broke. And I’ll say that, you know that this book, and the stories you tell have personal resonance for me. I grew up near a town in upstate New York, in a region of the of the state that’s had some economic hard times. And I think the the town that I grew up near, the biggest town that I grew up near fits the definition that you have in the book of border to border poverty, which is I think it’s an the town I grew up in was 33% below the poverty line, which is above the criteria that you have, which is either 20 or 25%. Yeah. And then the median income compared to the state is 60%. I wasn’t sure if that was family income or personal income, but it’s but it’s both for this town, Binghamton, New York, the personal income, median personal income is 60% of the state and median family income is 50% of the state. So I think that falls well within the criteria that you have. And in a lot of the problems that you described in the book. I definitely am familiar with from from my own hometown.
Michelle Wilde Anderson 3:39
Yeah, I think the Hudson Valley, I could have included Newburgh, New York in this book, I didn’t. But there’s a bunch of towns in New York that that would qualify under the definition that I use. But like you said, it sits with four places, and I chose them because all of them are in first of all, they’re just exceptional places on their own in their own right, their histories are rich, their leadership is really good right now. And they have, they have a larger story to tell when you put them next to each other because they’re really different from each other four places represent, I think the larger range of, of towns facing this problem of being poor and broke. So some places like that are big cities, some are smaller cities or inner ring suburbs and some are rural areas. And similarly, this problem ranges from all white places to predominantly black or Latino places to super diverse places. And finally, this problem ranges across politics and ideology. So I wanted to hold places that you know, consistently vote conservative consistently vote progressive and you know, places that swing back and forth. So I chose four places that are different from each other and therefore help to dislodge any kind of story we might tell about, you know, why why places face this problem along lines of race or ideology or scale. But you know, they these four places are kind of one of a kind as all towns are, they have their own unique history and their own unique networks of people, but they have a lot in common when you put them next to each other too.
Michael Livermore 5:28
Yeah, and one of the things that is really fun and interesting and different about this book that you’ve offered us is, as you say, in the book, it’s not a data driven, wonky policy book, I just, I dove into the wonkiest part, which was the definition of border for poverty. But other than that, there’s it’s not a it’s not full of statistics, it’s not full of charts and graphs. This is a book, you know, with narratives with stories in them. And so I guess one question, just to ask is why why that approach? Why Why not a policy book? Why was it important to take the, you know, take on these the storytelling role? Or the storytelling project? You know, is there something wrong with the stories that we’re currently telling about these places? And, and how do you see your book fitting within this kind of narrative of, of the town maybe, or of these towns in any case that we have in our culture?
Michelle Wilde Anderson 6:25
I love that question. And I thought so much about this issue. There were times when I really thought I wanted to do a more data driven policy book. We have some books, like I’m thinking, looking at my desk right now. Alan Malik’s “The Divided City” is an outstanding policy book that deals with some of the bigger public policy challenges that are at the base of, of this book, we have some good examples out there of policy work. But I think, you know, as as I went deeper and deeper into this project, really in all the years since the Great Recession, when I started to work on municipal financial collapse, I noticed that we have really dominant stories that we tell about broke places and about poor places. And those stories deal with violence and street crime, this kind of bullets flying in the middle of a hellish landscape kind of story. We have corruption stories in which we don’t listen to any or don’t pay attention to any news out of towns like this, except when there’s some kind of, you know, public scandal or mismanagement event that draws attention to them. We have a stories of hopelessness, almost like eulogistic writing of dying places in which we sort of grieve the past and you know, sort of engage in this kind of nostalgic memorialization of sort of a lost heyday for these places. So we have really dominant narratives about poor and broke places, and they’re kind of everywhere. And I started to really believe that those narratives themselves were destructive to the political will to keep working on these hard problems. And because millions of people live in places like this, you cannot simply wish them away. And I think the Electoral College and the Senate, you know, the structure of the Senate should always remind us that, that at some level, our politics and the structure of our government are bound to show up for the places where Americans live. And if we don’t, then they will take the government in the direction that they wish. So there’s a larger, there’s a larger narrative problem I think we have or almost a kind of mythology about these places that does a lot of damage. So I didn’t want to sugar I didn’t, I didn’t want to do that I didn’t want to do what in photography is called ruin porn. And I didn’t want to write a, you know, happy, heroic look at these amazing people. They’ve got it like, yeah, clap. And then we can all sort of walk away from these hard problems. So I really tried to, as a narrative matter sort of hold both of those truths at the same time, like, yes, these problems are devastating, the hardships are real, the challenges are intergenerational at this point. And they’re extraordinary people that are working on these problems and and we can’t just wish these places away.
Michael Livermore 9:38
Yeah. So so so that all is, you know, that makes a ton of sense as you brought up the Senate and electoral colleges is my law. You know, I guess my law professor brain noted that and so my, my question that just comes out of that is just kind of what your what your thinking is on that. So it sounded like possibly that this was actually like a justification for the way that we have the senator portion by states and the electoral college or it’s a it’s a it’s a it’s a feature of that system. So I was just curious to have you say more, because I’ll just I will admit, I don’t talk to too many defenders of the Electoral College, or the, or the, or the kind of apportionment of political power by states that we have in the Senate, those folks offer various arguments for why that’s a bad idea. So I was curious if you had an alternative perspective, because I think that would be worth worth airing because I don’t hear very often.
Michelle Wilde Anderson 10:35
Yeah, I mean, you’re not gonna find me, Mike as a defender. And given the distribution of our population right now, normally, you find me as a defender of the structure of the Senate, given modern urbanization. But what I what I really meant by that comment, is, let me back up and just say, this is the language that I use in the book, I think there’s a strand of thinking out there that’s dominant, primarily in econ. But it’s a strand of thinking that I labeled as suitcases solution, which is this idea that the answer to chronic poverty is that people should move toward growth and move toward jobs. And, you know, if you think of that spatially, a lot of how that looks is moving people, for instance, out of the rust belt, and toward the Gulf or toward the west. And here, you and I are as both environmental law scholars sort of living in the era of climate change. The idea that we’re going to solve our long term problems as a nation by moving our people away from the freshwater patrimony of the Great Lakes and toward the inundation zones of the Gulf is honestly totally absurd, but also financially frightening. Because the heroic levels of infrastructure that would be needed to spare the Gulf from climate, you know, from climate dislocation is so expensive. I mean, when I look fiscally at Florida’s future, it is dark. And let it be said here that the state of Florida has such predictable municipal bankruptcies and state grief in front of it and its finances. Anyway, I digress. The point is that, you know, here we are, we have this suitcases kind of fantasy that we can, you know, move people toward opportunity. And I think what we saw in 2016, although this has been brewing for a long time before that, what we saw in 2016, was a bunch of homeowners in places like Pennsylvania who are having trouble, you know, making a decent living and supporting their families, who said, No thanks to the offer, that they should go be a tenant janitor on a floodplain outside of Houston. And I think that’s kind of the the larger, you know, a larger problem in our politics right now is that you’ve got a lot of people that said, I can’t move, I won’t move, what you’re asking me to move toward in terms of the cost of housing, and the cost of living is just as unsustainable as what I’ve gotten now. And so I’m not going to do it. And so we’re seeing lower levels of migration toward those kinds of job opportunities. And there that loops us back to this kind of structure of our government problem, which is that if this, you know, example, kind of Pennsylvania homeowner says, like, No, thanks, I’m not moving to Texas. They have the power of, you know, the Senate and the larger structure of government to sort of demand attention on their own turf. And I think that’s, you know, that’s a bigger kind of reality of, of our politics, right at this moment. And that’s, you know, that will, that whole discussion will lead us in the direction of sort of picturing this as a rural white problem. But honestly, you know, the post industrial America is super diverse. And that’s a major distortion of the Trump coalition. And you know, this sort of populist moment that the people who are most dislocated in the economy and you know, facing regional scale, concentrated poverty are all white, you know, that’s just not true. So in this book, I’m really trying to hold the larger stretch of places that that are dealing with this, this larger problem of sort of what’s what’s our future and how do we make this a town where people could leave to move to opportunity, God bless them, they could stay here and you know, have a decent quality of life. But this town is not going to trap them in intergenerational poverty.
Michael Livermore 15:05
Yeah, there’s so there’s so many interesting things going on there. Because there’s, as you mentioned, there’s a lot of misunderstanding of the Trump Coalition, in part, because I think that there’s plenty of evidence that the poorest folks in the United States are not the ones that are voting for Donald Trump. There are kind of specific demographic characteristics that that, you know, the kind of Trump voters have is, I mean, the Trump coalition itself is, is, you know, very white. But of course, that doesn’t mean that dislocated people and, you know, people that live in poverty are overwhelmingly right, that would be, you know, very misrepresentative of our actual situation. So that’s, itself a very interesting thing. I mean, one, you know, another piece of, of course, our, our politics that are relevant here is just that, you know, at the end of the day, voters can vote and voters will, will have their voices heard, if it’s through the Electoral College, or the Senate or some other situation, you know, the, the cultural and economic power, you know, can be highly, constantly concentrated, and that can does translate to a certain amount of political power. But I think at the end of the day, you know, if you just neglect people, and you just allow places to, you know, be disinvested, you know, that’s going to show up in the political process one way or the other.
Michelle Wilde Anderson 16:24
Yeah, and, you know, that’s such a beautiful landing spot, because I really came to observe so closely, just over and over again, I did 250 interviews for this book, I talked to lots of people who really are on the frontlines of these problems. And a theme that I heard over and over again, is that trust in government and trust in strangers, you know, just any level of institutions, civic society, that starts to–civil societies sorry–starts to really break down when a place has been stuck in poverty, or, you know, when it has become this sort of larger poverty trap for a long time. And that breakdown in basic trust and cooperation is especially destructive when people don’t have much money. Because the reality is that when you don’t have a lot of cash, like people have to work together and sort of pool their staff, their expertise, their resources, their equipment, they’ve really got to, you know, start to coordinate their efforts in order to advance. And so at some level, you know, the the fight to save the town part of this book, the part that was so redemptive, and just hopeful for me and reporting it was to see how people sort of weave society back together, and really try to rebuild that basic trust. And I think if you know, as you think about the layers of a government, you know, primitively kind of federal, state, local, if, if you know, and as you know, levels of basic trust in America tend to be trust in government in America tend to be higher at the local level. But in places like this, they can be quite low. And once there’s no trust anywhere up the chain, it really does lead to a larger rot in democracy in which people lower their expectations for government, they start to fantasize about heroic alternatives to democracy, they start to really kind of disengage in voting and participation. And anyway, so the, you know, that’s the vicious cycle part of it. And really, what I was trying to sit with and find and celebrate at some level in this book is people who are, who are creating the virtuous cycle really trying to turn their community toward a form of participation, and, and change, you know, really saying, like, what do we want and working together to achieve that? And I think that will really, you know, it does, I mean, you can see it in these towns, it filters back up the chain, if you teach people to be participants and leaders in a local government, they’re going to turn out in larger scales of politics too.
Michael Livermore 19:20
Yeah, I mean, this just is like goes back to like, some of the founding kind of notions of why we have government, the way we have it set up, right is that, you know, having local government serves as a kind of a training ground and an opportunity to, for people to participate in politics. And having those experiences is is very important. And it’s very different from you know, a condition where there’s just the one remote you know, Washington DC based government or wherever one remote centralized government run by experts and elites that you have no, you have no day to day you haven’t experienced it in the conditions of your life, but you don’t have a participatory role to play except maybe, you know, occasionally voting.
Michelle Wilde Anderson 19:59
And I mean, sorry, Mike, I just can’t resist. But just focusing is it’s such an interesting line of discussion to me, because so in these types of communities, there’s a very strong perception of the dominance of government, that even in places that are super weak locally, so by definition, every place that I’ve written about in this book has a very weak local state, it has a collapse in basic local services that in wealthier places we take for granted. So, you know, 911, that has no officers to dispatch or no emergency services to dispatch, you know, absence of staff to get them water treatment formulas correct to deliver clean water to people are an absence of access to public water at all. And, you know, closure of public libraries, I mean, on and on, these basic services that we take for granted start to collapse. And yet, in these weak state places, people have a sense that government is dominant, and it’s coming from federal policy, whether it’s environmental law, or immigration law. And it’s also coming from state law, because state’s fund the the, the incarceration systems and so much of the cost of answering poverty with policing, and and they also fund the courts that enforce contracts, including leases through eviction law. So one of the things I observed is that, because we don’t, you know, the average person doesn’t always have a clear sense of who does what in government, you can live in a in essential, you know, in a very weak state environment like Detroit, and still feel like the government is dangerous and present in your daily life, also, child dependency, I should have mentioned that the dominance of family law through the state systems means that people have a sense that the state is is strong, maybe too strong, sometimes in ways that endangers their liberty or their families, and or their housing or so forth. Anyway, so this is all these distortions that happen. And again, this, the more positive spin that I’m trying to sit with in the book is, is people who are really trying to rebuild that local level. So the government’s trying to do something for you, other than just punish you. I mean, what does it mean for government to like, look out for you and your family?
Michael Livermore 22:28
Yeah, I want to turn back to this at some point, the the kind of question of rebuilding trust and how that works, because it is a fascinating component of the book. And just to reiterate, this, just it, it is so fascinating, such a distorted thing, in a sense that, you know, as the state gets dialed back, it’s the ways that you’re going to have positive interactions with the state get that get dialed back first in the in the residual them is police, and you know, evictions and Child Protective Services. And like, of course, we need all of those things. I mean, to varying degrees, but but if that’s all the people’s experiences with the states are with the state writ large, is they’re not going to provide a positive impression of, of the capacity of the state to do good in their lives.
Michelle Wilde Anderson 23:10
Exactly. Yeah. And so the, you know, and it’s, and what’s interesting about really broke places is that the government can’t local governments now just talking about, you know, cities and counties, you know, they really don’t have a lot of money, they can, you know, fix that problem by writing in with big programs, as one county commissioner said it in Oregon, that book sits in one county in Southern Oregon called Josephine County. But I did a bunch of research on other counties in Oregon too, and a county commissioner elsewhere, at one point said, the cavalry is not coming. And he really meant the higher tiers of government is and you know, Oregon’s not coming DC is not coming, you know, we’re gonna have to figure out some of these problems on our own. But also, it’s interesting, you know, at the local level, people don’t have the resources to kind of buy their way out of these problems, either. And so the reconstruction that has to happen is across the private sector too it’s sort of getting business owners at the table, it’s getting nonprofits coordinated with one another, it’s getting churches involved, it’s really starting, you know, it’s trying to sew that fabric of civil society back together, so that institutions can can work together again, and government can participate in that it can lead in that sometimes, and it can certainly throw some weight around because in very weak places, as weak as local government is, it’s often you know, one of the biggest employers left in the town. And so it’s got some weight to throw around. And it’s, it’s got to be part of the solution, but, but it can’t be the only answer.
Michael Livermore 24:58
So, so just for a moment, I wanted to return to the kind of the suit, suitcase solution question and the kind of moving away, you know, moving to economic opportunity argument at the–because I’ll admit to someone who’s done that, someone who’s moved away to economic opportunity. And in just in observing my, my hometown, where I grew up, you know, one of the things I noticed that folks who graduated from college, basically, none of them still live there. And the folks who didn’t go to college, a huge percentage of them did. So the folks who kind of had opportunities outside tended to pursue them. And so I wanted to kind of, maybe press on this or take a devil’s advocate, just to flush out the idea. So the argument from the economist position, or the kind of, you know, we’re taking a very idealized economist position would be, you know, there was an economic logic to a lot of these places, that was industry, again, where I grew up, there was, you know, there was manufacturing of a certain kind that produced a lot of jobs. That’s just gone. Globalization, automation, these big forces that exist, that are kind of just economic realities have, or that are baked in even if we didn’t have to make those choices, we’ve made those choices. And they’ve undermined the economic logic of these places. And we kind of have two options, either we can subsidize them indefinitely. Right. And that would be the idea. You know, over time, the state, as you note in the book, states have, make up a smaller proportion of local government’s budgets and more is being driven by kind of local taxes, we could reverse that and subsidize these places, by providing more revenue from the state or from states or from the federal government, and that creates, again, to provide the economic kind of perspective on this, that creates an incentive for people to stay where they are, rather than moving to economic opportunity. And that’ll be bad because it reduces dynamicism. And, you know, and overall productivity of the economy, and that they were caught on the horns of this dilemma, either, we face the difficulties that you chronicle of, you know, gradually declining places. And that’s bad. And we can kind of recognize that’s bad. But the alternative would be to just kind of keep them on life support for a long, longer period of time. And as a consequence, we’re going to get, you know, we’re going to get all a lot of the same types of harms. But we’re just going to prolong that. So I think that would be something like the case. And in broad strokes, I actually think you make a very compelling argument in the book that gateway cities in this way, provide us with a, you know, out of the horns of this dilemma, but I just wanted to offer that kind of argument for for your comment and response.
Michelle Wilde Anderson 27:43
Yeah, it’s such an important line of debate at the big picture, regional policy level, and just as we think about redistribution of federal taxes. So I’m really glad you asked, I think so the first thing I would say is that, you know, with respect to stories like yours, of sort of moving toward opportunity, that’s wonderful. And that’s a deeply embedded in American culture. And that form of liberty that we can move toward opportunities that we can sort of move toward education that we can try and better our family’s law is, you know, God forbid, I should try to disturb any of that individual liberty, I would never even try. I would actually quote Jessica Anders here, who’s an incredible advocate in Lawrence, Massachusetts that I worked really closely with and learning about Lawrence. And at one point, just said, quote, Lawrence should be a good enough, sorry, Lawrence should be good enough to get a good start. It should be a healthy enough community that people can come here, be welcome, learn English, retain their own language and culture, pass it on to their kids, and get a start, even if they do move out and go other places. And to me, that captures beautifully the aspiration like yes, part of the job of these places has to give people the opportunity to move, that’s their job is to help people get out. The problem is that when you leave these places to, you know, die on the vine for 40 50 years, as we’ve done, people end up unable to move because the town breaks them first. And I think we are now you know, decades in to the consequences. You know, the opioid crisis is just a symptom of this longer problem, that you know, you leave this problem and lots of people don’t move in part because they’re so broke that they don’t have the few 100 bucks to kind of get out and get a start, let alone a security deposit in an expensive place. So it’s actually harder and harder to get out given the intensity of the poverty. but also the levels of violence and exposure to drugs, like really break some people first and the so you know, I again, I don’t want to engage in the kind of pathologizing of these communities or kind of pretend I don’t want to engage in that kind of dystopic rhetoric about them. But I think, you know, the experiment that we can solve deindustrialization through domestic migration has run for 40 years. And here we are. So the you know, and at the end of the book, I won’t go deeply into it, but if folks read it, I would on your line of questioning that I wrote an epilogue about a woman named Joanne Pena who, who has a really tough run as a child and ends up as part of her childhood in Lawrence, Massachusetts again, and and then makes it out of Lawrence like all of her siblings, they all kind of make it to Sunbelt, you know, high opportunity zones. In Joanne’s case, she makes it to Virginia. And in Virginia, she gets the best job of her life, she makes 40 grand a year she is, which, for the cost of living in her town is putting her in debt, but you know, she’s scrapping out a living super proud of that income. And, and, you know, then there’s a series of hardships that hit Joanne as they do in life, and especially for people that have larger networks have kind of scar tissue in their families that come from long term poverty. And, and she in, you know, she gets like, knocked off of this life that she’s building in Virginia. And it’s Lawrence that takes her in again, through really through social services, and the strength of the networks and the community. And you know, some of the programs and efforts that I’d written about in Lawrence that really find Joanne and get her back on her feet. And when she’s back on her feet, what does she do, she leaves again. And to me, that’s exactly what Lawrence needs to do. It’s the idea is not to trap Joanne in Lawrence, she doesn’t owe Lawrence anything. But Nora is, you know, but look at what Lawrence has done. Lawrence has, like sheltered her family has sort of taken them in at times when, when they really needed that. And you used this term gateway cities that I write with write about in the introduction, I love that term, because we have a pretty, you know, common way of describing poverty traps, you know, people stuck in intergenerational poverty and, you know, unable to get out of their town, but also their, their status. And, and I think we need to really think about what the alternative is to that, what, what is a gateway city, and that term comes from Massachusetts state policy. There, it’s used to capture first homes for New Americans so that people can, you know, learn English and sort of assimilate or, you know, integrate into the larger American culture. But I like gateway cities as a socio economic aspiration too that people have choices, and they have chances, you know, the town is going to be good enough, that they have, you know, a basic level of education and personal safety, so that they actually could leave. So, anyway, that’s, that’s the thing. And yes, the, you know, there’s a larger public policy debate that has to do with you know, indefinite subsidization of so called dying regions, but to me sitting here in 2022, where we’ve reduced subsidies over the last 40 years, and we’ve really kind of run this larger experiment experiment about whether these places would all depopulate to zero and nope. So see eg opioid crisis.
Michael Livermore 34:15
Right, right. Yeah. And just the just this idea that, you know, to have the smooth functioning labor market, the idealized smooth functioning labor market where people are moving to opportunity, it’s kind of nice, theoretically, but people need resources to be able to do that. People need you know, they need to not as you kind of have said, if people have these bad experiences growing up, or just they’re just not invested in it, right. They just lack educational opportunities. I mean, you know, investment in early childhood, from your, from parents, from the from the state, in terms of schools and so on is just incredibly important for people’s long term prospects. And if we’re just failing to make those investments for huge tranches of the American public, we just can’t expect them to be in a position to participate in the in the contemporary labor market. And so they’re not going to move because as you note in the book, the less, you know, the less money you have in the bank, the more you have to rely on your social networks and, and family connections and the like to loan you money in an emergency or come in even I use the analogy of just literally moving from one place to the other, you can do it by having friends come over and help you pack up or you can hire someone that’s kind of like the choice. And if you don’t have money, and you don’t have friends, then you know, you literally can’t move because you can’t physically move your stuff around. So so I thought that was a really a really important contribution, that something that I had not, frankly, given much consideration to is the importance of building the foundation that people need, if they’re going to be, you know, participating in this, you know, smoothly functioning dynamic labor market.
Michelle Wilde Anderson 35:54
Yeah, that’s so well said. And I have two, you know, stories again, you know, on this theory that, you know, people need stories, ground an alternative understanding to these problems. But I have two stories in response to that one is a woman, she’s not actually in the book, but she was an amazing woman that I met in Flint, and I did a long interview with her. And, and she was in her young 30s, she had two teenage sons that were kind of coming into probably about I, if I recall, something like ninth grade, and seventh grade or so and, and she had grown up in Flint, her mom lived in Flint, she was dying to get out of Flint dying to, you know, move toward opportunity really wanted a better life for her sons. She is African American, she was incredibly worried about raising black boys in in Flint and wanted to move and so she got her family to Dallas, she got the three of them, not her mom to Dallas. And, and she really thought her her sons were safer there, she really felt like it was working for them. She was making out a living, it was very hard to make ends meet, but she felt like they were safer. And then her mom got really sick, and she could not afford to have her mom in Texas, there’s no way to kind of get her mom out of Flint, there’s no way to sustain her mom’s health care and so forth in Texas, let alone her housing, you know, to get her an extra room. And so the daughter did what, you know, she felt duty bound to do, which was move home to Flint to care for her mom. And it was just a basic example of this inter, you know, these sort of generational polls, you know, that people feel the reality is that she’s a daughter, and she’s also a mother. And at some level, she’s got these, you know, responsibilities pulling in different directions. And so that’s one thing that I’ve just never forgotten, like, people have to remember, these are real people with families, they have deeper responsibilities than just their job prospects, you know. And then the, the second thing is, you know, I’m, I don’t live in Palo Alto, but I work there. And Palo Alto is, you know, as your listeners will know, a very, very wealthy town that has systematically blockaded high density housing and any form of affordable housing. It’s been an exceptionally regressive town in terms of its housing policy for the most part, and, and that, so that’s Palo Alto, it invested $76 million in its library system, which I see is very symbolic because I wrote about Stockton where many of the low wage workers for Palo Alto’s economy live. Palo Alto has the university has got giant, two giant hospital complexes, tons of restaurants, it’s got this teeming low wage service workforce that helped to drive Palo Alto’s commercial economy. And so those workers are coming in from towns like Stockton, which means they’re spending about three hours a day away from their kids. And Stockton’s entire library system had to be pulled out of the poorest neighborhoods sort of saving the main branch by kind of drinking the whole system back to the center. So they couldn’t even afford to keep their libraries in low income neighborhoods open at all, in addition to many other dramatic budget cuts. And, and so you know, and meanwhile Stockton is 325,000 people. So what is it, what’s a suitcase solution for Stockton? Like that’s a giant city, you know, in any other city in states that are less populous than California, you know, that would be like a ranking big city and so the idea that you’re just gonna, like get everybody out of Stockton is is just absurd. And meanwhile, you know, this larger, you know, the prosperity in Palo Alto is dependent on the people of Stockton. So there are big picture, moral questions to me that sit across dynamics like that of sort of what does what does Palo Alto owe Stockton? Not nothing. And you know that anyway, so I don’t want to get too preachy. But you know, and I think in the last year, I looked at it, Palo Alto permitted 80 new housing units. It’s just ridiculous. The idea that, you know, we’re gonna solve Stockton’s problems by, you know, waiting to relocate people I think is is, is not realistic. All it does. It’s important. I mean, I think Palo Alto is intransigence over affordable housing is a is a terrifying public policy problem that is all over the Bay Area, and it deserves concentrated answers. But, but meanwhile, you know, Stockton is raising up all these kids, and it’s going to keep doing that every single year. So the question is, what future, what opportunities do those kids have?
Michael Livermore 41:25
You know, one of the really interesting observations in the book just kind of feeding off of this, you know, if we were assuming that the suitcase strategy isn’t going to work, or we found, it’s not an assumption at this point, we could say that we tried it hasn’t worked is, you know, what does it mean to reinvest in and to take the focus off of draining people out of an area, but instead say, Okay, we are going to provide reinvestment and the, you know, the contrast, one of the contrasts I take from the from the book is kind of a redevelopment approach, which, you know, put money into the downtown, make some fancy lofts. You know, present a location is a place where, you know, young professionals can come and you know, that prices are lower, and rents are cheaper, and you know, you can, you can get on Zoom, and you can work that way as this. So that’s kind of one or you know, put in the stadium put in some nice restaurants or whatever, that’s kind of one approach, which you contrast with an alternative around investing in current current residents. So so what is that contrast? And, and what have we learned from experiences with the redevelopment approach? And what do you what do you see as some of the key markers of a, you know, a resident based existing resident based model of, of investing in these places?
Michelle Wilde Anderson 42:43
Yeah, so you, you described it well, I think, though, you know, for decades, so much of local public policy in towns like this has been focused on downtown redevelopment as a kind of Hail Mary, that if you if you invest in the downtown, and you make it pretty, and you bring some jobs and some activity that you’ll attract tourists to spend money there, you know, suburbanize, or whatever it is, that you’ll do, and you’ll bring back new residents and people will, you know, spend money in the town etc. And, you know, I really believe in built environments, I’m not a kind of, you know, I’m married to an architect who does very high density housing and, you know, really believes in the impact of the built environment, on people’s psyche and their safety and so forth. So I those changes can be really important and a gutted downtown is not good for a city. So I understand that having said that, you know, that so that’s option number one is like big, splashy redevelopment of the downtown option number two that we’ve been trying for, you know, so long, just throwing good money after that has been, you know, giant subsidies of, of big employers. So, you know, your listeners will be very familiar with the, the just race to attract Amazon’s HQ2 and the just unbelievable lengths that states and cities went to try to attract Amazon’s HQ2 to their town, and in order to try to seduce Amazon to pick them in this giant national compass competition. Places really agreed to just slather you know Amazon with benefits, whether it’s infrastructure investments or tax exemptions measured by the decade or you know, rebranding of their parks use Amazon’s name, I mean, just one thing after another, like what can we do for you? And let’s say local governments have been doing both of these things like heroic redevelopment, heroic economic development, these big subsidy packages. And you know, we there’s been so much ink spilled in the urban policy literature about the problems with those things and the failed promises and the cost benefit analysis that is fake and looks good up front, but you know, never delivers the jobs or the tax revenue over the long run. So we’ve known about that those the problems with those two strategies for so long. And there’s all kinds of reasons that local governments still play those games, because, you know, officials want the ribbon cutting, they want the press release of the good news, there’s a focus that, you know, within, you know, a quick electoral cycle, you know, you can make progress on deals like either in either of those categories. What I wrote about in the book was, you know, pushing aside those kinds of interventions. For a moment, I wrote about what it looks like to try to invest in your people, which, which is entirely designed to make more Mike Livermores, you know, give the kids of this town a chance to leave, if that’s what they want. And so how do you invest in the people of your town, not just in your, you know, some outside chain movie theater that says they can sell a few tickets. So, you know, that’s what this book is really about. And it’s about the in Stockton, I wrote about the really important reparative anti trauma work that has to happen in places that have dealt with very high levels of violence over time, as so many kids have, and just adults have been witnesses to violence and been in families that have lost loved ones to violence, and have lost loved ones to incarceration as the main answer to violence. This is, you know, an experiment that has been playing out for a long time in American public policy, and Stockton is an epicenter of incarceration is an answer to violence. So you get these, you get a lot of fallout of just trauma from all of this exposure to violence and the loss of loved ones. So in Stockton, I really write about that reparative work of sort of helping people to feel safe in their own bodies to move again, through the city to work with each other, to work with strangers, to really try to, you know, free them from the costs of this violence over time. And then in in Lawrence, I looked at really incredible work to build systems of adult education to get people up the chain in jobs and income, really, like what does it look like in the 21st century to try and raise adult wages. And Lawrence is working on that problem in ways that are totally fascinating and brilliant, in my opinion. In Detroit, I wrote about the work to try to stabilize housing from what it has been a catastrophic and ongoing foreclosure crisis in the city, way beyond the Great Recession and up to the present. And Detroit, unfortunately, is emblematic of a lot of rust belt towns where there’s been a lot of reinvestment in large scale real estate portfolios that are being sold at, you know, a song. And that return of big capital to try and drink up these giant real estate portfolios is leading to very high rates of foreclosure of incredibly poor families across the rust belt. So that, you know, they’re working on that problem, which is, you know, a macroeconomic kind of change and where big capital is flowing, but then also, you know, coming down to ground as a urgent displacement crisis in at the household level. So that’s on the housing side. And then in Josephine, I really wrote about rebuilding trust in government in a place that’s super right wing and there are at least politically where, you know, there’s very low levels of trust and expectation of government at all, how you mobilize people for a kind of grassroots movement to reinvest in their government. So anyway, these are like deeper resident centered solutions that are really trying to get at these larger problems in wages and housing and safety. And you know, you don’t cut ribbons on stuff like that, you know, it’s not the politicians aren’t going to get as much immediate credit but the work is it’s the work that has to be done in my opinion, you know, you don’t get to kind of shortcut it.
Michael Livermore 49:47
Yeah, one of the and just immediately kind of all those examples in the in the in the book really, really come through and one of the impressions that I got was just how different all of these stories are right that, you know, there is something that holds all these stories together, which is conditions at border to border poverty and disinvestment, and certain challenges that they face. But then the solutions, at least the solutions that you focus your stories around, are very different from each other. And so I wonder, you know, just kind of abstracting up to a to a higher level, is this just the kind of thing where each town, each population, each place, kind of requires its own set of solutions, its own set of, you know, just activities or whatever to address these, its own particular challenges? Or are there kind of broader lessons or, you know, general principles that can be applied, that are that are more cross cutting that could be implemented in a in a more systematic way?
Michelle Wilde Anderson 50:50
Yeah, I mean, so it, it’s, one of the things I say in the introduction is that I don’t think we’re ready to write a playbook yet for this kind of resident centered government. And I’m not even sure such a thing would exist, what I was interested in trying to do in the book was really create a sort of proof of concept or sort of, you know, hold out these examples of progress that are being made. And also, I use that word progress really carefully to remind us that you can’t wait for transformation in single generations, you know, these are problems that have been accumulating for so long. And so you’re not going to have a single mayor who, you know, puts on their red, red cape and saves the day. So instead, we have to be like looking for signs of progress, not just resolution. But in any event, it’s sort of a proof of concept that people can move on these bigger challenges. And that in these towns, these were the kind of locally adopted responses. Having said all of that, and I well, one other thing I’ll just say about it is that over and over again, I also heard that, you know, people who really work on the frontlines of these challenges rarely believe that you can box up their model and just export it to another town. And here I’m reminded of something that this again is Jess Anders, she’s very wise. So I guess it’s not a surprise that I quoted her twice, interview, but just and ours in Laura’s was describing to me the difference between Lawrence and then Lowell, Massachusetts, and then New York City, all of whom have high levels of concentrated poverty in emigrate in immigrant rich contexts in which a lot of people are foreign born. And she was saying how it really matters that in Lowell, a lot of the migrants to Lowell came from places beset by war, in which it was incredibly dangerous for people to speak out in public, as she put it, at one point very vividly, you know, speaking in public could get your brother’s head cut off. So she said, that’s really different than Lawrence where there’s a lot of economic migrants who have really come to Lawrence seeking jobs and are coming from, you know, poverty push factors not war in are not as commonly pushed by war. And she said, You know, so that’s a important difference between Lawrence and Lowell, you have to build different kinds of organizing tactics, you know, for communities that are really afraid of public participation, then you do, you know, communities that are not. And then similarly, she was saying, in New York City is different than both of those were, you know, in New York City, people are not going to open their homes to each other, it’s, you know, just such a giant scale of city much more, you know, housing turnover, and so forth. And so you can’t build an organizing model in which people, you know, open their living rooms to a bunch of strangers from their block where you can do that in Lawrence, because it really sometimes does feel like a small town where people will open their homes to each other if they’re given the right kind of structure and formula for doing that. So anyway, her point was that these places you have to show up for the people you have, you have to learn about them, you have to understand the kind of backgrounds that bring them to this moment. And if your goal is to try to build networks of action and, you know, cooperation among them, you’ve got to sort of listen to who that you know, who that community is, and sort of adapt your strategies for for their needs. Yeah, so I think that’s, that’s important. So that’s the big caveat is like, Yeah, this is not a boxed, you know, policy list. Having said that, I do think that at some level, there’s no getting around that that some of the work that has to happen in places like this is a Um, mutual aid at the institutional level. So, you know, after the pandemic, we talked so much, of course, about mutual aid among individuals, you know, young people shopping for older people’s groceries, and so forth. But I think part of what I’m documenting across these four places is the way that you also need mutual aid at the institutional level. And there’s a lot of different ways to build that kind of cooperation and joint enterprise. And you know, each of these four chapters has examples of that. But I think at some level, that kind of social repair and social cooperation is, is a is a necessary and probably universal component of progress, and a universal component of hope. You know, just like at some level, do people believe that positive change is possible in their community? Do they have a sense of friendship and joint purpose with other people around them? And, you know, so that maybe that sounds generic, but the truth is, I think sometimes we lose sight of that, because we think that if we just got, you know, this one federal grant program exactly right that, you know, everything would be better. But at the end of the day that federal grant program has got to land on a real network of local people who know how to work together effectively and deliver.
Michael Livermore 56:27
Yeah. So So Thanks so much for for taking the time to chat with me, this has been a really fun conversation. I’ve got one final question for you. If you if you’ll indulge me this is a little I noticed in the book that you seem to have an you have an affinity, I think, correct me if I’m wrong with with labor history, there’s, you know, various kinds of the wobblies show up and various figures in American labor history and I wondered if, if, if that kind of was intentional. And if there’s some relationship here between what you think of as the kind of problems of the contemporary era and in, in something we can get out of the, the labor history that we have in the US that is often I think, kind of buried or sometimes can be, can be forgotten.
Michelle Wilde Anderson 57:10
Oh, that’s such a cool question, Mike, I don’t know. I mean, I might need to think about that, I didn’t notice that I have hard wired attraction to the labor movement, but I probably do. I mean, it’s interesting in American, if you go back through our speeches, and kind of our political discourse, I think there have been very few periods in our history where we really had an explicit language to talk about, about poverty, and really, you know, a focus on on empowerment and solidarity and progress on the on the problem of entrenched poverty. And, you know, certainly that the labor movement is one of those periods, the 60s and the beginnings of the poor people’s movement and the civil rights movement, at some level, you know, are such flowerings of that kind of language and leadership and writing. And, you know, what, I think that in the aftermath of the 80s, in which so much pathologizing of poverty, and, you know, the undeserving poor rhetoric sort of became so prominent, we just have less of that, and I think about Reverend Barber in North Carolina, as, you know, such an important leader and sort of giving us current language for really thinking about where poverty comes from, and what to do about it. And even figures like John Kerry, you know, are sort of temporary moments of, you know, vocabulary even for sort of focusing on poverty, and, you know, Sanders and Warren in their way too. So in any event, that’s all to say that, yes, I’m drawn to people who actually write about, talk about, think about poverty as sort of a source of strength and solidarity. And, you know, and who really believe in the power of, of people. And you know, who who don’t talk about poverty as kind of this stigmatized condition of want. So I think maybe it’s related to that at a narrower level, the story of the wobblies comes up, as you know, because it’s so fascinating to me, that historical echo that in in 1912, Lawrence was famous for a really important strike in which they managed to get up textile wages by 15%. And that underlying question of sort of, okay, that’s how you do that in 1912. You know, you strike against single employers and you know, that are dominant all across the region. But here in the early 21st century, like that’s not going to be the model if you want to get up wages by 15%. You’re gonna have to do something different. And so what I was you know really sitting with in Lawrence was like, you know, basically 100 years later when they really started this adult wage effort in Lawrence you know, what does that look like now and a lot of things have have changed. One thing that has not changed is the terrible pathologizing of Lawrence, then and now.
Michael Livermore 1:00:22
Yeah. Well, thanks so much for for this book and for a really interesting conversation. It’s really been a pleasure chatting with you.
Michelle Wilde Anderson 1:00:30
Thank you so much is were terrific questions, Mike. That was really a pleasure.
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