The Fight to Save the Town - Michelle Wilde Anderson

Welcome to Grit Nation. I'm Joe Cadwell, the host of the show, and on today's episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with urban law expert and author
Michelle Wilde Anderson about her book, The Fight to Save the Town - Reimagining Discarded America.

The San Francisco Chronicle writes that her book is "a sweeping and eye opening study of wealth inequality and the dismantling of local governments of working class US cities, and passionately argues for a reinvestment in people centered leadership, and offers a welcome reminder of what government can accomplish".

To learn more about Michelle and her work visit  https://law.stanford.edu/directory/michelle-wilde-anderson/

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Transcript

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And Welcome to grid Nation. I'm Joe Cadwell, the host of the show, and on today's episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with urban law expert and author Michelle wild Anderson about her book, fight to save the town reimagining discarded America. The San Francisco Chronicle writes that her book is a sweeping an eye opening study of wealth inequality and the dismantling of local governments, or working class US cities, and passionately argues for a reinvestment in people centered leadership, and offers a welcome reminder of what government can accomplish, if given the chance It was a great conversation. And I hope you enjoy. And now on to the show. Michelle Wilde Anderson, welcome to Grit Nation.

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 0:59

Oh, I'm so glad to be here, Joe. Thanks.

Joe Cadwell: 1:02

Thank you, Michelle, for taking your time to be on the show today, I'm really excited to introduce you and your new book, The fight to save the town reimagining discarded America, my listeners. Before we do that, what got you interested in writing this book Michelle?

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 1:17

Again, Joe, I'm so glad to be here. This is your podcast is terrific. And I have to say that grit nation is an amazing podcast title. And if I had to quick summarize the book itself, I might have called it grit cities. And I came to this project of really looking at cities that have rebuilt their governments in times of extreme poverty, because I am a sixth generation rural California and on one side of my family, and I'm very familiar with the weakness of rural governments. And for really, most of my career, I've worked on weak governments in rural areas, but also very concentrated urban poverty. And during the Great Recession, as maybe some of your listeners are aware, we had the biggest wave of municipal bankruptcies we've had since the Great Depression. And at that period of time, I realized that we no longer just have weak rural governments, we have a lot of really weak urban governments. And this book is about gritty people rebuilding civil society when there's a lot of intergenerational poverty and very weak local government. And when you wrote the book you focused in on four cities. And those four cities very close to where you are in the San Francisco Bay Area was Stockton, California, closer to where I live Josephine County in the state of Oregon, you also focused in on Detroit, Michigan, and Lawrence, Massachusetts. And so did you actually have a chance to visit all of those cities? Or was it online research? How did you go about researching for your book? Yeah, um, I spent a lot of time in all four places, I did 250 interviews for the book, really trying to tell the story of the people in these towns in their own voice. I teach environmental justice as part of my day job. And one of the really important commitments of the environmental justice movement is we speak for ourselves. And this book really tried to hold to that principle and really kind of pass the mic to really draw expertise, and, you know, just allow people to speak for themselves. But also, I chose those four places, not only because each of them has just an absolutely magnificent and deeply American working class history. But because they represent the huge range of places in the country that are both poor and broke. So they have this combination of a lot of poverty, but then also a really weak government. And places like that in the country range from Super rural to super urban with suburban small city places in between. They range from all black, all white, all Latino to a place like Stockton, which you mentioned a big inland port in California, one of the major agricultural transportation and food manufacturing hubs in the country. And Stockton is the most diverse city in the United States of America. So they range in this huge way sort of racially and in terms of urbanization, but also they range politically and so this book has to hold the politics of Josephine County, Oregon closer to you, which is very libertarian, deep anti government politics. But all the way to Deep Blue Detroit, and some purple, you know, some purple places in between including Stockton that sort of swings blue to red and Lawrence which is blue reliably blue but but The truth is has some kind of undercurrents these days of political turbulence.

Joe Cadwell: 5:05

And so you use Michela used all four of these cities to sort of shine a light that there are challenges within the American system that are under serving the communities under serving the regions. I noticed in the book that you really zeroed in on on neighborhood porousness and, and then city poorness, and then regional porousness that just sort of boil it down. And what what is the definition of poor and broke? You use that term earlier? What is that?

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 5:35

Yeah, well, I mean, this is just a quick sort of wonky aside, I'll make it super fast. But most of our, you know, in sociology and academic research, most work on American poverty focuses on individuals and households, like just the strain on individual budgets, cost of living and so forth. And then it works on neighborhoods and the way that neighborhoods form a kind of destiny for economic outcomes. I have called us in the book sort of zip code destiny of sort of, whether it's your schools, your level of violence in the community, your access to open space, all these, you know, incredible determinants of health and economic well being. And then they jump to big regional things like, you know, industrial decline all across a major manufacturing region. And I'm mostly focused on city level poverty of sort of what it means when a whole tax base, so a city tax base, or a county tax base, carries tons of concentrated poverty in its jurisdiction. And, you know, for reasons that we could get into or not, it's kind of up to you that when city governments or county governments carry that much poverty in their tax base these days, it's really hard for them to support basic services. So whether that's a library or clean water, or basic 911, emergency services dispatch, it becomes really hard to do the basic job that we expect from local government.

Joe Cadwell: 7:14

So it's a self perpetuating cycle in a way they're poor. Because they're broke, they're broke, because they're poor, it's a they've hole has been dug with the, in the post recession, when a lot of these municipalities were selling off a lot of their, their holdings, and then they had to go into budget cuts, and it just continues a downward spiral problem.

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 7:33

So I didn't say it better myself, by the way, I just want to like highlight that sentence, they're poor, because they're broke, and they're broke, because they're poor. I mean, that's exactly the heart of it. And you know, when that kind of problem sits around for 40 years, which is where we are right now, in a lot of our blue collar areas. It's, it passes across generations, and it really gets a lot harder to solve.

Joe Cadwell: 7:56

So how did we get here? I mean, when you think about is the average American you think, Well, we are blessed to be Americans, we live in one of the if not the richest country in the world, how can we have the cities that cannot even support clean water sanitation, basic emergency medical services or police services? How did that happen?

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 8:20

Um, you know, we'll, so there's, there's so many ingredients to that, but I'll just highlight three big drivers. You know, and this, by the way, the full title of the book, as you said, is fight to save the town reimagining discarded America. And I feel like your question is really going to like, why was this part of the country discarded? And I think really, there's three giant drivers that that are affecting that. One is the failure to really show up for deindustrialization really show up for the massive workforce transition that was going to be necessary as we heavily automated and heavily globalized a lot of American worker productivity in manufacturing and production.

Joe Cadwell: 9:12

For the listeners. Globalization could also mean just outsourcing a lot of jobs that were once done by Americans here in America, the manufacturing industries, the textile industries were all shipped overseas. So that could be one form of globalization.

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 9:28

Exactly. Yeah. And this book focuses on you know, on for industrial kind of origin stories in particular focuses on timber and the global sort of networks of moving timber from forests around the world into American markets. It focuses on textiles and the sort of abandonment of major textiles from the Northeast in the country and sort of moving to point south and then further south and then just splintering all over planet Earth. And it focuses on Detroit, which of course, is not only auto manufacturing, but all kinds of other manufacturing. And then Stockton, which is a story about food, food processing and the manufacturing of a lot of rural machinery related to AG. A lot of ag machinery, I should say, anyway, so we've got this giant strand of deindustrialization where we just never handled it. And we threw a few training dollars here and there. But the kind of educational transition that was going to be really necessary was, you know, was giant, and we just really didn't invest in people in the way that we needed to. But secondly, we invested in suburbanization in a way that really left older industrial cities behind and we invested in suburbanization in a deeply racialized way that left behind cities with a lot of non white workers who had shown up for the sort of tail end of the industrial boom, and then were kind of left left behind by deindustrialization. And then trapped through various zoning policies in, in central cities like Detroit and Lawrence. And we subsidize that suburbanization in a way that was really expensive, but also very damaging to the cities left behind. And then last, we just pulled money out, you know, at some level, this is a, you know, in academia, they call this disinvestment. And I think that's such a boring word, it sort of is a bloodless word, it doesn't really kind of bring to life, what that really looks like. But these are places that have, you know, whether it's their people and their people's educational needs, or it's their buildings, these are places where does money stopped supporting anything in town, so we just really withdrew a lot of tax dollars, we went through a lot of businesses, we went through a lot of housing developments, and, and just moved it all elsewhere and subsidized growth in newer places. So you know, disinvestment had real costs on the ground, and I think we're now kind of 40 years into what happens after a place has been neglected for that long.

Joe Cadwell: 12:28

So the catalyst would have been the automation would have been a globalization to some extent, I think, in Josephine County, the timber industry, some environmental laws probably factored in at a certain point in time. But overall, we've, we've created gone from a manufacturing nation, for the most part to one of a service industry, mindset, then you can only serve so many people and only have so much money to be made from that if people can't even attend the basic services that are there. It's hard to, to make a living as a as a chef for waiter or waitress if, if no one's coming to your restaurant. So a lot of these places began to die on the vine and, and the feds, it sounded like Michelle were trying to put a temporary patch on it. But that money eventually went away. And until we ended up in the situation we are now.

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 13:17

Yeah, I mean, it's so first of all, I think, you know, you have I think you've commented on this in the past, and it's so important to reiterate now that America is still a manufacturing giant. So we are still incredibly productive. But we just use fewer jobs to make that stuff. So the real, you know, American manufacturing is alive and well. But it represents fewer living wage jobs than it did before. And actually, you know, it's amazing. I mean, that when you go through the history of American manufacturing, sort of post World War Two, you can really see these points where manufacturing collapses. And, you know, famously, it collapses in a big way, in some cities like Detroit, between the 40s in the 60s and others in the 70s. But in the early 2000s, we have a massive fall in the number of jobs, so just the jobs, not the productivity. And that's a you know, a big kind of, it's a big slam that is happening to the country right before the Great Recession. So cities like Detroit take this massive new wave of job losses, right into a recession, which makes the Great Recession that much harder on Michigan as a state and Detroit and so forth. But anyway, like you said, we you know, this is this transition from manufacturing to the service economy, where or the in the gig economy where wages are low. Schedules are chaotic in ways that are really hard for two working two for two parent working families, which is what you got to do to pay your bills with the Low wages. And so the schedules are bad, the independence is bad, the larger, there's, you know, the larger support of basic benefits, health care, vacation time and so forth is bad. So we make this larger transition into a very insecure, poorly paid service economy. And in order to get those jobs, you got to be in a place that has a lot of dollars rolling around for restaurants and hotels, and you know, tourism, and so forth. And so the truth is that, we now have this very lopsided economy where we've got these giant Metro engines, like I'm talking to you from San Francisco, I'm sitting in one of those giant Metro engines, in which there's tons of jobs. And really, the problem is the availability of housing that people can afford on those jobs. But then we've got other areas of a country where there's more housing, although housing is now expensive, everywhere, but we've got more housing. And that's not quite the choke point. But there are just fewer jobs and in either place, it's hard to make ends meet, right, either your, you know, your wages are unavailable, and your housing is quote, unquote, cheap, or your, you know, housing, you've got plenty of job access, but you can't afford housing with what your paychecks bring in. So both places have an affordability crisis. But this book is really about the scenario of places with fewer jobs. And what happens to the larger tax base where, as you said, it's harder for the government to provide basic services that allow people to move, you know, at some level like this is it's the book at some level is about the difference between gateway cities that sort of get people out of poverty and poverty traps. And it's about how to take a poverty trap. And it looks at these four places, which are working on this problem, how to take an intergenerational poverty trap, and really try to reinvest in your people, so that they could stay in town there, if that's where they want to be with their families make a home sort of stay with their roots, or they want to go somewhere else. And I love that word. I love that phrase gateway cities that comes from Massachusetts policy. And it refers to the immigration history of Massachusetts of these sort of first industrial Mill Towns where people could, you know, learn English kind of make it into American culture. But, but I love it as a way of just thinking about what we need from poor places to we need to give people a gateway out of poverty out of town if they want, and just have a safe and healthy place for their families.

Joe Cadwell: 17:56

So what's what's the going to one of these gateway cities if we could Stockton, California, you said one of the most, if not the most ethnically diverse? city in America years? Yeah. And upon reading the chapter, I came up with two words, loss and trauma, that does seem that it was a lot of loss, that really was the catalyst that that caused this mindset that we need. We, you know, we cannot rely on on anyone else but ourselves as a community to start bringing ourselves out of this darkness. And who are the key players in the movement in Stockton? And where did that where did the loss come from? And how do these people deal with that trauma associated with the loss?

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 18:39

Yeah, I mean, those that's beautiful that you picked out those two words, because I think that's right, I would just add a third which is it's also about healing too. I think the the chapter is very much about the people who show up for that loss and trauma and really stand with one another to to grieve and to process it and really help children and, and adults alike sort of process exposure to violence.

Joe Cadwell: 19:10

Because there was no there was a period Wasn't there a two year period where 10 high school students I think it was Edison High School had died because of gun violence.

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 19:19

Yeah, I mean, that's that's the that's one story I tell in I'll come back to that in one minute. I'll just wrap up and sort of, you know, if we reorient to the the premise of Stockton is incredible racial diversity. If you just picture what it takes to become that diverse. You've got global refugee and immigration lines from all over the world, but then also within the country. And Stockton has made a home for refugees of foreign wars and violence and and economic Tragedy for really its whole history. I mean, it's been this incredible sort of first home for people who are fleeing violence and intergenerational poverty abroad. And California needed those workers because Stockton was this bedroom community for big ag and, you know, your non California listeners may not appreciate but the California interior is one of the most important food production regions in the whole world. It's this giant breadbasket for the world. So it's got tons of farmworkers a lot of food, labor, and all of the trucking and processing that comes with all of that food and those farms. Tons of meat production, dairy, nuts, vegetable, I mean, just the whole thing. So anyway, so you end stocked in Stockton has this is carrying this incredible hunger for labor that it doesn't want to pay very much. And it's bringing in workers who are bringing their own exposure to war, including the Vietnam War with socked in has a big history of Cambodian, and Vietnamese refugees from that period and Southeast Asia. And then it's got a mass shooting that takes place one of the the biggest mass shooting in the United States before Columbine High School. And then it goes into the 1990s period of intense drug trafficking across California and 1990s Homicide wave across American cities as we handle that period of drug related violence. And in the 1990s, there were a wave of children who were witnesses and orphans of that first drug crisis. Those kids, you know, and this is a hypothesis of this larger wave of current gun violence in Stockton is that those kids are now in their 20s. Many of them grew up as orphans either because their parents were incarcerated because that was our main answer to the drug wars and drug tragedy. At that point, the addiction crisis, then they were orphaned by incarceration, they were orphaned by homicide, or they were witnesses to this level of violence. And so, you know, the sad reality is that we abandoned that generation of families living in American cities and that period, and they were left with a lot of scars. So if you fast forward to 2010, where Stockton is still exceptionally poor, still a home to tons of farmworkers who are eking out, you know, absolutely unlivable wages on backbreaking jobs, and a lot of insecure, manufacturing workers of various kinds. You fast forward to that period. And by the time the you know, by the time the Great Recession rolls around. Stockton has a really intense gun violence problem on it in its neighborhoods, and it is related to drug trafficking. But also as in many very poor intergenerationally poor areas has a domestic violence problems related to that just packing of trauma and exposure to violence into families. Anyway, so yes, so Edison High School takes a wave of losses and a wave of killings one at a time of its students. And the story of the chapter really starts from that point of sort of what you do when you look out in your city and it's terrorized at some level by this violence and needing a path of Grief and Healing.

Joe Cadwell: 23:57

There's no safe place the parks were were sort of not accessible to the general community that open spaces people were just kind of fearful to make a make a go of it. And then finally the citizens started to turn that around.

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 24:10

Yeah, I mean, you know, here I will I want to just say Stockton is such a beautiful city. It's got this gorgeous waterfront, there's such beautiful people in the city. I come and go from Stockton so freely and happily I bring my family there. I don't want to like pathologize Stockton I feel like sometimes in California and in this region that happens so much. But But yes, during the some of the periods of peak violence, there have been particular parks that were you know, families just don't let their kids go and you know, and people don't walk on the sidewalks and you know, there is a kind of physical muscle memory to gun violence that I think in safer places we don't often think about you know, when you know that The shooting has taken place somewhere, you know, that is kind of remembered and people's bones and their movement in the city. And so the the social movements story in Stockton that I tell them is so beautiful is really about reclaiming those spaces, it's about what it takes to transform a park that has been really just surrender to drug dealing, and sort of turn it back into a place where kids are and families are and people are kind of, you know, barbecuing on birthdays, and you know, using that space again, so, Stockton has a lot of reclaimed places like that right now where, you know, neighbors have really, and youth programs and so forth have really, you know, worked together to sort of take that land back for the, for the community. And, and in so doing, you know, they see that not as like a parks project, but as a deeper psychological project of sort of reclaiming more sort of places in the city where people can feel safe and like physically relaxed their bodies, the the amount of you know, we have a lot of increased research now about the the stress on kids and adults from what is often called toxic stress, but just the physical hormones that surge when we're afraid. And when you go through your daily life, you know, coming getting in and out of your car getting in and out of your front door, walking to walk into a corner store, when you you know when you have that level of exposure to or that level of sort of physical stress and fear it can. It has major health consequence

Joe Cadwell: 26:49

manifests itself physically so so the people there said, Hey, we've got to do something different. They got together and they had a number of initiatives that eventually started to turn the tide yet that the tide hadn't turned very long, whereas Stockton now since when you started writing writing your book?

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 27:08

Yeah. So right, they made a lot of really incredible progress through, you know, mental health care through trauma informed training of police officers, and church leaders and so forth, through some of these parks reclamation projects that I described through the creation of voluntary basketball leagues and soccer leagues and so forth. So I mean, you know, just one step forward after another, advocates understood that none of that work is going to show up as easy returns quickly, like that's, you know, that deeper healing work takes a lifetime. In fact, Jasmine della Foss, this breathtaking social activist and leader in Stockton, really described how they understood early on that they were just planting seeds that, you know, they might not see come to fruition, you know, in their lifetime. But I would just say that in the big politically speaking, I think it's fair to say that Stockton has gone through a lot of turbulence has sort of, as Reverend William Barber of North Carolina of the NAACP and the Poor People's Campaign in North Carolina says, a lot of history and in particular, Black History teaches us that often you take four steps forward and to back. And I feel like Stockton has gone through a little bit of that in its politics, and but people are picking themselves back up in a big and very impressive way. And returning to this work. COVID in Stockton, as in many places was devastating. It has a lot of undocumented workers who are not protected by a lot of the early public health interventions, who continued to go to work and meatpacking facilities, and farm labor and so forth. So they had a really high death rate and a lot of fear early on. And they just have had a lot of other challenges in the last couple of years. But, but there's such incredible people there. And that's, I mean, if if I was, if that's true for all of these places, you know, these four places that I wrote about, they are portrayed all the time as these just moral backwaters just like guns flying and corrupt politicians and, you know, hopeless people and they, you know, they get pathologized all the time in ways that are really destructive. And, in fact, when you spend time there, you realize that there's something really really special about the social workers and church leaders and you know, basketball coaches and teachers and government official souls who, who stay in a place like that. I mean, they're really exquisite people. So a lot of resilience, a lot of love a lot of you know, just showing up for vulnerable people. And you know in Stockton is got a lot of fun too. I mean, it's there's a lot of youth programs that work together really well now and, you know, have a lot of just, I don't know, a lot of creativity and it's kind of defiant, artsy spunk to being that big of an underdog when you're like that big of an underdog that the rest of California just makes fun of you for guns. You know, there's like you can really develop a kind of fierce loyalty. That is, you know, really pretty, pretty. What's the word? I don't know. It's irresistible. I find it irresistible.

Joe Cadwell: 30:59

There you go. My guest today is Michelle wild Anderson, the author of the fight to save the town reimagining discarded America. Well, moving up the coast, staying on the west coast, but moving up to the coast in the state of Oregon, where I am you focused in on Josephine County and how did you find Josephine County? What brought that to your attention? And why did you want to write about Josephine County?

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 31:30

Yeah, you know, I first got involved in Oregon because all of the timber counties and that's their sort of nickname in Oregon politics. We're, we're going broke. Just they had a long history of direct subsidies from the federal government after the spotted owl wars. And the federal government, basically the administration of Bill Clinton and Al Gore and this larger sort of political compromise that follow the political meltdown over those spotted owl

Joe Cadwell: 32:06

that was the early 90s. Right,

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 32:09

early 90s. This the northern spotted owl gets listed as an endangered species. And there's a you know, total meltdown in environmental politics in. And interestingly, I think it's a point when the sort of boogeyman of people in suits in Washington, DC and environmental law itself become this diversion tactic for the larger industrial restructuring that's going on in timber in the Pacific Northwest, where a lot by the time the spotted owl listing happens that region's wages have already collapsed, the number of jobs has already collapsed. But because of globalization and automation and the arrival of technology, like the feller buncher, and these, like amazing technologies that have replaced jobs out in the forest, and but the spotted owl shows up as a kind of boogeyman and it sort of joined

Joe Cadwell: 33:06

it was an easy target.

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 33:08

easy target. And I mean, it was true. The truth is that the the protection of environmental for of old growth forests does cause a fall off in logging. So it adds to the job losses in the mills and in the forest. So it's not blameless, but it it becomes like the only story that people talk about anymore without really holding industry to some level of responsibility. Also, just as an aside, Oregon, just for your listeners from your neck of the woods, Oregon, unlike Washington really never had a good union movement. So Washington had the union, timber jobs. And Oregon never did. So Oregon's wages for timber and paper mills and wood products, manufacturing, and trucking related to that industry were always really, really low. So this is a region that's kind of never enjoyed the sort of idyllic kind of blue collar, you know, wages that we associate with some of the union movement,

Joe Cadwell: 34:16

right? And and if you're looking to take advantage of it and spin the narrative, as opposed to looking at what big businesses doing and opening their markets up to globalization, or investing in automation, they say, Hey, here's your easy foil, here's your tree huggers, your people that you know, care about the environment will make them the bad guys. And then they direct a lot of energy towards that. And they get a lot of people buying in on that storyline, which is only really part of the story, like you say most of those wages that are already collapsed. So Josephine County is suffering at this point in time and suffers today, to some extent,

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 34:52

right? Because basically, you know that like you said that early 90s It's ages ago, but basically for or, you know, the first for 10 years and then sort of to a slightly lesser extent for another five years, the federal government was earmarking all of this money straight to Oregon, it was just like a special earmark to just like keep spotted all country quiet, it was just a buy off basically, because the politics had been so inflamed. And or I shouldn't call it a by Amin, the generous way of saying it is that there were really a lot of jobs that were lost. And so we took care of Oregon to a greater extent than we were taking care of subsidizing those counties, right. There's lots of places that also needed that kind of buy off. So or what that kind of support sorry. So, you know, it's not to criticize the support for Oregon, Oregon needed it, but it was special as against other states that were also, you know, really in trouble in terms of their jobs. Anyway, so the federal government spending all this money, and then basically, that every, you know, it starts to become kind of one year at a time sort of appropriation cycles, because people in Washington or Washington DC are like, what are we doing, you know, why is Oregon enjoying these giant earmarks. And so then the great recession comes, you know, construction goes down, which hurts jobs that much more, there's a larger sort of hit that Southern Oregon takes in the recession. And by the time I got involved in the air, really started learning about Oregon and getting involved that all of the timber counties in the state were in real freefall, where they really they started to close. All kinds of basic services, libraries were closing all over the rural parts of the state. They've got, you know, massive layoffs in, in major crimes, investigations, massive layoffs in 911. Dispatch and police, you know, law enforcement, fire services, just basic, you know, basic local government services start to really die off and, and you know, there were some very famous jail closures during that period in which not because of defund the police politics, but because they were just broke the counties in Oregon started doing a triage releases of their jails just so they could close Wings of them and have fewer expenses associated with county jail. So it became this kind of spectacle of government. Downsizing. And and I started working with folks there, and but the Josephine work came because, you know, to work specifically on Josephine, because I just got to know this incredible group of people in the sheriff's office in the library system and in community organizations all over the county, who were really engaged in the fight to save the county of, sir, what are we going to do about the freefall in local government, and I fell totally in love with Josephine, because it really is this example of a grassroots pro tax movement in one of the most anti government places in America. And that's just totally crazy and fascinating, and like how you rebuild trust in government in a deeply libertarian place that has a lot of suspicion and resentment, and really, you know, sometimes hatred of government.

Joe Cadwell: 38:38

So what did they do? What did the people of Josephine County do for a few examples?

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 38:42

Yeah, I mean, so public officials really had to go back to the people and argue for their existence. And to do that, you know, they use these very intimate townhall formats across the county, I should be specific, that what they've got to do is make a case to the people for very, very modest local tax increases small levels of parcel taxes, in order to support basic services, because the federal government is, you know, walking away, and the county officials are saying, hey, the cavalry is not coming. The Federal cavalry is no longer writing to our rescue. And Oregon is up there at the state capitol saying, you know, and we've been supporting you guys for years with a disproportionate amount of state funding and, and, you know, there you got this language of, sort of, you're gonna have to help yourselves to so that we can also, you know, work with you. So there's this larger reality that the counties the timber counties, including Josephine, really have to show that they're willing to pay a rate of taxes that is a little bit closer to what is being paid elsewhere in Oregon. And anyway, so they have to go through these town halls. As they go through these larger explainer efforts of just telling people what their government money, you know what their taxes paid for, and really trying to kind of earn trust back in, in government, the library in Josephine, the whole library system closes down. But this incredible volunteer movement, reopens it as a nonprofit, and then builds this army of volunteers who really care about the library, and who, if you can believe it, end up putting a levy on the ballot to sort of recreate the library as a public function, which would have taxpayer support. And they make 14,000 phone calls, in order to turn people out to support the reopening of a public library. And this is in a county that only has 80,000 people. So 14,000 people is like a, an exhibition of grassroots democracy. Like, I mean, breathtaking. Where do you see 40,000 people this, you know, over a local tax election, and they win?

Joe Cadwell: 41:10

Wow. And outside of the libraries, there was also just the basic calling 911 and needing police or fire those services were also shut down at the low point of Josephine County de investment.

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 41:23

Right. Yeah, I mean, the there had been some absolute, just devastating incidents in which people and this you know, any of your listeners in rural areas are familiar with extreme 911 delays in very large rural areas. That's a very common experience. But but in Josephine, the larger, the entire Sheriff's Department apparatus sort of collapses to the point that it's only for a while, is only only has deputies on call during business hours. And needless to say, lots of violence takes place outside of business hours. And so there's a larger sort of period of time in which only state police are available as a backup for 911. And some really terrible things take place and including just an absolutely chilling, tragic 911 Call of a woman who has an intruder trying to break into her house and she is on the phone with 911, who has nobody to send to her because it's a Saturday morning, there's no officers on call and, and and she is violently assaulted. And there's a larger you know, sort of reckoning with what it means this, this phrase gets used a lot and Josephine at that time, which is bar which is beyond available resources, which was just like jargon for like, we don't we don't have anybody to send, and the audio of that 911 Call if this woman on the phone for 10 minutes, just begging for help and the 911 person like trying to make these, you know what seem like just lame suggestions of can you ask him to go away? And anyway, and that, you know, there were a few things like that, that just really draw attention to how bad things have gotten. And but then, you know, there's a sheriff turnover, which was for the good in the larger trust in the sheriff's department and the new sheriff Dave Daniel, who, whose story I tell him the book really has to kind of make the case that we know that you've asked us for a lot of things over the years, you've asked us for assistance during moments of crime, you've asked us for EMS dispatch in the middle of heart attacks, you've asked us to record your stolen cars so that you can get insurance money, and we weren't there for you. Because we were lights out here. And we need to earn back your trust, you know, people are mad, you go through a period like that where your car's stolen, and you like can't get a friggin piece of paper to authenticate that that happened for insurance purposes. People were really mad and there was a larger period of volunteer policing that grew up across those terrible cuts at the Sheriff's Department. And, you know, and I tell the story of all of that to have sort of what happens when people start to you know, develop their own volunteer dispatch systems for burglary and other crimes that the sheriff's department no longer you know, can send officers for so are deputies, I should say. So anyway, yeah, it's an incredible story, but you know, eventually it's a happy ending in 2017 when voter errs sort of give their faith back to the local government. And there's been enough of a change politically that for the first time and, you know, decades of local history, people start voting for grassroots taxes. So they start to rebuild some other services. And you know, they continue to have to go through those elections law as in Stockton, like these problems don't get wiped out because some great sheriff and a red cape like save the day they you know, people have to keep working on them the intense poverty that continues to strain, especially Josephine's rural areas is not going away. And so you know, the the fight to save the county continues to this day.

Joe Cadwell: 45:49

Once again, my guest today is Michelle wild Anderson, author of the fight to save the town reimagining discarded America. So fight to save the town fight to save the county. We're going to take it to the other side of the country now, Michelle, to the fight to save Lawrence, Massachusetts, which at one point in American history was sort of the not the breadbasket of agriculture, but the breadbasket where the loom of America where the average American clothing was made. I heard from one of one of my prior guests, the the CEO of Dignity, apparel, and image point, Josh rule had mentioned that back in the 60s 95% of the clothing that Americans wore was made here in the US back in the 1960s. And nowadays, about 2%, according to recent studies, of the clothing that Americans made are made here in the US so and Lancaster, I'm sorry, Lawrence, Massachusetts, at one point was responsible for a lot of those looms and a lot of that manufacturing and then what happened there?

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 46:59

Yeah, I love that loom capital i That's beautiful. I've never heard that. Lawrence's nickname at the turn of the 20th century was the immigrant city. And that you got a picture just immigrant is kind of like the storytelling in Stockton like this. This textile boom town is drawing people from all over the world. And in the early 1900s, it's got these giant textile mills, one of them is so big that it is the same size as the Empire State Building, if you laid it on its side. Wow. So these buildings, you know, not all of these mills are still standing, a lot of them are ripped down or chunks of them or wings of them were ripped down on the 60s. But you know, you go there to this day, and they've got these just stunning buildings. If you were to step into Warren's in, you know, 1910, you would know you were in, you know, a really important American city. These each of these mills is basically a teeming city of textile workers. But their jobs were ruthlessly dangerous with absolutely dangerous levels of low income so very dangerous housing unlivable diets and so forth, you know, that they can afford based on these terrible wages. I mean, most workers didn't survive past 10 years in these jobs,

Joe Cadwell: 48:24

long hours, low wages, dangerous working conditions.

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 48:29

Yeah, Anthrax exposure from I don't even understand really the anthrax thing, but it comes off of the wool from the sheep, like, you know, tons of terrible industrial dangers at work. And then, you know, living in tenements, with terrible conditions. And, you know, so many sanitation problems, a lot of people die of various diseases that just come from the lack of investment in water and sanitation. So anyway, but by 1912, Lawrence's workers are really starting to organize and in 1912 Lorenz is home to the Bread and Roses strike, which is one of the biggest, most successful early labor uprisings and American labor history. And workers from the International Workers of the World the wobblies organized this larger strike. I tell the story of this in the book but this incredible international array of workers including the more skilled Irish and Scottish workers who had suffered terrible discrimination, terrible housing, terrible conditions, but had like slightly inched up the chain by 1912 and are doing like ever so slightly better. And and the wobblies and other strike leaders really convinced these, you know, slightly more skilled workers to stand in solidarity with the line textile workers and the uniforms. Haitians sort of across, you know, across these class groups and across languages and across, you know, international origins really allows this breathtaking success. And they managed to at the conclusion of a, you know, a debt, I mean, the strike was hard, I don't want to paper over the dangers and the losses. But at the conclusion of what can only be understood is a very successful strike, they managed to get a 15% wage increase for workers all across the textile industry of all of New England. And that is just, you know, one of the early kind of wins for the formation of American labor. But the story to tell and Lawrence is really about how you do that now, but what does it mean? How do you get a 15% wage increase in your town? In,

Joe Cadwell: 50:54

you know, your union unions come into play and apprenticeships?

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 50:58

Right, well, the apprenticeship thing is key, which talk about that, but But you know, the thing about unions for workforce if you fast forward to today, Lawrence's workforce is splintering into a zillion jobs. They are gig workers, their nannies, their elder care workers, they are some of them are in manufacturing, some of them are in food service, they're all over the place, they're commuting out for their jobs, for the most part, it is an over it is still an immigrant city, but it's a new nickname is the Latinos city because those immigrant groups still come from many nations, but they are, you know, largely converging around Spanish native language and larger kind of pan Latino heritage that Lauren starts to form in order to create a new organizing identity for the city anyway, and so they really asked this question, you know, you can't, unions are not going to work in quite the same way as strikes not going to work in quite the same way. So they really turn to this, you know, this larger model of how you create systems to train workers into the better jobs. And the thing about Lawrence is like so many towns, it's got a K to 12 school system, which is a big job base, there's paraprofessionals, and all kinds of workers in the school system, of course, including teachers, but I mean, even more entry level workers, and it's got healthcare, it's got a big old historic hospital that serves the whole region. Again, lots of entry level jobs, that kind of can get you up the chain toward nursing and better middle, you know, better paid occupations. And so Lawrence develops this incredible effort to really try to allow its people who still have to be able to work a day job, like nobody can pay their rent in Laurens unless you continue to bring in income. So you're not going to like, you know, quit your job and go become a full time student. So they have to build this larger effort to get people into the entry level hospital work and get them into the entry level education work. And that's what they do. And parts of it are apprenticeship models, parts of it are organized vocational training that works around worker hours. And, you know, and they are real programs with, with cohorts and support systems and so forth to sort of motivate people to, to stay in it. So it's just this, you know, it's this really impressive effort to and they set the the 15% benchmark of we want our, they actually made their job really hard. They said, how would we get a 15% wage increase for the parents of the kids in public schools. And they did that because there's some commuters and you know, young people, you live in Lawrence and commute to Boston, and the real cohort that was the, you know, the deeper harder poverty problem. And Lawrence was the, the, the longterm families who have, you know, have kids and they really tried to focus on those kids, not just for the family's own sake, but also for the sake of the schools so that kids are not going through evictions all the time so that, you know, their parents have greater economic stability so that the kids have a chance in K to 12. And they pull it off. I mean, who does that?

Joe Cadwell: 54:37

Especially I can't remember if I got it from your book or heard it while I was prepping for the interview, but it seemed like the the last administration, the Trump administration, it really used Lawrence Massachusetts sort of a political punching bag to show you how how dangerous these immigrants could be and then you you go there and and you see a town where literally you're you're you've never seen In such a large number of people holding hands, is that true to get that correctly?

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 55:06

Yeah, I mean, the from punching bags holding hands I like how you as a Christian. So there's no question that Lawrence is used as was used as a punching bag not only by former President Trump but also by governors and in New Hampshire and Maine. And the story was that Lawrence was running the drugs into in the opioid crisis into New England's addiction crisis. So this is a sort of blame narrative that Lawrence was responsible for the drug crisis in New England. And Trump made it and those governors made it a deeply racialized accusation of sort of referring to, quote unquote, black and brown drug dealers who are sort of causing this addiction crisis, which, again, totally beside the point of the larger, the demand side of the addiction crisis in New Hampshire and Maine, the, you know, the depths of despair literature, the larger sort of concern about the terrible backlogs in residential rehab in those states, like there's all kinds of problems that are going on. And but Lorenz is, is really poor, and it has, you know, super weak public services, and it had a lot of land that was just under utilized from these, this decades of disinvestment. And so there were encampments of addicts and other kinds of problems that the city is kind of carrying for its region, in the crisis, anyway, but the the, you know, and as one advocate, and morons put it so beautifully, you can, she said, if you look at warrants, through the eyes of the police, you would be deeply aware of the opioid crisis in the country, like that's through the eyes of the police like that, that was so much of the load that Lawrence is carrying, for its region of just bearing the the impacts of this crisis. But she said, You know, when you look at it through the eyes of a nonprofit or social services agency, you just see the same story of immigrants drivers that you would have seen in this place forever of people that are, you know, exile in here from some other place, or they don't have a place to go. And they're working 80 hour weeks, you know, 80 hours a week in various jobs that have been cobbled together in order to, you know, make a foothold for their kids in this rough country.

Joe Cadwell: 57:40

So in pursuit of the American dream, yeah. And that's the holding hands part, it

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 57:45

was just a private reflection that I was, you know, that part of the book, I was just thinking about how pathologized Lauren says, by its suburbs, too, and how people just describe it as so dangerous, and whatever. And I just noticed how it because it's an immigrant city with a lot of Caribbean culture, especially Dominican families, Puerto Rican families, there's a lot of physical affection in families and among friends, I knew, you know, so you see, like, on Sunday mornings, like families flooding toward the churches, you see a lot of people holding hands with children with, you know, among adults and so forth. It's a really affectionate culture and, and a sort of vibrant city in so many ways. So the, the stories that get told about Lawrence, by regional politicians and the Boston media, you know, really don't line up with what it looks like to see a city like that on the ground.

Joe Cadwell: 58:45

Right. And you had mentioned the color of one's skin oftentimes, you know, being played into the narrative of why the woes of the fall on a particular area and I think we'll finish up our our last city in your book is Detroit, Michigan, which historically has always been considered to be a bedrock of the American working class and also has huge amount of African American population there. And I think at the it's gone through some tumultuous times over the last number of decades, and I was hoping you could talk to us a little bit about Detroit skin color and how income inequality and is sort of taken hold there.

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 59:24

Ya know, I've Detroit it really like all of these places just really won me over I think, because for really two reasons First, because it just like you say it has this incredible status in the American imagination as sort of a capital of our working class heritage, like Detroit is a really important sort of symbol of a place where people on modest incomes could own a house like that, that was so much of what Detroit stood for. And, and just the kind of, you know, mid 20th century kind of heyday of middle of the American middle class and and so it's very symbolic that way. But I think the reality is that right now today, I think we should understand Detroit as a symbol or a capital of American inequality. And so the story of the chapter is really how you get from point A to point B, how you get from this kind of homeownership place that's so symbolic of the American dream to this place. That is, you know, where, where there's huge amounts of money moving, and it's real estate markets in ways that are causing massive displacement on the ground. And in between is this devastating, racialized story that I think is is really twofold. It's really about a history of discrimination against black migrants to the city to sort of lock them out of this American dream and sort of price gouge, the black workers who came to Detroit for the same jobs that brought you know, so many immigrants for so long. And so there has a history of price gouging and housing and discrimination in housing that deeply segregated the city. And, and then as this is in common with Lawrence, too, as the jobs leave the there's this larger exit of what is you know, called white flight sort of the larger exodus of white Detroiters to the suburbs, and deindustrialization. And Detroit's rising poverty get blamed on its black population. And that was the same in Lawrence, there's this story that is libtorrent, Lawrence became more Puerto Rican, more Dominican, that they were responsible for the city's decline. But what's really responsible for the city's decline is that it's just hemorrhaging jobs. And the workforce is trapped, they're unable to follow the jobs because there's so much discrimination in the suburban areas where manufacturing has relocated. So there's a larger kind of poverty trap sort of story where, you know, Detroit gets kind of hemmed in, in its population, really unable to move toward employment in the same way that others were. And but you know, there to the story that I tell in Detroit is how to look out at a city like this, which has just a terrible housing crisis, if you can believe it. 48% of Detroit houses went through a mortgage or tax foreclosure between 2005 and 2015. And you just imagine, like, if listeners just imagine what that looks like on a block level, if half of homes are going through a foreclosure in a 10 year period. So they've got just this huge problem. And it's very complicated because real estate, it's like hard to see who owns stuff and where what's happening. They have to diagnose this problem, like figure out what's going on that's driving this crisis, it was way beyond the subprime lending crisis. And they have to figure out what's going on. And then they have to figure out how to stop this mass displacement, reform the government and private institutions that are enabling this mass transfer of wealth, and then really look at rebuilding homeownership. So in some ways, this is about a modern movement, to restore or stabilize homeownership in a city that, like I said, is really symbolic of that of sort of being a modest, a person of modest means was nonetheless able to sort of control your own destiny through a piece of land. And in Detroit, the land across a period I was writing about, you know, is going for often 515 $102,000 In these auctions. So from the from the point of view of outsiders, and this is the inequality story, from the point of view of outsiders, land into traders miners will be free. And so the question is, like how you, you know, bring this land that there's plenty of and there's, you know, so much need for housing, how you put it in local hands again, and sort of take control of the wheels of this real estate market that has, you know, a lot of global speculation starting to buy that land.

Joe Cadwell: 1:04:37

Sounds like the Detroit dwellers, the other cities in your book have a long, hard fight ahead of them. Michelle, this has been a fantastic conversation. Where can people go to find out more about you and your book, the fight to save the towel?

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 1:04:52

Thank you so much joy. I loved your questions. This was amazing. Um, so I have a website on Stanford Law. Schools website and there are links to some and there will increasingly be links to some resources related to the book. And I'm on Twitter at Wild Anderson, and I'm so grateful to you and the community you've created through this podcast though. All right, well, thank

Joe Cadwell: 1:05:19

you so much, Michelle. It's been a real pleasure.

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 1:05:21

Thank you.

Joe Cadwell: 1:05:25

I guess day was Michelle wild Anderson, author of the fight to save the town reimagining discarded America and is now available wherever you buy your favorite books. Thanks again for listening to the show. And until next time, this is Joe Cadwell. thanking you for wanting no more today than you did yesterday. Michelle, what would you hope that people after reading your book come away with

Michelle Wilde Anderson: 1:05:49

I all end on this amazing photograph that became the title of the Stockton chapter? And it is a man I don't know his name. He's an African American resident of of Stockton sorry. And he is part of this photo exhibit where photographer asked people to write messages to the city of Stockton on their hands or arms. And you know, Stockton was being like I said, just so so stigmatized in the larger California dialogue. And he wrote on his hands, dear Stockton, I won't give up on you ever