The Fight to Save the Town - Michelle Wilde Anderson - Grit Nation

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
AndWelcome to grid Nation. I'm Joe

(00:09):
Cadwell, the host of the show,and on today's episode, I have
the pleasure of speaking withurban law expert and author
Michelle wild Anderson about herbook, fight to save the town
reimagining discarded America.
The San Francisco Chroniclewrites that her book is a
sweeping an eye opening study ofwealth inequality and the

(00:31):
dismantling of localgovernments, or working class US
cities, and passionately arguesfor a reinvestment in people
centered leadership, and offersa welcome reminder of what
government can accomplish, ifgiven the chance
It was a great conversation. AndI hope you enjoy.
And now on to the show.

(00:57):
Michelle Wilde Anderson, welcometo Grit Nation.

Michelle Wilde Anderson (00:59):
Oh, I'm so glad to be here, Joe. Thanks.

Joe Cadwell (01:02):
Thank you, Michelle, for taking your time
to be on the show today, I'mreally excited to introduce you
and your new book, The fight tosave the town reimagining
discarded America, my listeners.
Before we do that, what got youinterested in writing this book
Michelle?

Again, Joe, I'm so glad to be here.
This is your podcast isterrific. And I have to say that
grit nation is an amazingpodcast title. And if I had to
quick summarize the book itself,I might have called it grit
cities. And I came to thisproject of really looking at
cities that have rebuilt theirgovernments in times of extreme

(01:40):
poverty, because I am a sixthgeneration rural California and
on one side of my family, andI'm very familiar with the
weakness of rural governments.
And for really, most of mycareer, I've worked on weak
governments in rural areas, butalso very concentrated urban
poverty. And during the GreatRecession, as maybe some of your
listeners are aware, we had thebiggest wave of municipal

(02:03):
bankruptcies we've had since theGreat Depression. And at that
period of time, I realized thatwe no longer just have weak
rural governments, we have a lotof really weak urban
governments. And this book isabout gritty people rebuilding
civil society when there's a lotof intergenerational poverty and

(02:23):
very weak local government. Andwhen you wrote the book you
focused in on four cities. Andthose four cities very close to
where you are in the SanFrancisco Bay Area was Stockton,
California, closer to where Ilive Josephine County in the
state of Oregon, you alsofocused in on Detroit, Michigan,
and Lawrence, Massachusetts. Andso did you actually have a

(02:48):
chance to visit all of thosecities? Or was it online
research? How did you go aboutresearching for your book? Yeah,
um, I spent a lot of time in allfour places, I did 250
interviews for the book, reallytrying to tell the story of the
people in these towns in theirown voice. I teach environmental
justice as part of my day job.

(03:11):
And one of the really importantcommitments of the environmental
justice movement is we speak forourselves. And this book really
tried to hold to that principleand 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

(03:33):
only because each of them hasjust an absolutely magnificent
and deeply American workingclass history. But because they
represent the huge range ofplaces in the country that are
both poor and broke. So theyhave this combination of a lot
of poverty, but then also areally weak government. And

(03:56):
places like that in the countryrange from Super rural to super
urban with suburban small cityplaces in between. They range
from all black, all white, allLatino to a place like Stockton,
which you mentioned a big inlandport in California, one of the
major agriculturaltransportation and food

(04:18):
manufacturing hubs in thecountry. And Stockton is the
most diverse city in the UnitedStates of America. So they range
in this huge way sort ofracially and in terms of
urbanization, but also theyrange politically and so this
book has to hold the politics ofJosephine County, Oregon closer
to you, which is verylibertarian, deep anti

(04:41):
government politics.
But all the way to Deep BlueDetroit, and some purple, you
know, some purple places inbetween including Stockton that
sort of swings blue to red andLawrence which is blue reliably
blue but but The truth is hassome kind of undercurrents these

(05:02):
days of political turbulence.

And so you use Michela used all four of these
cities to sort of shine a lightthat there are challenges within
the American system that areunder serving the communities
under serving the regions. Inoticed in the book that you
really zeroed in on onneighborhood porousness and, and
then city poorness, and thenregional porousness that just

(05:28):
sort of boil it down. And whatwhat is the definition of poor
and broke? You use that termearlier? What is that?

Yeah, well, I mean, this is just a
quick sort of wonky aside, I'llmake it super fast. But most of
our, you know, in sociology andacademic research, most work on
American poverty focuses onindividuals and households, like
just the strain on individualbudgets, cost of living and so
forth. And then it works onneighborhoods and the way that

(05:57):
neighborhoods form a kind ofdestiny for economic outcomes. I
have called us in the book sortof zip code destiny of sort of,
whether it's your schools, yourlevel of violence in the
community, your access to openspace, all these, you know,
incredible determinants ofhealth and economic well being.
And then they jump to bigregional things like, you know,

(06:19):
industrial decline all across amajor manufacturing region. And
I'm mostly focused on city levelpoverty of sort of what it means
when a whole tax base, so a citytax base, or a county tax base,
carries tons of concentratedpoverty in its jurisdiction.

(06:43):
And, you know, for reasons thatwe could get into or not, it's
kind of up to you that when citygovernments or county
governments carry that muchpoverty in their tax base these
days, it's really hard for themto support basic services. So
whether that's a library orclean water, or basic 911,

(07:06):
emergency services dispatch, itbecomes really hard to do the
basic job that we expect fromlocal government.

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

So I didn't say it better myself, by
the way, I just want to likehighlight that sentence, they're
poor, because they're broke, andthey're broke, because they're
poor. I mean, that's exactly theheart of it. And you know, when
that kind of problem sits aroundfor 40 years, which is where we
are right now, in a lot of ourblue collar areas. It's, it
passes across generations, andit really gets a lot harder to

(07:55):
solve.

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

Um, you know, we'll, so there's, there's
so many ingredients to that, butI'll just highlight three big
drivers. You know, and this, bythe way, the full title of the
book, as you said, is fight tosave the town reimagining
discarded America. And I feellike your question is really
going to like, why was this partof the country discarded? And I

(08:42):
think really, there's threegiant drivers that that are
affecting that. One is thefailure to really show up for
deindustrialization really showup for the massive workforce
transition that was going to benecessary as we heavily
automated and heavily globalizeda lot of American worker

(09:08):
productivity in manufacturingand production.

For the listeners.
Globalization could also meanjust outsourcing a lot of jobs
that were once done by Americanshere in America, the
manufacturing industries, thetextile industries were all
shipped overseas. So that couldbe one form of globalization.

Michelle Wilde Anderso (09:28):
Exactly.
Yeah. And this book focuses onyou know, on for industrial kind
of origin stories in particularfocuses on timber and the global
sort of networks of movingtimber from forests around the
world into American markets. Itfocuses on textiles and the sort
of abandonment of major textilesfrom the Northeast in the

(09:51):
country and sort of moving topoint south and then further
south and then just splinteringall over planet Earth. And it
focuses on Detroit, which ofcourse, is not only auto
manufacturing, but all kinds ofother manufacturing. And then
Stockton, which is a story aboutfood, food processing and the
manufacturing of a lot of ruralmachinery related to AG. A lot

(10:15):
of ag machinery, I should say,anyway, so we've got this giant
strand of deindustrializationwhere we just never handled it.
And we threw a few trainingdollars here and there. But the
kind of educational transitionthat was going to be really
necessary was, you know, wasgiant, and we just really didn't

(10:36):
invest in people in the way thatwe needed to. But secondly, we
invested in suburbanization in away that really left older
industrial cities behind and weinvested in suburbanization in a
deeply racialized way that leftbehind cities with a lot of non

(10:57):
white workers who had shown upfor the sort of tail end of the
industrial boom, and then werekind of left left behind by
deindustrialization. And thentrapped through various zoning
policies in, in central citieslike Detroit and Lawrence. And
we subsidize thatsuburbanization in a way that

(11:18):
was really expensive, but alsovery damaging to the cities left
behind. And then last, we justpulled money out, you know, at
some level, this is a, you know,in academia, they call this
disinvestment. And I thinkthat's such a boring word, it
sort of is a bloodless word, itdoesn't really kind of bring to

(11:40):
life, what that really lookslike. But these are places that
have, you know, whether it'stheir people and their people's
educational needs, or it's theirbuildings, these are places
where does money stoppedsupporting anything in town, so
we just really withdrew a lot oftax dollars, we went through a

(12:03):
lot of businesses, we wentthrough a lot of housing
developments, and, and justmoved it all elsewhere and
subsidized growth in newerplaces. So you know,
disinvestment had real costs onthe ground, and I think we're
now kind of 40 years into whathappens after a place has been

(12:24):
neglected for that long.

So the catalyst would have been the automation
would have been a globalizationto some extent, I think, in
Josephine County, the timberindustry, some environmental
laws probably factored in at acertain point in time. But
overall, we've, we've createdgone from a manufacturing
nation, for the most part to oneof a service industry, mindset,
then you can only serve so manypeople and only have so much

(12:51):
money to be made from that ifpeople can't even attend the
basic services that are there.
It's hard to, to make a livingas a as a chef for waiter or
waitress if, if no one's comingto your restaurant. So a lot of
these places began to die on thevine and, and the feds, it
sounded like Michelle weretrying to put a temporary patch
on it. But that money eventuallywent away. And until we ended up

(13:13):
in the situation we are now.

Yeah, I mean, it's so first of all, I
think, you know, you have Ithink you've commented on this
in the past, and it's soimportant to reiterate now that
America is still a manufacturinggiant. So we are still
incredibly productive. But wejust use fewer jobs to make that
stuff. So the real, you know,American manufacturing is alive

(13:42):
and well. But it representsfewer living wage jobs than it
did before. And actually, youknow, it's amazing. I mean, that
when you go through the historyof American manufacturing, sort
of post World War Two, you canreally see these points where
manufacturing collapses. And,you know, famously, it collapses
in a big way, in some citieslike Detroit, between the 40s in

(14:05):
the 60s and others in the 70s.
But in the early 2000s, we havea massive fall in the number of
jobs, so just the jobs, not theproductivity. And that's a you
know, a big kind of, it's a bigslam that is happening to the
country right before the GreatRecession. So cities like
Detroit take this massive newwave of job losses, right into a

(14:29):
recession, which makes the GreatRecession that much harder on
Michigan as a state and Detroitand so forth. But anyway, like
you said, we you know, this isthis transition from
manufacturing to the serviceeconomy, where or the in the gig
economy where wages are low.

(14:50):
Schedules are chaotic in waysthat are really hard for two
working two for two parentworking families, which is what
you got to do to pay your billswith the Low wages. And so the
schedules are bad, theindependence is bad, the larger,
there's, you know, the largersupport of basic benefits,

(15:11):
health care, vacation time andso forth is bad. So we make this
larger transition into a veryinsecure, poorly paid service
economy. And in order to getthose jobs, you got to be in a
place that has a lot of dollarsrolling around for restaurants
and hotels, and you know,tourism, and so forth. And so

(15:34):
the truth is that, we now havethis very lopsided economy where
we've got these giant Metroengines, like I'm talking to you
from San Francisco, I'm sittingin one of those giant Metro
engines, in which there's tonsof jobs. And really, the problem
is the availability of housingthat people can afford on those

(15:55):
jobs. But then we've got otherareas of a country where there's
more housing, although housingis now expensive, everywhere,
but we've got more housing. Andthat's not quite the choke
point. But there are just fewerjobs and in either place, it's
hard to make ends meet, right,either your, you know, your
wages are unavailable, and yourhousing is quote, unquote,

(16:17):
cheap, or your, you know,housing, you've got plenty of
job access, but you can't affordhousing with what your paychecks
bring in. So both places have anaffordability crisis. But this
book is really about thescenario of places with fewer
jobs. And what happens to thelarger tax base where, as you

(16:38):
said, it's harder for thegovernment to provide basic
services that allow people tomove, you know, at some level
like this is it's the book atsome level is about the
difference between gatewaycities that sort of get people
out of poverty and povertytraps. And it's about how to

(16:58):
take a poverty trap. And itlooks at these four places,
which are working on thisproblem, how to take an
intergenerational poverty trap,and really try to reinvest in
your people, so that they couldstay in town there, if that's
where they want to be with theirfamilies make a home sort of
stay with their roots, or theywant to go somewhere else. And I

(17:23):
love that word. I love thatphrase gateway cities that comes
from Massachusetts policy. Andit refers to the immigration
history of Massachusetts ofthese 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 ofjust thinking about what we need

(17:44):
from poor places to we need togive people a gateway out of
poverty out of town if theywant, and just have a safe and
healthy place for theirfamilies.

So what's what's the going to one of these
gateway cities if we couldStockton, California, you said
one of the most, if not the mostethnically diverse? city in
America years? Yeah. And uponreading the chapter, I came up
with two words, loss and trauma,that does seem that it was a lot
of loss, that really was thecatalyst that that caused this

(18:19):
mindset that we need. We, youknow, we cannot rely on on
anyone else but ourselves as acommunity to start bringing
ourselves out of this darkness.
And who are the key players inthe movement in Stockton? And
where did that where did theloss come from? And how do these
people deal with that traumaassociated with the loss?

Yeah, I mean, those that's beautiful
that you picked out those twowords, because I think that's
right, I would just add a thirdwhich is it's also about healing
too. I think the the chapter isvery much about the people who
show up for that loss and traumaand really stand with one
another to to grieve and toprocess it and really help

(19:02):
children and, and adults alikesort of process exposure to
violence.

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

Yeah, I mean, that's that's the that's
one story I tell in I'll comeback to that in one minute. I'll
just wrap up and sort of, youknow, if we reorient to the the
premise of Stockton isincredible racial diversity. If
you just picture what it takesto become that diverse. You've

(19:40):
got global refugee andimmigration lines from all over
the world, but then also withinthe country. And Stockton has
made a home for refugees offoreign wars and violence and
and economic Tragedy for reallyits whole history. I mean, it's

(20:03):
been this incredible sort offirst home for people who are
fleeing violence andintergenerational poverty
abroad. And California neededthose workers because Stockton
was this bedroom community forbig ag and, you know, your non
California listeners may notappreciate but the California

(20:26):
interior is one of the mostimportant food production
regions in the whole world. It'sthis giant breadbasket for the
world. So it's got tons offarmworkers a lot of food,
labor, and all of the truckingand processing that comes with
all of that food and thosefarms. Tons of meat production,

(20:47):
dairy, nuts, vegetable, I mean,just the whole thing. So anyway,
so you end stocked in Stocktonhas this is carrying this
incredible hunger for labor thatit doesn't want to pay very
much. And it's bringing inworkers who are bringing their
own exposure to war, includingthe Vietnam War with socked in

(21:08):
has a big history of Cambodian,and Vietnamese refugees from
that period and Southeast Asia.
And then it's got a massshooting that takes place one of
the the biggest mass shooting inthe United States before
Columbine High School. And thenit goes into the 1990s period of
intense drug trafficking acrossCalifornia and 1990s Homicide

(21:35):
wave across American cities aswe handle that period of drug
related violence. And in the1990s, there were a wave of
children who were witnesses andorphans of that first drug
crisis. Those kids, you know,and this is a hypothesis of this

(22:00):
larger wave of current gunviolence in Stockton is that
those kids are now in their 20s.
Many of them grew up as orphanseither because their parents
were incarcerated because thatwas our main answer to the drug
wars and drug tragedy. At thatpoint, the addiction crisis,
then they were orphaned byincarceration, they were

(22:22):
orphaned by homicide, or theywere witnesses to this level of
violence. And so, you know, thesad reality is that we abandoned
that generation of familiesliving in American cities and
that period, and they were leftwith a lot of scars. So if you
fast forward to 2010, whereStockton is still exceptionally

(22:44):
poor, still a home to tons offarmworkers who are eking out,
you know, absolutely unlivablewages on backbreaking jobs, and
a lot of insecure, manufacturingworkers of various kinds. You
fast forward to that period. Andby the time the you know, by the
time the Great Recession rollsaround. Stockton has a really

(23:07):
intense gun violence problem onit in its neighborhoods, and it
is related to drug trafficking.
But also as in many very poorintergenerationally poor areas
has a domestic violence problemsrelated to that just packing of
trauma and exposure to violenceinto families. Anyway, so yes,

(23:29):
so Edison High School takes awave of losses and a wave of
killings one at a time of itsstudents. And the story of the
chapter really starts from thatpoint of sort of what you do
when you look out in your cityand it's terrorized at some
level by this violence andneeding a path of Grief and

(23:52):
Healing.

There's no safe place the parks were were sort
of not accessible to the generalcommunity that open spaces
people were just kind of fearfulto make a make a go of it. And
then finally the citizensstarted to turn that around.

Yeah, I mean, you know, here I will I
want to just say Stockton issuch a beautiful city. It's got
this gorgeous waterfront,there's such beautiful people in
the city. I come and go fromStockton so freely and happily I
bring my family there. I don'twant to like pathologize

(24:30):
Stockton I feel like sometimesin California and in this region
that happens so much. But Butyes, during the some of the
periods of peak violence, therehave been particular parks that
were you know, families justdon't let their kids go and you
know, and people don't walk onthe sidewalks and you know,

(24:50):
there is a kind of physicalmuscle memory to gun violence
that I think in safer places wedon't often think about you
know, when you know that Theshooting has taken place
somewhere, you know, that iskind of remembered and people's
bones and their movement in thecity. And so the the social
movements story in Stockton thatI tell them is so beautiful is

(25:11):
really about reclaiming thosespaces, it's about what it takes
to transform a park that hasbeen really just surrender to
drug dealing, and sort of turnit back into a place where kids
are and families are and peopleare kind of, you know,
barbecuing on birthdays, and youknow, using that space again,
so, Stockton has a lot ofreclaimed places like that right

(25:35):
now where, you know, neighborshave really, and youth programs
and so forth have really, youknow, worked together to sort of
take that land back for the, forthe community. And, and in so
doing, you know, they see thatnot as like a parks project, but

(25:55):
as a deeper psychologicalproject of sort of reclaiming
more sort of places in the citywhere people can feel safe and
like physically relaxed theirbodies, the the amount of you
know, we have a lot of increasedresearch now about the the
stress on kids and adults fromwhat is often called toxic

(26:19):
stress, but just the physicalhormones that surge when we're
afraid. And when you go throughyour daily life, you know,
coming getting in and out ofyour car getting in and out of
your front door, walking to walkinto a corner store, when you
you know when you have thatlevel of exposure to or that

(26:41):
level of sort of physical stressand fear it can. It has major
health consequence

manifests itself physically so so the people
there said, Hey, we've got to dosomething different. They got
together and they had a numberof initiatives that eventually
started to turn the tide yetthat the tide hadn't turned very
long, whereas Stockton now sincewhen you started writing writing
your book?

Yeah.
So right, they made a lot ofreally incredible progress
through, you know, mental healthcare through trauma informed
training of police officers, andchurch leaders and so forth,
through some of these parksreclamation projects that I
described through the creationof voluntary basketball leagues
and soccer leagues and so forth.

(27:28):
So I mean, you know, just onestep forward after another,
advocates understood that noneof that work is going to show up
as easy returns quickly, likethat'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

(27:49):
understood early on that theywere just planting seeds that,
you know, they might not seecome to fruition, you know, in
their lifetime. But I would justsay that in the big politically
speaking, I think it's fair tosay that Stockton has gone
through a lot of turbulence hassort of, as Reverend William

(28:10):
Barber of North Carolina of theNAACP and the Poor People's
Campaign in North Carolina says,a lot of history and in
particular, Black Historyteaches us that often you take
four steps forward and to back.
And I feel like Stockton hasgone through a little bit of

(28:31):
that in its politics, and butpeople are picking themselves
back up in a big and veryimpressive way. And returning to
this work. COVID in Stockton, asin many places was devastating.
It has a lot of undocumentedworkers who are not protected by

(28:54):
a lot of the early public healthinterventions, who continued to
go to work and meatpackingfacilities, and farm labor and
so forth. So they had a reallyhigh death rate and a lot of
fear early on. And they justhave had a lot of other
challenges in the last couple ofyears. But, but there's such

(29:15):
incredible people there. Andthat's, I mean, if if I was, if
that's true for all of theseplaces, you know, these four
places that I wrote about, theyare portrayed all the time as
these just moral backwaters justlike guns flying and corrupt
politicians and, you know,hopeless people and they, you

(29:38):
know, they get pathologized allthe time in ways that are really
destructive. And, in fact, whenyou spend time there, you
realize that there's somethingreally really special about the
social workers and churchleaders and you know, basketball
coaches and teachers andgovernment official souls who,

(30:01):
who stay in a place like that. Imean, they're really exquisite
people. So a lot of resilience,a lot of love a lot of you know,
just showing up for vulnerablepeople. And you know in Stockton
is got a lot of fun too. I mean,it's there's a lot of youth

(30:22):
programs that work togetherreally well now and, you know,
have a lot of just, I don'tknow, a lot of creativity and
it's kind of defiant, artsyspunk to being that big of an
underdog when you're like thatbig of an underdog that the rest
of California just makes fun ofyou for guns. You know, there's

(30:44):
like you can really develop akind of fierce loyalty. That is,
you know, really pretty, pretty.
What's the word? I don't know.
It's irresistible. I find itirresistible.

There you go.
My guest today is Michelle wildAnderson, the author of the
fight to save the townreimagining discarded America.
Well, moving up the coast,staying on the west coast, but
moving up to the coast in thestate of Oregon, where I am you

(31:22):
focused in on Josephine Countyand how did you find Josephine
County? What brought that toyour attention? And why did you
want to write about JosephineCounty?

Yeah, you know, I first got involved
in Oregon because all of thetimber counties and that's their
sort of nickname in Oregonpolitics. We're, we're going
broke. Just they had a longhistory of direct subsidies from
the federal government after thespotted owl wars. And the

(31:52):
federal government, basicallythe administration of Bill
Clinton and Al Gore and thislarger sort of political
compromise that follow thepolitical meltdown over those
spotted owl

that was the early 90s. Right,

early 90s. This the northern spotted
owl gets listed as an endangeredspecies. And there's a you know,
total meltdown in environmentalpolitics in. And interestingly,
I think it's a point when thesort of boogeyman of people in
suits in Washington, DC andenvironmental law itself become

(32:30):
this diversion tactic for thelarger industrial restructuring
that's going on in timber in thePacific Northwest, where a lot
by the time the spotted owllisting happens that region's
wages have already collapsed,the number of jobs has already
collapsed. But because ofglobalization and automation and

(32:51):
the arrival of technology, likethe feller buncher, and these,
like amazing technologies thathave replaced jobs out in the
forest, and but the spotted owlshows up as a kind of boogeyman
and it sort of joined

it was an easy target.

easy target. And I mean, it was true.
The truth is that the theprotection of environmental for
of old growth forests does causea fall off in logging. So it
adds to the job losses in themills and in the forest. So it's
not blameless, but it it becomeslike the only story that people

(33:30):
talk about anymore withoutreally holding industry to some
level of responsibility. Also,just as an aside, Oregon, just
for your listeners from yourneck of the woods, Oregon,
unlike Washington really neverhad a good union movement. So
Washington had the union, timberjobs. And Oregon never did. So

(33:53):
Oregon's wages for timber andpaper mills and wood products,
manufacturing, and truckingrelated to that industry were
always really, really low. Sothis is a region that's kind of
never enjoyed the sort ofidyllic kind of blue collar, you
know, wages that we associatewith some of the union movement,

right? And and if you're looking to take advantage
of it and spin the narrative, asopposed to looking at what big
businesses doing and openingtheir markets up to
globalization, or investing inautomation, they say, Hey,
here's your easy foil, here'syour tree huggers, your people
that you know, care about theenvironment will make them the
bad guys. And then they direct alot of energy towards that. And

(34:38):
they get a lot of people buyingin on that storyline, which is
only really part of the story,like you say most of those wages
that are already collapsed. SoJosephine County is suffering at
this point in time and sufferstoday, to some extent,

right?
Because basically, you know thatlike you said that early 90s
It's ages ago, but basically foror, you know, the first for 10
years and then sort of to aslightly lesser extent for
another five years, the federalgovernment was earmarking all of
this money straight to Oregon,it was just like a special
earmark to just like keepspotted all country quiet, it

(35:15):
was just a buy off basically,because the politics had been so
inflamed. And or I shouldn'tcall it a by Amin, the generous
way of saying it is that therewere really a lot of jobs that
were lost. And so we took careof Oregon to a greater extent
than we were taking care ofsubsidizing those counties,
right. There's lots of placesthat also needed that kind of

(35:37):
buy off. So or what that kind ofsupport sorry. So, you know,
it's not to criticize thesupport for Oregon, Oregon
needed it, but it was special asagainst other states that were
also, you know, really introuble in terms of their jobs.
Anyway, so the federalgovernment spending all this
money, and then basically, thatevery, you know, it starts to

(36:00):
become kind of one year at atime sort of appropriation
cycles, because people inWashington or Washington DC are
like, what are we doing, youknow, why is Oregon enjoying
these giant earmarks. And sothen the great recession comes,
you know, construction goesdown, which hurts jobs that much

(36:20):
more, there's a larger sort ofhit that Southern Oregon takes
in the recession. And by thetime I got involved in the air,
really started learning aboutOregon and getting involved that
all of the timber counties inthe state were in real freefall,
where they really they startedto close. All kinds of basic

(36:40):
services, libraries were closingall over the rural parts of the
state. They've got, you know,massive layoffs in, in major
crimes, investigations, massivelayoffs in 911. Dispatch and
police, you know, lawenforcement, fire services, just

(37:00):
basic, you know, basic localgovernment services start to
really die off and, and youknow, there were some very
famous jail closures during thatperiod in which not because of
defund the police politics, butbecause they were just broke the
counties in Oregon started doinga triage releases of their jails

(37:24):
just so they could close Wingsof them and have fewer expenses
associated with county jail. Soit became this kind of spectacle
of government. Downsizing. Andand I started working with folks
there, and but the Josephinework came because, you know, to
work specifically on Josephine,because I just got to know this

(37:47):
incredible group of people inthe sheriff's office in the
library system and in communityorganizations all over the
county, who were really engagedin the fight to save the county
of, sir, what are we going to doabout the freefall in local
government, and I fell totallyin love with Josephine, because

(38:09):
it really is this example of agrassroots pro tax movement in
one of the most anti governmentplaces in America. And that's
just totally crazy andfascinating, and like how you
rebuild trust in government in adeeply libertarian place that
has a lot of suspicion andresentment, and really, you

(38:33):
know, sometimes hatred ofgovernment.

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

Yeah, I mean, so public officials really
had to go back to the people andargue for their existence. And
to do that, you know, they usethese very intimate townhall
formats across the county, Ishould be specific, that what
they've got to do is make a caseto the people for very, very

(39:03):
modest local tax increases smalllevels of parcel taxes, in order
to support basic services,because the federal government
is, you know, walking away, andthe county officials are saying,
hey, the cavalry is not coming.
The Federal cavalry is no longerwriting to our rescue. And
Oregon is up there at the statecapitol saying, you know, and

(39:24):
we've been supporting you guysfor years with a
disproportionate amount of statefunding and, and, you know,
there you got this language of,sort of, you're gonna have to
help yourselves to so that wecan also, you know, work with
you. So there's this largerreality that the counties the
timber counties, includingJosephine, really have to show

(39:46):
that they're willing to pay arate of taxes that is a little
bit closer to what is being paidelsewhere in Oregon. And anyway,
so they have to go through thesetown halls. As they go through
these larger explainer effortsof just telling people what
their government money, you knowwhat their taxes paid for, and

(40:07):
really trying to kind of earntrust back in, in government,
the library in Josephine, thewhole library system closes
down. But this incrediblevolunteer movement, reopens it
as a nonprofit, and then buildsthis army of volunteers who
really care about the library,and who, if you can believe it,

(40:30):
end up putting a levy on theballot to sort of recreate the
library as a public function,which would have taxpayer
support. And they make 14,000phone calls, in order to turn
people out to support thereopening of a public library.
And this is in a county thatonly has 80,000 people. So

(40:54):
14,000 people is like a, anexhibition 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?

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

Right.
Yeah, I mean, the there had beensome absolute, just devastating
incidents in which people andthis you know, any of your
listeners in rural areas arefamiliar with extreme 911 delays
in very large rural areas.
That's a very common experience.
But but in Josephine, thelarger, the entire Sheriff's

(41:46):
Department apparatus sort ofcollapses to the point that it's
only for a while, is only onlyhas deputies on call during
business hours. And needless tosay, lots of violence takes
place outside of business hours.
And so there's a larger sort ofperiod of time in which only

(42:10):
state police are available as abackup for 911. And some really
terrible things take place andincluding just an absolutely
chilling, tragic 911 Call of awoman who has an intruder trying
to break into her house and sheis on the phone with 911, who

(42:32):
has nobody to send to herbecause it's a Saturday morning,
there's no officers on call and,and and she is violently
assaulted. And there's a largeryou know, sort of reckoning with
what it means this, this phrasegets used a lot and Josephine at
that time, which is bar which isbeyond available resources,

(42:56):
which was just like jargon forlike, we don't we don't have
anybody to send, and the audioof that 911 Call if this woman
on the phone for 10 minutes,just begging for help and the
911 person like trying to makethese, you know what seem like
just lame suggestions of can youask him to go away? And anyway,

(43:20):
and that, you know, there were afew things like that, that just
really draw attention to how badthings have gotten. And but
then, you know, there's asheriff turnover, which was for
the good in the larger trust inthe sheriff's department and the
new sheriff Dave Daniel, who,whose story I tell him the book
really has to kind of make thecase that we know that you've

(43:42):
asked us for a lot of thingsover the years, you've asked us
for assistance during moments ofcrime, you've asked us for EMS
dispatch in the middle of heartattacks, you've asked us to
record your stolen cars so thatyou can get insurance money, and
we weren't there for you.
Because we were lights out here.
And we need to earn back yourtrust, you know, people are mad,

(44:05):
you go through a period likethat where your car's stolen,
and you like can't get a frigginpiece of paper to authenticate
that that happened for insurancepurposes. People were really mad
and there was a larger period ofvolunteer policing that grew up
across those terrible cuts atthe Sheriff's Department. And,

(44:29):
you know, and I tell the storyof all of that to have sort of
what happens when people startto you know, develop their own
volunteer dispatch systems forburglary and other crimes that
the sheriff's department nolonger you know, can send
officers for so are deputies, Ishould say. So anyway, yeah,

(44:52):
it's an incredible story, butyou know, eventually it's a
happy ending in 2017 when votererrs sort of give their faith
back to the local government.
And there's been enough of achange politically that for the
first time and, you know,decades of local history, people
start voting for grassrootstaxes. So they start to rebuild

(45:15):
some other services. And youknow, they continue to have to
go through those elections lawas in Stockton, like these
problems don't get wiped outbecause some great sheriff and a
red cape like save the day theyyou know, people have to keep
working on them the intensepoverty that continues to
strain, especially Josephine'srural areas is not going away.

(45:37):
And so you know, the the fightto save the county continues to
this day.

Once again, my guest today is Michelle wild
Anderson, author of the fight tosave the town reimagining
discarded America.
So fight to save the town fightto save the county. We're going
to take it to the other side ofthe country now, Michelle, to

(46:12):
the fight to save Lawrence,Massachusetts, which at one
point in American history wassort of the not the breadbasket
of agriculture, but thebreadbasket where the loom of
America where the averageAmerican clothing was made. I
heard from one of one of myprior guests, the the CEO of
Dignity, apparel, and imagepoint, Josh rule had mentioned

(46:34):
that back in the 60s 95% of theclothing that Americans wore was
made here in the US back in the1960s. And nowadays, about 2%,
according to recent studies, ofthe clothing that Americans made
are made here in the US so andLancaster, I'm sorry, Lawrence,
Massachusetts, at one point wasresponsible for a lot of those

(46:56):
looms and a lot of thatmanufacturing and then what
happened there?

Yeah, I love that loom capital i That's
beautiful. I've never heardthat. Lawrence's nickname at the
turn of the 20th century was theimmigrant city. And that you got
a picture just immigrant is kindof like the storytelling in
Stockton like this. This textileboom town is drawing people from

(47:20):
all over the world. And in theearly 1900s, it's got these
giant textile mills, one of themis so big that it is the same
size as the Empire StateBuilding, if you laid it on its
side. Wow. So these buildings,you know, not all of these mills
are still standing, a lot ofthem are ripped down or chunks
of them or wings of them wereripped down on the 60s. But you

(47:43):
know, you go there to this day,and they've got these just
stunning buildings. If you wereto step into Warren's in, you
know, 1910, you would know youwere in, you know, a really
important American city. Theseeach of these mills is basically
a teeming city of textileworkers. But their jobs were

(48:04):
ruthlessly dangerous withabsolutely dangerous levels of
low income so very dangeroushousing unlivable diets and so
forth, you know, that they canafford based on these terrible
wages. I mean, most workersdidn't survive past 10 years in
these jobs,

long hours, low wages, dangerous working
conditions.

Yeah, Anthrax exposure from I don't
even understand really theanthrax thing, but it comes off
of the wool from the sheep,like, you know, tons of terrible
industrial dangers at work. Andthen, you know, living in
tenements, with terribleconditions. And, you know, so
many sanitation problems, a lotof people die of various

(48:51):
diseases that just come from thelack of investment in water and
sanitation. So anyway, but by1912, Lawrence's workers are
really starting to organize andin 1912 Lorenz is home to the
Bread and Roses strike, which isone of the biggest, most

(49:12):
successful early labor uprisingsand American labor history. And
workers from the InternationalWorkers of the World the
wobblies organized this largerstrike. I tell the story of this
in the book but this incredibleinternational array of workers
including the more skilled Irishand Scottish workers who had

(49:36):
suffered terriblediscrimination, terrible
housing, terrible conditions,but had like slightly inched up
the chain by 1912 and are doinglike ever so slightly better.
And and the wobblies and otherstrike leaders really convinced
these, you know, slightly moreskilled workers to stand in
solidarity with the line textileworkers and the uniforms.

(50:00):
Haitians sort of across, youknow, across these class groups
and across languages and across,you know, international origins
really allows this breathtakingsuccess. And they managed to at
the conclusion of a, you know, adebt, I mean, the strike was

(50:21):
hard, I don't want to paper overthe dangers and the losses. But
at the conclusion of what canonly be understood is a very
successful strike, they managedto get a 15% wage increase for
workers all across the textileindustry of all of New England.
And that is just, you know, oneof the early kind of wins for

(50:43):
the formation of American labor.
But the story to tell andLawrence is really about how you
do that now, but what does itmean? How do you get a 15% wage
increase in your town? In,

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

Right, well, the apprenticeship thing
is key, which talk about that,but But you know, the thing
about unions for workforce ifyou fast forward to today,
Lawrence's workforce issplintering into a zillion jobs.
They are gig workers, theirnannies, their elder care
workers, they are some of themare in manufacturing, some of
them are in food service,they're all over the place,

(51:20):
they're commuting out for theirjobs, for the most part, it is
an over it is still an immigrantcity, but it's a new nickname is
the Latinos city because thoseimmigrant groups still come from
many nations, but they are, youknow, largely converging around
Spanish native language andlarger kind of pan Latino

(51:43):
heritage that Lauren starts toform in order to create a new
organizing identity for the cityanyway, and so they really asked
this question, you know, youcan't, unions are not going to
work in quite the same way asstrikes not going to work in
quite the same way. So theyreally turn to this, you know,
this larger model of how youcreate systems to train workers

(52:09):
into the better jobs. And thething about Lawrence is like so
many towns, it's got a K to 12school system, which is a big
job base, there'sparaprofessionals, and all kinds
of workers in the school system,of course, including teachers,
but I mean, even more entrylevel workers, and it's got

(52:30):
healthcare, it's got a big oldhistoric hospital that serves
the whole region. Again, lots ofentry level jobs, that kind of
can get you up the chain towardnursing and better middle, you
know, better paid occupations.
And so Lawrence develops thisincredible effort to really try
to allow its people who stillhave to be able to work a day

(52:51):
job, like nobody can pay theirrent in Laurens unless you
continue to bring in income. Soyou're not going to like, you
know, quit your job and gobecome a full time student. So
they have to build this largereffort to get people into the
entry level hospital work andget them into the entry level
education work. And that's whatthey do. And parts of it are

(53:13):
apprenticeship models, parts ofit are organized vocational
training that works aroundworker hours. And, you know, and
they are real programs with,with cohorts and support systems
and so forth to sort of motivatepeople to, to stay in it. So
it's just this, you know, it'sthis really impressive effort to

(53:37):
and they set the the 15%benchmark of we want our, they
actually made their job reallyhard. They said, how would we
get a 15% wage increase for theparents of the kids in public
schools. And they did thatbecause there's some commuters
and you know, young people, youlive in Lawrence and commute to

(54:01):
Boston, and the real cohort thatwas the, you know, the deeper
harder poverty problem. AndLawrence was the, the, the
longterm families who have, youknow, have kids and they really
tried to focus on those kids,not just for the family's own
sake, but also for the sake ofthe schools so that kids are not

(54:21):
going through evictions all thetime so that, you know, their
parents have greater economicstability so that the kids have
a chance in K to 12. And theypull it off. I mean, who does
that?

Especially I can't remember if I got it from your
book or heard it while I wasprepping for the interview, but
it seemed like the the lastadministration, the Trump
administration, it really usedLawrence Massachusetts sort of a
political punching bag to showyou how how dangerous these
immigrants could be and then youyou go there and and you see a
town where literally you'reyou're you've never seen In such

(55:00):
a large number of people holdinghands, is that true to get that
correctly?

Yeah, I mean, the from punching bags
holding hands I like how you asa Christian. So there's no
question that Lawrence is usedas was used as a punching bag
not only by former PresidentTrump but also by governors and
in New Hampshire and Maine. Andthe story was that Lawrence was
running the drugs into in theopioid crisis into New England's

(55:28):
addiction crisis. So this is asort of blame narrative that
Lawrence was responsible for thedrug crisis in New England. And
Trump made it and thosegovernors made it a deeply
racialized accusation of sort ofreferring to, quote unquote,
black and brown drug dealers whoare sort of causing this

(55:49):
addiction crisis, which, again,totally beside the point of the
larger, the demand side of theaddiction crisis in New
Hampshire and Maine, the, youknow, the depths of despair
literature, the larger sort ofconcern about the terrible
backlogs in residential rehab inthose states, like there's all

(56:11):
kinds of problems that are goingon. And but Lorenz is, is really
poor, and it has, you know,super weak public services, and
it had a lot of land that wasjust under utilized from these,
this decades of disinvestment.
And so there were encampments ofaddicts and other kinds of

(56:32):
problems that the city is kindof carrying for its region, in
the crisis, anyway, but the the,you know, and as one advocate,
and morons put it sobeautifully, you can, she said,
if you look at warrants, throughthe eyes of the police, you
would be deeply aware of theopioid crisis in the country,

(56:54):
like that's through the eyes ofthe police like that, that was
so much of the load thatLawrence is carrying, for its
region of just bearing the theimpacts of this crisis. But she
said, You know, when you look atit through the eyes of a
nonprofit or social servicesagency, you just see the same

(57:15):
story of immigrants drivers thatyou would have seen in this
place forever of people thatare, you know, exile in here
from some other place, or theydon't have a place to go. And
they're working 80 hour weeks,you know, 80 hours a week in
various jobs that have beencobbled together in order to,
you know, make a foothold fortheir kids in this rough

(57:36):
country.

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

was just a private reflection that I
was, you know, that part of thebook, I was just thinking about
how pathologized Lauren says, byits suburbs, too, and how people
just describe it as sodangerous, and whatever. And I
just noticed how it because it'san immigrant city with a lot of
Caribbean culture, especiallyDominican families, Puerto Rican

(58:06):
families, there's a lot ofphysical affection in families
and among friends, I knew, youknow, so you see, like, on
Sunday mornings, like familiesflooding toward the churches,
you see a lot of people holdinghands with children with, you
know, among adults and so forth.
It's a really affectionateculture and, and a sort of
vibrant city in so many ways. Sothe, the stories that get told

(58:30):
about Lawrence, by regionalpoliticians and the Boston
media, you know, really don'tline up with what it looks like
to see a city like that on theground.

Right. And you had mentioned the color of one's
skin oftentimes, you know, beingplayed into the narrative of why
the woes of the fall on aparticular area and I think
we'll finish up our our lastcity in your book is Detroit,
Michigan, which historically hasalways been considered to be a
bedrock of the American workingclass and also has huge amount

(59:06):
of African American populationthere. And I think at the it's
gone through some tumultuoustimes over the last number of
decades, and I was hoping youcould talk to us a little bit
about Detroit skin color and howincome inequality and is sort of
taken hold there.

Ya know, I've Detroit it really
like all of these places justreally won me over I think,
because for really two reasonsFirst, because it just like you
say it has this incrediblestatus in the American
imagination as sort of a capitalof our working class heritage,

(59:46):
like Detroit is a reallyimportant sort of symbol of a
place where people on modestincomes could own a house like
that, that was so much of whatDetroit stood for. And, and just
the kind of, you know, mid 20thcentury kind of heyday of middle
of the American middle class andand so it's very symbolic that

(01:00:07):
way. But I think the reality isthat right now today, I think we
should understand Detroit as asymbol or a capital of American
inequality. And so the story ofthe chapter is really how you
get from point A to point B, howyou get from this kind of
homeownership place that's sosymbolic of the American dream
to this place. That is, youknow, where, where there's huge

(01:00:32):
amounts of money moving, andit's real estate markets in ways
that are causing massivedisplacement on the ground. And
in between is this devastating,racialized story that I think is
is really twofold. It's reallyabout a history of
discrimination against blackmigrants to the city to sort of

(01:00:55):
lock them out of this Americandream and sort of price gouge,
the black workers who came toDetroit for the same jobs that
brought you know, so manyimmigrants for so long. And so
there has a history of pricegouging and housing and
discrimination in housing thatdeeply segregated the city. And,

(01:01:17):
and then as this is in commonwith Lawrence, too, as the jobs
leave the there's this largerexit of what is you know, called
white flight sort of the largerexodus of white Detroiters to
the suburbs, anddeindustrialization. And

(01:01:38):
Detroit's rising poverty getblamed on its black population.
And that was the same inLawrence, there's this story
that is libtorrent, Lawrencebecame more Puerto Rican, more
Dominican, that they wereresponsible for the city's
decline. But what's reallyresponsible for the city's
decline is that it's justhemorrhaging jobs. And the
workforce is trapped, they'reunable to follow the jobs

(01:02:01):
because there's so muchdiscrimination in the suburban
areas where manufacturing hasrelocated. So there's a larger
kind of poverty trap sort ofstory where, you know, Detroit
gets kind of hemmed in, in itspopulation, really unable to

(01:02:21):
move toward employment in thesame way that others were. And
but you know, there to the storythat I tell in Detroit is how to
look out at a city like this,which has just a terrible
housing crisis, if you canbelieve it. 48% of Detroit

(01:02:44):
houses went through a mortgageor tax foreclosure between 2005
and 2015. And you just imagine,like, if listeners just imagine
what that looks like on a blocklevel, if half of homes are
going through a foreclosure in a10 year period. So they've got
just this huge problem. And it'svery complicated because real
estate, it's like hard to seewho owns stuff and where what's

(01:03:06):
happening. They have to diagnosethis problem, like figure out
what's going on that's drivingthis crisis, it was way beyond
the subprime lending crisis. Andthey have to figure out what's
going on. And then they have tofigure out how to stop this mass
displacement, reform thegovernment and private
institutions that are enablingthis mass transfer of wealth,

(01:03:29):
and then really look atrebuilding homeownership. So in
some ways, this is about amodern movement, to restore or
stabilize homeownership in acity that, like I said, is
really symbolic of that of sortof being a modest, a person of
modest means was nonethelessable to sort of control your own

(01:03:50):
destiny through a piece of land.
And in Detroit, the land acrossa period I was writing about,
you know, is going for often515 $102,000 In these auctions.
So from the from the point ofview of outsiders, and this is
the inequality story, from thepoint of view of outsiders, land
into traders miners will befree. And so the question is,

(01:04:12):
like how you, you know, bringthis land that there's plenty of
and there's, you know, so muchneed for housing, how you put it
in local hands again, and sortof take control of the wheels of
this real estate market thathas, you know, a lot of global
speculation starting to buy thatland.

Joe Cadwell (01:04:37):
Sounds like the Detroit dwellers, the other
cities in your book have a long,hard fight ahead of them.
Michelle, this has been afantastic conversation. Where
can people go to find out moreabout you and your book, the
fight to save the towel?

Michelle Wilde Anderson (01:04:52):
Thank you so much joy. I loved your
questions. This was amazing. Um,so I have a website on Stanford
Law. Schools website and thereare links to some and there will
increasingly be links to someresources related to the book.
And I'm on Twitter at WildAnderson, and I'm so grateful to

(01:05:14):
you and the community you'vecreated through this podcast
though. All right, well, thank

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

Thank you.

I guess day was Michelle wild Anderson, author
of the fight to save the townreimagining discarded America
and is now available whereveryou buy your favorite books.
Thanks again for listening tothe show. And until next time,
this is Joe Cadwell. thankingyou for wanting no more today
than you did yesterday.
Michelle, what would you hopethat people after reading your

(01:05:46):
book come away with

I all end on this amazing photograph
that became the title of theStockton chapter? And it is a
man I don't know his name. He'san African American resident of
of Stockton sorry. And he ispart of this photo exhibit where
photographer asked people towrite messages to the city of

(01:06:11):
Stockton on their hands or arms.
And you know, Stockton was beinglike I said, just so so
stigmatized in the largerCalifornia dialogue. And he
wrote on his hands, dearStockton, I won't give up on you
ever

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Fight to Save the Town - Michelle Wilde Anderson