Discover the untold stories of America's most resilient towns with Michelle Wild Anderson, whose book "The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America" weaves a compelling narrative of hope and renewal. In this episode we talk about how local governments and everyday citizens band together to overcome adversity with stories like the reopening of an Oregon library, the spirited comeback of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and the spirit of Detroit as they bounce back as beacons of community strength. Join us as we peel back the layers of skepticism surrounding local government and reveal the strategies that help restore trust and empower citizens.
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Discover the untold stories of America's most resilient towns with Michelle Wild Anderson, whose book "The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America" weaves a compelling narrative of hope and renewal. In this episode we talk about how local governments and everyday citizens band together to overcome adversity with stories like the reopening of an Oregon library, the spirited comeback of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and the spirit of Detroit as they bounce back as beacons of community strength. Join us as we peel back the layers of skepticism surrounding local government and reveal the strategies that help restore trust and empower citizens.
Show Notes:
Follow us on social media for more content related to each episode:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/booked-on-planning/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BookedPlanning
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bookedonplanning
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bookedonplanning/
you're listening to the booked on planning podcast, a project of the nebraska chapter of the american planning association. In each episode we dive into how cities function by talking with authors on housing, transportation and everything in between. Join us as we get Booked on Planning. Welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of Booked on Planning. In this episode we talk with author Michelle Wild Anderson on her book the Fight to Save the Town Reimagining Discarded America. Michelle wrote this book in a storytelling format from many interviews and firsthand observations. The book, while very much fact-based, is really focused on the programs and the people on the front lines of revitalization efforts in their communities. It's a book meant to inspire other struggling towns across the nation to begin reinvesting in its people.
Jennifer Hiatt:I think the book is a great example of why continuing to fully fund government action is so important. I got so frustrated at times when I was reading it because I see some of these exact same things happening in Nebraska, and I think every member of our Unicameral should either buy or be gifted a copy.
Stephanie Rouse:The book focuses on four communities across the political, demographic and geographic spectrum, which provides perspective for readers into a variety of challenges that leaders face when trying to make changes in their communities. By showing these efforts working in a variety of circumstances, it really helps to dispel the myth that this would never work here because X, y and Z. In our conversation Michelle mentions there were dozens of other communities that could have been included in the book but didn't make the cut, some that she's actually pretty excited to be working with today.
Jennifer Hiatt:Well, stephanie, since this is a longer episode and really I think it speaks for itself, let's get into our conversation with author Michelle Wild Anderson on the Fight to Save the Town.
Stephanie Rouse:Well, michelle, thank you for joining us on Booked On Planning to talk about your book the Fight to Save the Town Reimagining Discarded America. When you began this project, the book had a different title and vision as a problem-centered book. What resulted was a book focused on four cities and the work towards becoming a gateway city vision in each. How did this shift in focus occur?
Michelle Wilde Anderson:Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. I think we're all lovers of cities and you guys do this podcast with so much generosity and geeky curiosity about the subject that's so close to so many of our hearts. So thank you. But yeah, this book really changed from being a problem-centered book to a solutions-oriented book.
Stephanie Rouse:And.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:I really tried in the end to hold those two things in some kind of equilibrium, to sort of make it about problems and solutions, and that's because I just don't think we have time for books that are just about problems.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:But I was writing in a space where I think we do need to do more to understand the problem and I think, just on a personal level as a writer, I didn't want to spend as much time as I would need to write a book sort of dwelling on just the challenges. What I really wanted was to cozy up to people doing the work out there and write a book that could acknowledge the challenges. What I really wanted was to cozy up to people doing the work out there and write a book that could acknowledge the challenges they're up against and also be useful to them. So this book was really written for the folks that are in it and people that are like them. It was trying to reflect the problems that they have so they can see themselves in a national context but then also just share lessons across communities about what people are doing about it.
Jennifer Hiatt:And your first title, which just hit my heart, is titled Aren't we the Government? And it discusses how people often perceive the problem actually is too much government action or governments sticking their nose in business that doesn't belong to them. But really most of the problems in the communities that you featured are actually caused by a lack of government action. Can you talk about why this misconception seems to be so persistent?
Michelle Wilde Anderson:Yeah, I mean that's exactly right. This book is ultimately about governments that have been weakened and depleted over time but are asked to hold these incredible challenges of intergenerational poverty, intergenerational disinvestment. In many of the cities I wrote about the incredible fiscal losses that come from depopulation and loss of industry. So this depletion over time just really wears the larger social structure out.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:I think places get stuck in this vicious cycle where government's been defunded and for that reason it disappoints people all the time and then they lose more faith in government. And when government comes to them and says, will you approve this new funding or do you believe in our capacity to step up to these problems? Will you bother to vote All of those things government needs from civil society, people just feel less willing to support it. So that's the vicious cycle of just weakness, disappointing people, faithlessness and further depletion of the government's resources. But that line that you're capturing aren't we the government really struck me. It actually is a quote.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:It came from Kate Lasky, who is this incredible librarian and public leader in Josephine County, oregon, which is one of the places in the book. And Josephine County's board of supervisors had to defund its whole library system and close them. But volunteers rallied to reopen a freestanding nonprofit library and do all private fundraising to support it and they brought in Kate Lasky to lead it. And she had to really think about the psychology, this sort of faithlessness growing over time, and really think about what to do with that. And she really chose to build from a base of strength and faith in the system. So, if you'll indulge me, can I read two sentences from the book about Kate.
Jennifer Hiatt:Yes, please do, because Kate's story was actually my favorite from the book, so I'm here for all of this.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:She's worth it. She should be people's favorite. She's so special. And it's not only what she did, it's actually the wisdom that she brought to her work and to reflecting on it in a national context. I just loved talking to her, but this is a quick passage from the introduction in which she's, you know, using that line, aren't we the government? And just thinking out loud with me.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:So it says she believed they could not progress by proclaiming save us, we're dying. She thought it would feed into a destructive psychology. She observed in town a fatalistic acceptance that the needs were so dire that things could not get better. Even worse, the cuts to shared institutions seemed to reflect the view that residents didn't deserve more In a democracy. Lasky reflected aren't we the government? It's supposed to serve us. She said If it's us, and then we tear it down, what does that say?
Michelle Wilde Anderson:Lasky took a stand. We're going to invest in ourselves, no matter what she said, and I just love that. So instead of emphasizing this kind of save us, we're dying, help, help, help. She said how do I build community around the core of people who really care about this county? They care about childhood education, they care about adult literacy. They care about elders having volunteer projects, they care about this county, they care about childhood education, they care about adult literacy, they care about elders having volunteer projects, they care about just the contact that a library brings to a rural area. And she said we're going to build from that community and invest in ourselves. So I just love that. And you know she proved the wisdom of that insight that you know and actually was able to eventually restore the library to public funding, which was just an incredible achievement.
Jennifer Hiatt:Yeah, the reason that it was my favorite story out of many, many amazing stories is the library was facing some hardship I can't remember exactly what it was and the board had some financing that they could afford to fix the problem.
Jennifer Hiatt:But Kate had a bunch of people in her board, on her circle and I sit on many boards and I face these people every day that said, well, we can't fix the problem because if we prove that we have the money to fix this problem, no one will give us any more funding, any more investment. The courage that it must have taken for Kate to stand up to what was it seemed to the majority of her board and from my experience, probably was the majority of her board and say, no, we deserve nice things, we're going to fix our library, we're going to have a nice library and we are still going to do the fundraising and we are still going to do the outreach. To come back to public funding, it was just so. It was just such a reminder of like no, these communities, everybody deserves the good thing and more, not just like this one good thing, not just, oh, don't fix it, let it decay. The good thing and more. And so it was just very heartwarming to me, my favorite.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:Yeah, jennifer, I love that. That's exactly right. And what it was was that the main library, the main town library in Grants Pass the overhead lighting circuitry had failed and so it was going to black out. And they had this dinky little rainy day fund and they could spend the entire rainy day fund on the lighting, or they could have people carry around flashlights to just show them how bad things were.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:We are so broke that if you want to go through our library you've got to bring your own flashlight. This is exactly as you described, this moment in which Lasky says you know what? We are going to have lighting because our people deserve lighting in a library and this is not a place that is so in the dumpster that we need flashlights. We're going to have lighting because our people deserve lighting in a library and this is not a place that is so in the dumpster that we need flashlights. We're going to actually build from a base of support and she eventually fundraised for the first children's reading area of the library and these other, just very these things that in a wealthier town would be completely unnoticed.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:I mean, how many towns have cute little scaled children's nooks for reading? I mean everywhere. But you know she had to build those, she and her volunteers. I mean it's not just her. If she was here right now, she'd want to insist on 10 other people who are working so hard right alongside her. But you know that whole crew of people. They set these more ambitious benchmarks. They believed in the community and they did it from a place of faith and resources as opposed to feel sorry for us.
Stephanie Rouse:This is so pathetic, you have to bring a flashlight and it's stories like these that really underpin your book, and while there is data and facts in there, they're really there to support the narratives and the stories, and I really appreciate that. I love reading books that are more telling stories about what is happening out there. I think you can learn from that a lot better. What was it that made you decide to take that approach, versus something that's more kind of fact-based?
Michelle Wilde Anderson:Yeah, thank you, stephanie. It's an interesting question because I actually think we do need a lot more empirical evidence about this particular problem of places that across their entire tax base they're carrying just a huge load of poverty and then even beyond that load of poverty they have this whole other majority of the town that is sort of fragile working class, so that in the book I call that sort of border to border poverty or you know, this kind of low income tax base citywide. And I am doing a big national empirical project on that problem. I think it's really important to understand how many places are in this situation and to help states actually think about the massive coalition of small and medium sized cities they have that are in this situation. But you're exactly right that for this book I didn't write a big empirical investigation into that problem, and I think the reason is that in order to have any political will to show up for these places, you have to believe that change is possible.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:And I think many of our state legislators and just our electorate in general, and then also people within these towns, have really lost faith that progress was happening.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:We are saturated in narratives of decline, just post-industrial despair, depopulation, beautiful sepia tone or black and white photography of like swing sets with no children, with like the busted chains on the side.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:I mean, we have so much narrative and visual content that is voyeuristic and eulogistic about poverty and I think what we don't have enough of is stories of grit and determination and experimentation and really the appropriate admiration and envy even that we should have for people who show up for a really vulnerable community and fight for it. So to me, this was both an act of kind of of learning, of sort of how do I learn from people who have done that and who are committed in that way, an act of gratitude for them how do I express my kind of appreciation for them by holding up their stories but then ultimately a kind of proof that in fact progress is possible and these are people that are, that are figuring it out, and therefore the rest of us who don't live in these places, who are not part of these social movements, really should be so lucky as to work with people like this.
Jennifer Hiatt:One of my dearest friends was a planner in Dearborn for a while and when I first went to visit him I asked him to take me around town and he said that he would, but only on one condition, and it was that I take no photos of the dilapidation, because so like that was what the planner even in Dearborn which of course, the suburb of Detroit, not actually Detroit even the planners in Dearborn, all they saw all day were pictures of the decay around them and not the growth I felt for him in that moment.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:Yeah, I mean, that's so real and you know, in its own way Blight is kind of beautiful, like it's, you know, a great photographer can take beautiful images of it, and it holds all this kind of melancholy and sentiment, you know, and we kind of remember like past kind of generations of a city. So there's something kind of pretty in the exercise of it and yet I think when it's the only story that you've got in town it's really an act of erasure. And I think people feel that so strongly.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:And I wrote about in the book and have celebrated the generation of photographers in you know so-called declining or dying places that just insist on photographing people. You know babies and kids and you know schoolyards and kitchen tables and you know just the kind of and trees that are alive and like just the kind of ordinary life. Because these so-called you know dying cities I mean I don't know exactly Dearborn's population but Detroit is, you know, 700 plus thousand people. It's about the same size as San Francisco. So the way we think about those two cities in terms of population, so the way we think about those two cities is, you know, is fundamentally different. The way we talk about them, the way we photograph them the way we kind of represent them in our larger culture, and yet the base population is really comparable.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:So, yeah, that's really like. At the core of this book too is like all these quote unquote dying places are very much alive and they've got to take care of their people, no matter what outsiders think is going on there.
Jennifer Hiatt:So we've danced around it, but the book focuses on four very different communities Stockton, california, josephine County, oregon, lawrence, massachusetts and Detroit, michigan and each of these communities of course face different problems, but everything stems from disinvestment. And there are just four of what are probably hundreds of communities overall. So what made you highlight these communities for the book?
Michelle Wilde Anderson:Yeah, hundreds is about right in the big national project I'm doing right now. Let me just talk about these four for a second and then I'll come back to the big group. So they are, exactly as you say, really different from each other. So these four, a political range, they run a big racial range from almost all black to almost all white, almost all Latino to a super multiracial diversity. And I chose these four for that kind of big mix because I deliberately wanted to show that this is not a problem that you can assign to one of those categories.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:And I don't think we should think totally differently about white rural poverty than we do about Black urban poverty, for example. And I don't think we should always think differently about the way we think about a kind of giant multiracial city like Stockton, a kind of giant multiracial city like Stockton, california, the most diverse city in America, from the way we think about a post-industrial Latino city like Lawrence. And that's not to say these cities aren't different from each other. In fact, like the beauty of being able to take them one by one was just to hold them on their own terms, and I really tried so hard to tell their unique stories within the voices of their own people and the specific history of that community. So it's not to say they're the same as each other, but they're all handling this bigger picture problem we've been talking about, about disinvestment and weak governments and intergenerational poverty, and those problems I think can't be written off as kind of one little group's problem.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:So that's why I chose these four and also, just on a personal level, they all had people that kind of let me in and let me get to know their work and their community, which was incredibly generous and I think also expressed their natural openness, I think, to outsiders and to engagement with people beyond their borders.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:But, like you say, there are lots of other places I could have written about and you know, in one of my daydreams for the aftermath of this book, which hasn't happened yet, I would get some kind of giant grant program and support local journalists at just writing Fight to Save the Town stories about their town, because I really believe that behind these four chapters lies another hundred of other places where you can tell a story that holds all of the challenges in some level of equilibrium with the beautiful work that people are doing there A side question that I just thought of when you were talking about picking these specific four communities, did you get into the level of interview and kind of research maybe not fully this to the same extent of these four communities, but in some other communities that just didn't make it into the book?
Michelle Wilde Anderson:Yeah, actually the original research this book started from looked at 26 cities that had all gone through bankruptcy or receivership during the Great Recession. So you know, for listeners who don't know this, the Great Recession was our biggest wave of municipal bankruptcy since the Great Depression. So there's this big group and not all states allow their local governments to go bankrupt. Some have these receivership programs when they go broke instead. So after the recession, or kind of during the recession, I started looking at all the cities that were just fiscally imploding from the lost property tax revenues, from the foreclosure crisis. So I looked at all of those and I started thinking about what they had in common. And the main thing they all had in common was intense levels of poverty.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:So you start to kind of realize that this condition of being broke and this condition of being incredibly poor often travel together.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:As you guys know, once in a while a local government can go broke because it's a small town, it gets hit with some giant lawsuit or there's something like single that hits, a single shock that hits it.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:But for the most part, places go broke because they're poor and they have this long-term slump in their receipts and, you know, in their revenues and their state is not there to sort of patch in the revenues that they need. So that was the problem that I was trying to show up for and within that group of 26, I started, I winnowed it down to a group of nine and then a group of seven and for various reasons, this group of 26, I started, I winnowed it down to a group of nine and then a group of seven and for various reasons this group of four kind of emerged. But I'm now getting a chance to work in Jackson, Mississippi, which was one of the cities that was sort of on the cutting room floor of this book in various ways, and it's incredible to get to work on Jackson. And there's other places that I will sort of return to over the longer run just for the privilege of getting to keep doing this work and keep learning from advocates there.
Stephanie Rouse:Nice, and so each of these communities have some sort of program or situations that you cover on and how they're kind of building back and improving their communities from the ground up. What is one or two that of these kind of approaches that you felt really had a lasting or meaningful impact that improved these communities, that you think could be applied elsewhere?
Michelle Wilde Anderson:Many people who've read the book have told me that the most hopeful chapter to them is the one about Lawrence, massachusetts. I love that. I think there's hopeful things in all of these places. But I love that reaction and sometimes I feel that way too.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:And the reason, I think, is that Lawrence is this incredible story of a community development corporation that really tried to kind of sew civil society back together, just really tried to, at the block level, help neighbors meet each other At the neighborhood level, help scale out all kinds of interdependence and connections in the community and then really started to cultivate a generation of leaders who would speak up at city council meetings and, you know, become involved in local government campaigns and really enter the local government, you know, in a more intensely participatory way.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:And I think that change model is very durable and it has proven itself very durable in Lawrence because it's built from residents and built from a community development corporation. It's not dependent on a single mayor remaining in office, it's not in their campaign strategy, it's not dependent on some kind of outside grant that might evaporate. It's really trying to kind of generationally create a culture of participation that will support the city over time. So I think it's been really impressive to see that and people can you know, in Lawrence today people have won or lost various races, that you know. They're more or less happy with various electoral outcomes, but the underlying work of sewing society back together is still there. So in the book I talk about, you know some of the ways that they have done that, the kind of techniques that they've used, and I just remain so convinced that that kind of base building work is incredibly important to really to two things to restoring faith in government and to making government accountable to the people who live in a city.
Jennifer Hiatt:A few years ago actually, when Michael Tubbs was elected to his mayorship, I was working with a small town and they're like you know, gosh. I just wish that we had someone like Mayor Tubbs that would come in and fix everything. And I was like you probably already do. If you look around your community, there are already people here who have ideas, good ideas You're just not investing in them. It's frustrating.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:Yeah, I think that's really well said. And so Michael Tubbs, I agree, was a terrific mayor. I think he was actually the best mayor that Stockton's had in I don't know half a century, and only the. I only limit it that way because I don't know the mayors before that. I mean, he was a really special mayor, but he did lose election the second time, which I could give you lots of reasons why. I don't think it was related to the quality of his leadership but that was for the people of Stockton to decide.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:But the amazing thing about Tubbs is that he did this base building exercise and so, even though there was the massive backlash against his movement and the nonprofits and the staff and the department heads and everything that sort of were trying to change the city alongside him, even despite that backlash, that movement remains strong in Stockton.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:And he now lives in LA.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:You know he's now moved on with his political life and, you know, felt bruised and whatever.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:So he's, you know, moved on and yet he left behind like a real sort of network of people and in fact, this little slip of paper, which your listeners cannot see, but is this tiny little slip of paper on my desk, just so I'll remember.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:It is one of the quotes from Michael Tubbs that I love so much and he said to me change is not going to happen because one person is elected. It's going to happen because one person elected is a catalyst to bring a whole lot of people to become engaged in our process of making change and to me, like that's the heart of it, like that's what leadership is Like, sometimes you do need that kind of initial catalyst, all that excitement, that sort of directs toward figures that people trust and believe in. But if it's all about that person as kind of an individual, it's not going to last. So you know, I think Stockton is a bruised and you know lots of hard things have come to Stockton since the story of the book, but I really think that the sort of core that he was part of is strong and growing.
Jennifer Hiatt:I found the most moving line in your book to be one stating that it was not God who had forsaken Lawrence. Can you discuss how media portrayals further harm communities when those communities are actually needing uplifting stories to be shared the most?
Michelle Wilde Anderson:I am so glad you picked that out, jennifer. So that line came from a Boston Magazine article that called Lawrence the most godforsaken city in Massachusetts. So I think if everybody just pauses for a minute and imagines like here's your town, you know it's got lots of problems, it's also got a beautiful river in the middle and these stunning mill buildings that are in various stages of repair, disrepair, but sort of carry this incredibly proud history in the city and you've got these canals and you've got just so many families and people like working so hard to make it as new immigrant families. And then you know this, like big city publication comes and says you're the God. You know this. Like big city publication comes and says you're the God. You know the most God forsaken city in Massachusetts.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:It was so disrespectful, I think, of the people in the place and it was actually quite hurtful. As is the case in all the places that I've worked, there are various kind of underdog parties and social movements and efforts and t-shirts and whatever that try to kind of reject that sort of bad press and allow people to sort of come back together and react to it. And that was definitely true with that magazine article. It definitely it catalyzed a certain level of refusal, like refusal for that to be the only story, and I think it actually ended up being good for Lawrence in his own way, because they turned it toward a social movement opportunity. But you know, when I said it was not God that had forsaken Lawrence, what I meant was that it was the rest of Massachusetts. So I think you know we have to take responsibility for this kind of decline.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:And Lawrence is the bedroom community of very low-wage service workers that fuel the Route 128, massachusetts, tech economy, massachusetts and this incredible concentration of wealth around Andover and Newton all the way down sort of into the very wealthy suburbs of Boston.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:They rely on low wage labor but they won't permit any level of density in their housing stock so that low wage labor can live there.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:So Lawrence is the residential community for their workforce In some ways. If you were to compare Massachusetts to Mississippi, you know they're very progressive in their redistribution of tax resources at the state level. But if you compare Massachusetts to itself, the Andovers of the state the wealthier communities have increasingly this varies a little bit over time, but they've gone through these massive cycles in which they've really said you know, lawrence, your problems are your problems and meanwhile they won't give their workers a living wage. So this kind of interdependence from the employment needs of the larger economy, the workforce, housing needs and tax policy I think is incredibly important. So you know, I think there were so many moments of just ordinary family life in Lawrence, of just people taking care of their kids and looking out for each other and just a lot of love and extended family. And it feels funny to say this in a more public setting, but I felt the presence of God everywhere in Lawrence.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:So really this idea that you know the problem was God was really backwards. To me, the problem was that a bunch of people in Andover thought Lawrence was really scary but were really delighted to pay their nannies 18 bucks an hour and which, on Lawrence's cost of living and Massachusetts cost of living, is no way to support a family.
Stephanie Rouse:That was my reuse of that toxic phrase, and you brought up tax policy, and I think it was Josephine County that struggled over and over again to try and get their government properly funded. But eventually I think they got there, and in Nebraska right now we're having this conversation that there's a very small segment of the population that feels like we should do away with our property taxes, which is how we fund nearly everything. And as reading the book, and especially that first section, I wanted anyone who is in support of that to read that chapter and see what could happen if we start to defund government. What did you see as the most effective way that the communities reversed this trend of getting their government funding?
Michelle Wilde Anderson:government and their levels of faith in government. And some of that damage is perpetuated by media that's kind of off-site, so it's not really held in the care and custody of people in town. So some of that, I think I don't have any answer for how to fix the special interests who dominate media with stories of government failure so that they themselves, at the top of our income spectrum, will pay less in taxes. I mean, I think big picture, there's a larger dynamic in which people want to drown the government because otherwise, if you're one of the wealthiest people, in the country government will take a share of your money.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:So that's a larger debate and it's offsite. What I wrote about and thought about in the book was the ways that people restore faith and government locally, so just this kind of closely held project of how you allow people to trust their local governments again. I think Josephine County, just as you say, stephanie, is one of the best examples of this because it's a very conservative county in general. It has a strong liberty watch and oath keepers wing to the county and just in general, a strong kind of libertarian spirit about the role, the appropriate role for government, spirit, you know, about the role, the appropriate role for government. Those politics really drove the county into this multi-decade pit of defunding its basic services and at that point the thing that public officials did right that I wrote about and think is so transferable to other places is that they actually acknowledged all of the ways that they had failed. So they didn't pretend it didn't happen, they didn't hide in their offices, they actually went out in town halls and they met people and in those town halls they received the criticism and the questions that allowed people to say like, well, don't you have extra money on X and you say your patrol cars are at 150,000 miles, but I think that those patrol cars can go to 200,000. Why do you need new? You know they're like able to ask. You know very specific questions that are on people's mind to allow people to vent periods of frustration. You know, my car was stolen and I called and all I got was a voicemail and I couldn't even get a record so I could claim my car for insurance. They let people kind of vent and feel that level of frustration. They did a second thing in that period of advocacy, which is that the board of supervisors put out a very simple, clear but also honest, very truthful pamphlet just saying here's the money you give us and here's how we spend it. In a place like that, where people are, you know, very low income, lots of retirees on fixed income before you ask them for more money you do have to tell them how you're spending the resources that you already have. So that kind of basic act of transparency and just also like civic education of you know these are the sources of our money was incredibly important.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:One last thing I'll mention about that is that it also allowed the board of supervisors to explain to people the powers that they did and didn't have. So for instance and I don't know if this is part of Nebraska's politics right now I haven't seen this in coverage from the state, but this is so common elsewhere People have this idea like you could get money from X if only you tried, or if only you were more effective, or whatever. And in Josephine that story is about the logging of federal lands, and one thing the government officials were able to do in these town halls and with this explanatory pamphlet was to say we actually don't have the power to make the federal government give us money and explain why they don't have that power. You know X and Y lawsuits are pending. We're trying over here, but we have no ability to convert that into this budget cycle.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:So I just think you know, at some level you have to dignify people with information. They deserve information and government. You know, after government has been depleted for a long time, it sometimes does really suck and it sometimes attracts people who are ineffective or even corrupt, and so current leaders any given set of current leaders sometimes really does have to apologize for mistakes that were made in the past. So that's just all the kind of basic restorative work I don't think you can always change what's going on in the kind of national media, but sometimes you can just rebuild confidence in your own leadership locally.
Jennifer Hiatt:So you're right, we don't, in Nebraska, have the. If only you could find X amount of money, partly because at this point X is actually flowing in to Nebraska. We get farm subsidies and we haven't had something like the timber industry where, all of a sudden over 20 years right, all of a sudden over 20 years the logging industry is in decline. We don't have that. Instead, right now what we have is a pernicious group of people who are taking the Grover Norquist approach of if we abolished government, all of a sudden people would realize how much they needed government. Instead, we're going to reduce it in size that you can drag it to a bathroom and drown it. Is that Drown it in a bathtub?
Jennifer Hiatt:Drown it in a bathtub. That's the approach that we have in Nebraska right now, and we have some really lovely groups that are doing the really hard work of making sure that people realize what they're trying to do and what government really does bring in. And we actually just had a win this year. Our governor was going to reject money for SNAP, which would feed children over the summer. We had three or four groups of people that came in and they were like are you kidding me? We've already paid this money, we're not rejecting it. And the governor did not win. He did ultimately have to sign the bill that would bring that money in. He let everyone know that it was an 11 year old that changed his mind. Apparently, one 11 year old is just very persuasive.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:Can I just say it's amazing that you mentioned that specific dispute because I was just learning about all that yesterday and I think that's such a good example where you know you've got this federal funding that's coming in from the outside and you have states who are so mistrustful of government that even this kind of free money, in the sense that it's, you know, being funded by the tax and federal taxpayers, feels tainted or toxic or something. And you know the amount of the states under that program, as I understand it, have to put in 50% of the cost of the administration but zero of the actual benefits SNAP benefits themselves. So even that core of just 50% of the cost of administration becomes the fight. And I just think it's a really interesting example of how, if people understand those EBT cards to be just making 11-year-olds life better and to be allowing families supplemental nutrition over the summer when their kids aren't in school lunch programs I don't know it would be a more basic kind of humanistic conversation and instead it becomes this big picture ideological, like do we believe in a welfare state? Do we believe in the federal government? So yeah, I think there's deeper psychological dynamics at work in a fight like that. That really shouldn't be hard from a state policy point of view.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:There's one little paragraph in the book that goes straight to this issue, jennifer and I just as an advocate for you guys in Nebraska and just anybody who's listening, because I think this stuff is so important. And in Josephine because I got to really see up close all of the skepticism of government. I got to kind of see all of its flavors. There's lots of different versions of what makes people mistrust government and I worked so hard on this paragraph and so I just want to read it because I put it all in one place and I think, as people reflect on their own communities, it's important. I mean back to Stephanie's question, like if you're trying to answer government skepticism, I think you have to answer each of these strands or at least know which of these strands is kind of hitting you in state or local politics.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:The paragraph, again from Josephine. It says and ride high on junkets to the state capitol in DC. Or two hidden stashes the suspicion that there were other funds that could be used now in the county's time of need. Or three heroic alternatives, the theory that a good leader could come up with something other than new taxes. Number four bad priorities the idea that fiscal problems could be solved by moving funds away from less worthy expenditures, empire building, the concern that some departments or public sector unions were just amassing power, self-indulgence by government employees, an assumption that employees should have made do with existing facilities and equipment and, the biggest one of all, a perception the government staff were lazy, dishonest or incompetent. And to me those are all like separate roots in this larger unraveling of public trust and local governments. I think really have to see which one is kind of animating people at the deepest level and or which ones are animating people and then really answer them.
Jennifer Hiatt:So many threads to pull. So I work in redevelopment. Of course that means that I watched Detroit's downtown resurgence with great interest, and one of the things that concerns me personally not in my professional capacity as a representative for the city I work at, just personally is that so much of that redevelopment was privately generated and the city of Detroit, at least from an outside perspective, didn't seem to have a lot of control over how that redevelopment occurred. And you noted that even in Detroit, who is famously dying, as we talked about at the top of the episode there was a comment from someone in Detroit that growth can still crush things. And since, primarily, we have planners who listen to our podcast, how can planners make sure that growth in their communities don't continue to crush things?
Michelle Wilde Anderson:You know. So one of the kind of ideas about a place like Detroit is that it's a blank slate, right? So much depopulation, all this empty land, all this blight. You could double its population and not displace a soul, right? So much depopulation, all this empty land, all this blight. You could double its population and not displace a soul, right? This is one of the like ideas about the kind of urban prairie and depopulation, and I think what I learned in working in Detroit is that growth still wants to go toward the best things, not the worst things.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:So the parts of Detroit that are most depopulated, that truly are closest to an urban prairie, where you have like species that people haven't seen in 50 years, sort of all of a sudden showing up in your neighborhood, those areas are not the places of crowded reinvestment. The places of crowded reinvestment are the individual properties and the neighborhoods that are in the best condition, the beautiful mansions that are deteriorated but they still have their beautiful bones and their craftsman construction, the skyscrapers, for which that's the same thing. It's very expensive to redevelop a dilapidated skyscraper, but if it was made at the peak of architectural craft in its day, 100 years ago, there's a beautiful thing there to salvage neighborhoods where there can be this kind of core of vitality. So developers go toward that because there's activity, there's sort of starting to be life there. So the point is not to deter or refuse reinvestment in Detroit.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:It's just to acknowledge that the reality of that reinvestment is that it can still spur displacement and it's very confusing to use a word like gentrification in a city like Detroit, although less so now than it was five years ago. But it's confusing to use a word like gentrification. But you have to use a word like displacement because the reality is that the money flows toward the best things and Detroit's residents already lived in a lot of those best things. That chapter of the book is about this sustained, just crushing foreclosure crisis and this wave of massive evictions that have just swept the city way after the foreclosure crisis in the Great Recession itself. You know I write about the social movement to answer the fact that 48% of the city's residential units went through a mortgage or tax foreclosure between 2005 and 2015. That's what I meant by that line, and this kind of urban prairie fantasy that it's all been abandoned and you can start over is not the case. It's just like that photography metaphor there's still 700,000 people that are living there.
Stephanie Rouse:Yeah, and displacement really ties into this idea that a lot of communities have that if we just bring in new people new people with middle and higher incomes that's going to fix our problem. But the communities that you profile in the book really show that they're trying to transition to a resident-centered good governance approach where they're focusing on the people that live there rather than bringing in these newcomers to fix the problem. Why do you think that communities lost this really basic concept that used to be at the heart of all of our government services?
Michelle Wilde Anderson:Yeah, I think that idea of residence-centered governance is really important to me. It was kind of the thing at some level. The whole book is just an exploration of what it looks like when people try to recover that or try to build it. So I think it's really important and the conclusion is rumination on what I learned across all of these places, illumination on what I learned across all of these places the worst of local government to me. I wrote it up as like a fake city hall banner that you'd never see on a city hall, but I think unfortunately, too many cities actually live with this kind of philosophy.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:This is what residence center governance is. Not is a kind of prioritization of attracting new residents. Not is a kind of prioritization of attracting new residents subsidizing large businesses, deferring costs, enforcing leases and arresting people, and if you actually think about those things, you know a lot of cities spend most of their budgets doing those things. They're trying to replace their current population. They're at least in poor cities I should say. They're desperately trying to subsidize new outside businesses to come into town to bring a few new jobs and cut a ribbon on something. They're kicking costs down the road. They're continuing to run eviction courts and housing. You know housing courts to enforce leases and they're running a police department often a revenue generating police department through fines and fees. You know, and if that's what government does, then it's not investing in its residents, it's really containing them or managing them or extracting value from them.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:So this book is full of people who, I think, are trying to really invest in their people. You know the Lawrence chapter is all about investing in people's skill development and their people. You know the Lawrence chapter is all about investing in people's skill development and their wages. The Detroit chapter is all about how a government intervenes to stabilize housing. The Josephine County chapter is all about how a government tries to rebuild its public safety to be there for people in the context of violence and emergencies.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:And the Stockton chapter is all about how you show up for a place that has faced a lot of violence over time and you really support the mental health needs of a community that has witnessed and lost so much from violence. So you know, those are all examples of resident-centered governance, I think, and at base it is simply about putting your existing residents at the center of what you do, not suburbanites, not outside employers that you're trying to attract, but just your people. That's why it was so fun to work on, because the people who try to run city halls like that, they're just really special people and they should be the kind of people that we hold up in our politics, I think I think that's a great place to really wrap up a book that speaks to all of those things.
Jennifer Hiatt:And so always our last question, because this is Booked on Planning. We started asking people what's one book, but everybody did not just have one book. So what are other books you would recommend to our readers that they should check out besides yours?
Michelle Wilde Anderson:So what are other books you would recommend to our readers that they should check out besides yours?
Michelle Wilde Anderson:Because of course, everyone should pick that one up 2019. It's called Race for Profit by Keeanga Yamada Taylor, and it's an amazing book about the 1960s and 1970s in our deindustrializing cities, and I think that period of time is incredibly important for understanding what comes later and for really understanding the Great Recession and this sort of current period of deindustrialization we're in. And Race for Profit is not only beautifully written, but it describes this wave of predatory banking and real estate practices that helped to pioneer, in a bad way, the foreclosure business model that we saw during the Great Recession. So it's an example of a book that if we'd paid more attention to the business models in that era and, in particular, the exploitation of Black women through those loans, I think we could have actually avoided a lot more pain in the peak of the foreclosure crisis. So I hope people will read that.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:Number two, alec McGillis' Fulfillment. The original title was Fulfillment Winning and Losing in One-Click America. It is so good and as an urban studies nerd, you might not realize how good this book is, but it's actually a story of regional inequality, but told through Amazon and all of the parts of its business. So you really see how the company has affected cities, not only their effects on retail, but their negotiations for warehouse and distribution centers and their power generating infrastructure and the impact of their workforce and wages on communities. It's a narrative book written by one of America's best journalists, so it's just so good.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:Number three is a brand new book by Henry Graber called Paved Paradise how Parking Explains the World, and I think it's just perfect for booked on planning in your community of people, because I don't know about you guys, but I thought there was nothing new. I needed to learn about parking in American cities, like we all learn that and think about that. But I was definitely wrong, because this book taught me so much and plus it's super funny and poignant and he's actually really wise, so it's very good. That's hot off the shelves 2023.
Jennifer Hiatt:We actually have that one on a list of people we would love to interview.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:Oh, you should. It'd be perfect for you, yeah.
Stephanie Rouse:Well, it's been a really great conversation, so thank you, michelle, for taking the time to talk to us today.
Michelle Wilde Anderson:Thank, you, stephanie, and thank you, jennifer. You guys do this podcast with so much heart and love for writing. I know I speak on behalf of every writer in America that we want nothing more than to have people actually read our books. So thank you. It's been such a delight to talk to both of you today.
Jennifer Hiatt:We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Michelle Wild Anderson on her book the Fight to Save the Town Reimagining Discarded America. You can get your own copy through the publisher, avid Reader Press or, as always, we recommend your local bookstore. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and please rate, review and share the show. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next time on Booked on Planning. Thank you.