THE FIGHT TO SAVE THE TOWN
A conversation with Michelle Wilde Anderson
Thursday, December 8
6:00pm – 7:30pm
@ The FOCUS Lab (live-streamed for registrants)
>>GET TICKETS HERE<<
Join us for an exciting conversation with Michelle Wilde Anderson, author of the widely acclaimed The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America, one of the best portraits of the challenges and opportunities of small city governance and how communities can come together to rebuild their neighborhoods. With case studies from Stockton, CA, Josephine County, OR, Lawrence, MA, and Detroit, MI.
More about The Fight to Save the Town:
Decades of cuts to local government amid rising concentrations of poverty have wreaked havoc on communities left behind by the modern economy. Forty years after the anti-tax revolution began protecting wealthy taxpayers and their cities, our high-poverty cities and counties have run out of services to slash, properties to sell, bills to defer, and risky loans to take.
Some of these discarded places are rural. Others are big cities, small cities, or historic suburbs. Some vote blue, others red. Some are the most diverse communities in America, while others are nearly all white, all Latino, or all Black. All are routinely trashed by outsiders for their poverty and their politics. Mostly, their governments are just broke.
In The Fight to Save the Town, urban law expert and author Michelle Wilde Anderson offers unsparing, humanistic portraits of the hardships left behind in four such places. But this book is not a eulogy or a lament. Instead, Anderson travels to four blue-collar communities that are poor, broke, and progressing. Networks of leaders and residents in these places are facing down some of the hardest challenges in American poverty today. In Stockton, California, locals are finding ways, beyond the police department, to reduce gun violence and treat the trauma it leaves behind. In Josephine County, Oregon, community leaders have enacted new taxes to support basic services in a rural area with fiercely anti-government politics. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, leaders are figuring out how to improve job security and wages in an era of backbreaking poverty for the working class. And a social movement in Detroit, Michigan, is pioneering ways to stabilize low-income housing after a wave of foreclosures and housing loss.
Our smallest governments shape people’s safety, comfort, and life chances. For decades, these governments have no longer just reflected inequality—they have helped drive it. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Anderson argues that a new generation of local leaders is figuring out how to turn poverty traps back into gateway cities.
“The Fight to Save the Town changed my understanding of America. This insightful, narrative-driven book tells the story of four cities and towns with deep poverty and gutted public services. But in focusing on Americans who have committed heart and soul to their communities, Anderson weaves an ultimately hopeful story and delivers a blueprint for reform. This book pierced me and left me inspired.” —Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted
Michelle Wilde Anderson writes and teaches in the areas of poverty and inequality, local government law, housing, and environmental justice. Her new book, The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America (published by Simon & Schuster in 2022) focuses on the dismantling and rebuilding of local government in high-poverty communities. Rooted in narrative portraits of urban and rural poverty, the book describes the fallout from decades of cuts to local government amidst rising segregation by income and race. It profiles networks of officials and residents in four communities (Stockton, California; Josephine County, Oregon; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Detroit, Michigan) who are progressing on some of the hardest challenges of American poverty today: the collapse of basic services; the traumatic effects of gun violence; unlivable wages for the working class; and on-going waves of housing foreclosure.
Anderson is the Larry Kramer Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and a Professor at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability. She is the Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Housing Law Project and a board member at the East Bay Community Law Center in Oakland. Anderson’s writing has appeared in the Stanford Law Journal, Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and other publications. In 2019, the American Law Institute awarded her the ALI Early Career Scholars Medal.
TICKETS: $10 GA/$5 students. Scholarship opportunities are available.