Book Talk! The Fight to Save the Town by Michelle Wilde Anderson

Masks Required.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A sweeping and authoritative study of wealth inequality and the dismantling of local government in four working-class cities across the US that passionately argues for reinvestment in people-centered leadership.

Decades of cuts to local government amidst rising concentrations of poverty have wreaked havoc on communities left behind by the modern economy. 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. 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 cut, properties to sell, bills to defer, and risky loans to take.

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 are figuring out how to turn poverty traps back into gateway cities.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michelle Wilde Anderson is a professor of property, local government, and environmental justice at Stanford Law School. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Yale Law Journal, and other publications.

ABOUT THE INTERLOCUTOR

Julia Mendoza is an Associate Law Professor at Loyola Law School. She is an interdisciplinary legal scholar who focuses on criminal law and education. In addition to her law degree from UC Davis School of Law, she earned an M.A. in Human Rights from Columbia University, and has an M.A. and a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University. Before coming to Loyola, Professor Mendoza was a fellow at Stanford Law School, and served as a legal fellow at the ACLU of Northern California in the Racial Justice Project. During her fellowship she worked on two advocacy campaigns that utilized a combination of legislative advocacy, public education, and organizing strategies to address racial disparities within public schools and felon disenfranchisement.

Notes on parking in Larchmont Village:

Chevalier's does not have any parking, but there is paid meter parking on the street, a paid lot next to the bank, and free street parking parallel the Larchmont Blvd. on Lucerne Blvd.