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Four of the poorest, most maligned places in America have become beacons of hope—and burgeoning centers of trust, in people and local government—since going broke in the Great Recession. How did they pull themselves up from an especially low point, and what can the rest of the country learn from them?

This was the subject of 2023 Zócalo Book Prize winner Michelle Wilde Anderson’s The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America, which we honored last night as the year’s best nonfiction book exploring community and social connection at the Zócalo Book and Poetry Prize event.

Held at the ASU California Center in downtown Los Angeles, the program, which also streamed live online, began with a virtual reading by this year’s Zócalo Poetry Prize winner, Paige Buffington, of “From 20 Miles Outside of Gallup, Holbrook, Winslow, Farmington, or Albuquerque.” Then, philanthropist Tim Disney—the sponsor of the program and both prizes—took the stage, where he lauded The Fight to Save the Town as “a moving and important document, and a timely one.”

Anderson received $10,000 in prize money and a pre-solved Rubik’s Cube, emblazoned with the Zócalo logo, for winning this year’s book prize. She announced she would be keeping the Rubik’s Cube, but donating all of her winnings to four organizations she wrote about in her book, and to South L.A.’s Community Coalition. “Because if this book moved anybody, that is because, above all, these people moved me,” she said.

During the 13th annual Zócalo Book Prize lecture, Anderson shared stories from the four places she wrote about: Stockton, California, Josephine County, Oregon, Detroit, Michigan, and Lawrence, Massachusetts. Since the 1980s, these towns and cities and others like them—often older, industrial cities with decaying housing and infrastructure, and high levels of environmental contamination—have grown poorer because of disinvestment from state and federal government and poorer tax bases.

“These cities are broke in part because they’re poor, and their people stay poor in part because their governments are broke,” said Anderson. “This is actually the start of a larger, vicious cycle of decline in which the conditions of poverty undermine the basic trust that is needed for human cooperation.”

But in each place, she found examples of how people and institutions are facing this vicious cycle and finding ways to work together to break out of it. In Stockton, that meant addressing the trauma and mental health effects of violence, segregation, and intergenerational poverty. In Josephine County—one of the most anti-government places in America—that meant saving public services by convincing angry, skeptical voters that it’s possible to build cooperation and trust in government. In Detroit, that meant fighting foreclosures and speculators, and putting property back into local hands. And in Lawrence, that meant forming strong, pan-Latino networks to help residents in the 21st-century economy make a living wage.

“All of these efforts add up to social repair,” said Anderson.

Following the lecture, Alberto Retana, president and CEO of South L.A.’s Community Coalition—which, like many of the organizations in Anderson’s book, engages in ground-up, locally focused work—joined her on stage to talk about The Fight to Save the Town’s inspirations, and how to apply some of its lessons to other communities around the country.

Retana noted that Anderson’s book celebrates what democracy is all about: “people fighting to make something beautiful from something broken.” How, he asked Anderson, did she come to this subject and perspective?

She said she chose to write a “people-centered” book because she’s “really concerned that the way we tell stories about poverty is part of the problem.” Our narratives of poor places feature “crooks in the government and bullets flying everywhere and hell holes … Those narratives reinforce faithlessness that things can be better. So they give outsiders an excuse to stop working alongside people on the ground.”

You can see this dynamic in Los Angeles, a city of 40,000 unhoused people, particularly among the white middle class, Retana agreed. But what, he asked Anderson, is the “heart of the heart of the central solution” to tackling poverty and disinvestment?

“Turning government back toward its people,” said Anderson. “We have to invest in people where they live.” But she cautioned that one community cannot write the playbook for other communities. To the extent that, say, Lawrence has a method to teach the rest of America, it would be “showing up and listening,” and forming tight and supportive networks among people and organizations.

Why center the book on these local networks? Federal and state policy cause many of the problems they are tackling, said Retana.

It’s true that the problems are systemic, and we need federal and state policy changes, said Anderson. But upper tiers of government don’t work without this grassroots level—which creates places for outside funding, policies, and philanthropy to land.

Anderson turned the question back on Retana—whose work is local, after all.

The greatest changes in American history, he said, come from localities up—“whether it’s Ferguson in 2013 or Birmingham, Alabama, in the ’60s, or Los Angeles solving the homelessness crisis in the next few years.” He added, “I really love this book because it recenters the conversation where it really needs to happen: in our backyards, on our blocks, in our living rooms.”

After concluding their discussion, Anderson and Retana turned to audience questions, which largely centered around their advice for people and organizations hoping to effect change locally.

In response to one person who wondered what opportunities community-based organizations might be overlooking, Anderson shared a lesson from Stockton. There, a youth development program gathered all the local youth programs staff together one morning a week for orange juice and doughnuts. “It was an incredible moment for the city’s network-building,” she said—not because spectacularly important plans got made in these meetings, but because they helped people and programs get to know one another and coordinate in an environment of scarcity. “I do think there’s a form of casual coordination that we don’t give enough credit to as a component of social change,” she said.

Last night also kicked off Zócalo’s 20th birthday celebration, and before the program wrapped, Zócalo executive director Moira Shourie took the stage to thank Zócalo’s past and present staff, funders, and audiences for their support over the past two decades, through more than 700 public programs and 3,000 published essays. And then, in true Zócalo fashion, everyone came together for cake and more conversation.

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“Both” was the answer that emerged over the course of the hour-long exchange among Morain, editorial page editor and political affairs columnist for The Sacramento Bee, and a panel of civic, education, and community leaders before a packed audience at the Capitol Events Center in downtown Sacramento.

The lunchtime event, co-presented by Zócalo Public Square and The California Wellness Foundation, was built around the query, “Is the Central Valley Finally Embracing Its Urban Future?” Even as the Central Valley’s population swells in cities such as Sacramento, Fresno, Bakersfield, and Stockton, and officials grapple with characteristically urban challenges like air pollution, soaring housing costs, and sagging infrastructure, California’s San Joaquin Valley still retains its agricultural roots and clings to certain elements of its pastoral lifestyle.

Bridging that dual urban-rural character requires comprehensive regional measures, and problem-solving approaches that aren’t either/or, urban vs. rural, said Meg Arnold, managing director of Valley Vision, a regional leadership organization working on issues like transportation, air quality, and economic development in Northern California.

For example, Arnold said, developing more agricultural-based manufacturing across the Valley would be a way of “taking a strength and adding to and augmenting it.” Capturing a greater share of “value-added-income” in industries like agricultural technology will enable the Valley’s economy to “unify its assets” and “harness them to shared goals,” Arnold said.

Joseph Castro, who has served as president of California State University, Fresno since 2013, agreed that the Valley needs to build on its heritage as “the worldwide hub for agriculture,” even as it keeps urbanizing. “We should embrace our agricultural roots and invest more in that area,” he said.

Dirk Brazil, who has been Davis’ City Manager since 2014, said the region is underfunded in any number of key areas, including education and health care. Local and state governments are cautious about coughing up more money because they’re trying to figure out the spending and social priorities of the new administration in Washington.

“It’s all about the revenue, it’s all about, ‘How do we fund this stuff?’” Brazil said.

Several panelists were raised in the Central Valley, or have lived there for decades, so they were personally familiar with the complexities of its rapidly changing character. Moderator Morain introduced the topic of the region’s mass transportation shortfall and the desirability of high-speed rail by asking how many panelists had driven by car to the gathering. Everyone, as it turned out.

Gayle Garbolino-Mojica, who’s serving her third term as the Placer County Superintendent of Schools, and who said she arrived in her electric car, noted that high-density traffic in places like the Lincoln-Roseville-Rocklin corridor, where State Route 65 meets I-80, can cause bottlenecks that bedevil commuters and school-bound students.

Brazil said that California state officials and legislators must produce a comprehensive transportation plan and a bill to match, since individual cities lack the resources to prop up a strained transportation network all by themselves. That’s also important for forging ties between the Valley and adjacent high-job-growth regions like the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. “We would love to see Facebook spin off a division that’s based in Davis,” he said.

Meeting the Valley’s growing educational demands was a recurrent theme. Garbolino-Mojica said that a fair proportion of her district’s students go on to college; after graduating, some move back to the area and are able to find work locally with Sutter Health Care and other major employers. She stressed the need for more educational investment, including in public-private partnerships, and for more innovation in creating educational training programs.

Castro said that 70 percent of Cal State Fresno students are first-generation to college, and 60 percent receive Pell grants. The vast majority of students rely heavily on public transit, namely buses. “The difference between going to college and not going to college may be transportation,” he added.

Some of those students’ parents are migrant farmworkers, both documented and undocumented, and audience member Vanessa Richardson asked the panel how agriculture’s dependence on migrant labor factors in the Valley’s future.

City Manager Brazil said that shifting federal immigration policies will heavily impact local wineries and other labor-intensive industries, and also will have “a huge impact” on the movement of visiting scholars and international students at UC Davis. “There’s a lot of tumult and confusion on campus right now,” he said.

Morain brought the discussion full circle to whether the mega-region, somewhat monolithically known as the Central Valley, could cooperate across its many municipalities. The panelists concurred that it was necessary for communities to recognize their mutual inter-dependency even more in coming years.

Arnold said that regional jurisdictions will “have to attend to their own knitting” and take care of their own problems, but also work together to permit jobs, dollars and workers to flow across counties. As a resident of Davis, she said, she’d like to see any job stay in Davis. But she’d rather have it go somewhere else in the Valley than go to Austin, Texas.

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Why is that? And what are individuals, organizations, and government doing to improve Los Angeles communities? These were a few of the questions tackled at the downtown Los Angeles panel titled “How Do You Fix a ‘Bad’ Neighborhood?”

Zócalo editorial director Sara Catania, the event’s moderator, opened by asking Los Angeles City Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who represents South Los Angeles and grew up there, to explain why his family left the neighborhood.

Harris-Dawson explained that their move coincided with larger American trends—urban deindustrialization and the crack cocaine epidemic. “A place that was safe and was nurturing became completely unsafe, unstable, and downright destructive,” he recalled.

UC Irvine criminologist Charis E. Kubrin said her research has shown that large-scale structural changes in cities such as the ones Harris-Dawson mentioned shape local neighborhoods. “I’m interested in why crime clusters where it does, why it occurs where it does,” she said. “To understand that you have to know how neighborhoods are shaped by larger social forces.”

That holds true for St. John’s Well Child and Family Center/Harbor-UCLA Medical Center pediatrician Chris Mink. “You think one child, one doctor in one office,” she said. “I am one-on-one with the child, but everyone in the community is there with me.” An obese child may be living in poverty, for example, with food insecurity Mink explained. To combat that, she added, you need a grocery store where the family can buy good food, a parent with a job to buy that food, and a park that’s safe for the child to go out and play.

As president and chief operating officer of the Gang Reduction & Youth Development Foundation (the GRYD Foundation), Adrienne Newsom is trying to combat some of these issues through programs like the Summer Night Lights series. Summer Night Lights keeps the lights on at parks in neighborhoods dealing with gang-related violence and also creates events and programs (from sports and food to gardening) for the entire family after hours. The program, said Newsom, is about taking people who live in areas where it’s hot during the summer and who feel cooped up inside, and giving them the chance to come out with their families and enjoy themselves.

“How do you take an example like that where you see success with a program,” Catania asked Harris-Dawson, “And translate that into action on your end?

Harris-Dawson, who was involved in the beginnings of Summer Night Lights as a community organizer, said that it’s two-fold: People and organizations talking to neighborhood residents first, then doing things with the community. Summer Night Lights “created a platform for connection,” he said. “No one knows more than the people living in a block, or a neighborhood, what it takes to bring that place to the next level.” It’s not just poverty but disconnectedness, from both your neighbors and the police, he added, that causes crime.

Kubrin said that communities with less crime have a very close relationship with their police force. “There’s communication, there’s trust,” she said. It goes both ways, too, she explained. People feel they can go to the police if they have a problem. And “the police rely on the community members to help do their job.”

Harris-Dawson pointed to the LAPD’s Community Safety Partnership Program, which places officers in a specific neighborhood for a five-year period and evaluates them not on arrests, but on participating in community activities as a successful way of building such relationships. “Residents know police, and police know residents,” he said.

Resilience and grit have become buzzwords for talking about individuals who rise out of difficult circumstances, said Catania. “Can a community have resilience? Can a community have grit?”

Yes, said the panelists, but they can’t do it without having support from beyond their communities in fixing structural disadvantages and providing necessary resources. “You can have all the grit you want” in a struggling neighborhood, said Kubrin, but “you are from behind at the start.”

Harris-Dawson said that it has to start with creating “a situation where people’s basic needs can be met,” like having the time and money to cook healthy meals. Too often, we marvel at the rose that grows through the concrete. “I’m like, break up the concrete, there are a bunch of flowers under there,” he said.

So what can be done to transform a “bad” neighborhood?

“I think one thing would be to have some type of town forum, so to speak, where we can actually hear from residents what their perceptions are of their neighborhood and what they think are some of the solutions,” said Newsom. It’s more than that, however. “There needs to be a mindset change, too,” she said.

For Harris-Dawson, it comes down to kids. “Every child has to have their basic needs met. A caring adult in their life. Something meaningful to do. And someone to love,” he said. “I think if you do those things, almost every problem’s solved.”

Mink said that we know what a good neighborhood looks like: “It’s safe, loving, and nurtures growth for everybody,” she said. “There are so many things we need to do and we know how to do” to make those neighborhoods happen. “We just have to get people invested.”

That takes resources. “Where does that money come from?” asked Catania.

The money is there, the panelists agreed. Unfortunately, most of it is going into what Kubrin called “back-end criminal justice solutions” rather than “front-end prevention.” The state, she said, spends $60,000 per year to house a prisoner.

What, asked Harris-Dawson, would happen if you spent that money paying people decent salaries instead?

In the question-and-answer session, audience members asked for advice on dealing with problems in their communities, how the panelists tackle various challenges, and their takes on a few different programs.

“If an inner-city residential neighborhood had a pocket park within a quarter mile of every resident, how valuable would this investment be?” To put a pocket park in every six to eight blocks, he said, would take just 1.2 percent of L.A.’s annual budget.

“It would help with health and wellness and stress relief,” said Newsom.

However, Harris-Dawson cautioned against parks without programming. “The park is identified as one of the most dangerous places” in many neighborhoods in South Los Angeles. A football league in the street, run by adults, is more beneficial to the community than a park without the type of programs GRYD runs, he said.

Another audience member asked what she can do to educate her neighbors about resources available to them, and get the community connected, even as she feels unsafe on her neighborhood’s streets. “What’s the first step?”

“It’s one slice at a time,” said Mink. She works with many foster children who face a number of different obstacles. Her hospital has tried to deal with these obstacles individually: A fundraiser for buying pajamas first, then one to provide lunch in the summer, and finally to buy backpacks for the school year. “Just one slice of the pie at a time,” she said.

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Four panelists, each involved in different Inland Empire communities, shared their diverse perspectives on this topic at the Zócalo Public Square/The California Wellness Foundation event “Will the Inland Empire’s Sprawl Create the Community of the Future?” in front of a full house at the Riverside Art Museum.

The evening was framed by findings from The California Wellness Foundation’s Advancing Wellness Poll, which found that residents of Riverside and San Bernardino counties endure some of the nation’s dirtiest air and longest commutes. These communities also deal with low wages, which means they often work more, making it difficult to spend time with friends, family, and neighbors. Nevertheless, the evening’s spirit was one of hope from the beginning, when moderator and New York Times reporter Jennifer Medina asked the panelists how optimistic they are about the region’s future and why.

“I’m very excited about our region’s job prospects,” John Husing, a research economist, answered. He said the Inland Empire has added approximately 235,000 jobs recently, bringing the region to a total of nearly 100,000 more than before the recession.

Luz Gallegos, who works with the region’s immigrant population as community programs director at TODEC Legal Center, was also optimistic. She said she’s seen the immigrant community “wake up” and become politically engaged. “We’re very hopeful because at the end of the day that’s how you see change,” Gallegos said.

Medina pressed the panelists to consider one of the Inland Empire’s greatest challenges: How do you engage the community when it’s so widespread and disjointed?

“It’s one community at a time … If change is going to happen, you must start with the indigenous people,” Rev. Samuel J. Casey, executive director of Congregations Organized for Prophetic Engagement and a pastor at New Life Christian Church in Fontana, said. The other panelists agreed, emphasizing the importance of building relationships between individuals as well as across different organizations.

Greer Sullivan, a professor of psychiatry and the Founding Director of UC Riverside’s Center for Healthy Communities, pointed out that it’s not uncommon for people to feel like they don’t know their neighbors or like there is no “community” to begin with. But she had an idea for change: “I think the solution is to start small and build from there.”

Gallegos agreed, saying she’s seen the firsthand benefits of grassroots organizing. It helps to “get in the trenches” in order to know each community’s individual needs. Coachella, for instance, is very different from Riverside, she said.

“There are 4.4 million people in the Inland Empire spread across two counties,” added Husing. “There’s no center to it.” This disjointedness can make it challenging to deal with big problems. “In San Bernardino, 27 percent of children and 18 percent of all people are living in poverty,” he said. “These are catastrophic numbers.”

Sullivan said that there’s a link between poverty and health, and she has been encouraged that this is becoming more widely known and researched. However, the Inland Empire needs to address both at the same time. “Research shows that having close friendships, having close family or friends, is really critical,” she said. “Exercise is really critical. If you don’t have a safe neighborhood, you may not feel safe exercising.”

Gallegos agreed that paying attention to wellness is a necessity for positive community growth. “We live such fast and crazy lives; we are running from taking kids to school to trying to get to work. There’s really no time for wellness,” she said. “How can we work together as a team that will continue empowering the community—not only for our generation, but for future generations?”

The audience question-and-answer period also looked ahead in order to deepen the discussion. One audience member asked: How can people in the Inland Empire get better access to education?

Casey said there are two issues that need to be addressed. First, high poverty areas sometimes lack teachers with the training needed to address students who come to school hungry, or are suffering from PTSD. “The reality is that teachers are walking into classrooms trying to engage students that they are not prepared to engage,” he said. Second, he said, more attention needs to be given toward not just education but jobs in order to put an end to “the school to prison pipeline.”

Still, several of the panelists said they have seen improvement at schools where parents become involved at school board meetings. Ultimately, that’s the kind of action that all four panelists agreed can improve the region’s communities—a perspective best summed up by Gallegos’ closing remark. “By working together,” she said, “I think all of us can really make an impact in the Inland Empire.”

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This project, called Putting Youth on the Map, reflects several interests articulated by young people and their adult allies with whom we collaborated. First was a need for a holistic measure of youth wellbeing—one that reflects the intersecting ways that young people experience education, health, social relationships, etc.—that provided information at a local level and could be viewed by ethnicity and gender.

We created a Youth Well-Being Index that looked at how Californians between the ages of 10-18 fare in their communities. The index is a bit like a GPA on a school report card, combining multiple measures into an overall score out of a potential optimal 100 percent. It includes information on education outcomes, both the percentage of youth that graduate from high school, and the percentage that graduate having passed state university prerequisites. Youth health is based on scores from 9th grade tests of whether students meet minimum levels of physical fitness associated with protection against disease, and 9th and 11th grade surveys on substance use. A statewide survey called the California Healthy Kids Survey provided information on whether 9th and 11th graders experience their neighborhoods and schools as safe, report having caring relationships with adults and peers, and indicate community involvement through clubs, sports, places of worship, and/or helping others. We selected these measures based on research suggesting not only their importance unto themselves, but their tendency to indicate other aspects of wellness.

What we discovered when we looked at the whole map of California was that no community was doing very well by its youth. If most young people were meeting these education, health, social, and community involvement benchmarks—benchmarks that parents tend to want and California needs for our children—we would expect to see scores close to 100 percent (dark blue on the map). But no place even achieved an overall score of 80 percent (the equivalent of a B- on a report card). However, some places and populations, including many in the Central Valley, fare especially poorly.

 
Of course, youth do not grow up in a vacuum, but are influenced by their family’s access to opportunity. So we also created a Regional Opportunity Index. The Regional Opportunity Index development process, led by faculty member Chris Benner, included input from a national peer review committee of leading authorities with expertise in community development and opportunity mapping. It combines measures across the areas of economics, education, health, housing, transit, and civic engagement, drawing from multiple datasets. The index distinguishes between the resources held by individuals (the “People Index”) and available in places (the “Place Index”). For example, to assess economic opportunity, the People Index includes the percentage of people who have jobs and the percentage of people with an income over 200 percent of the federal poverty level; the Place Index includes information about job availability, job quality, job growth, and access to capital.

 
Locations depicted in green are those where individuals (on the People Index) and communities (on the Place Index) have the comparatively greatest levels of resources measured, while those in red have the least. These maps together begin to distinguish between two types of places that reflect opportunities for development. First, there are places where resources are available (green) but individuals don’t appear to benefit from them (orange/red). Secondly, there are places where resources are not available (orange/red) and people are faring poorly (orange/red). Many Central Valley communities have the latter pattern of orange/red for both People and Place.

We wanted users—youth and their supporters—to be able to interact with these data and analyses visually, so we developed point-and-click websites that share them using maps. The maps can be customized, printed, and posted to social media.

We collaborated with several California youth-focused groups to develop and pilot a curriculum and training. They focus not only on the nuts and bolts of data and maps, but why young people should care about maps at all, and how they can use them in combination with their own research and action.

The maps are tools that have helped some youth come to see themselves as activists and advocates for change. For example, we spoke with youth leaders about their neighborhood at Fathers and Families of San Joaquin, an organization dedicated to promoting the cultural, spiritual, economic, and social renewal of the most vulnerable families in Stockton and the greater San Joaquin Valley. Then they compared their personal stories to the story they found in the maps. The youth, who were all from south Stockton, looked at the index maps and said that the depressing data implicated them. One said “if the data says that we are not doing good then it must be all our fault.”

But when we showed them older maps, they saw instantly how powerful maps could be. The 1938 Stockton redlining maps used by banks for decades to deny loans to homeowners in certain parts of the city showed that the neighborhoods where the young people live today were for decades deemed “undesirable” by loan assessors. For the youth this shock turned to anger as they realized that redlined neighborhoods were those that are currently the most poverty-stricken, high crime areas. “So you mean to say that our community isn’t just the way it is, but it was built this way?” one youth asked.

 
The maps can also help young people figure out what their community needs. For example, through collaboration with diversity advocates New America Media, young people used maps to support their own investigative research. Youth working for Coachella Unincorporated, a publication in the eastern Coachella Valley, drew upon both their own experiences and maps to highlight the long distances between where people live and major transit stops and to encourage investment in additional transit stops as well as sidewalks and walking paths to access them.

In Sacramento, youth used maps to bring community challenges to life in planning for a major gathering, the Sacramento My Brother’s Keeper Summit in 2015. Ten young people were brought together to help create the summit program. After reviewing maps of their city, the youth focused on three key areas: safety, education, and employment. They then developed and recorded skits focused on their lived experience of the analyses.

One skit complemented data on the percentage of youth who are neither in school nor working, and spoke to the need for youth to feel like they are contributing by way of employment. The skit starts with a young man talking to himself about wanting to stop hustling and get a real job. He relives his experience of selling drugs as a way to make money and the impacts that has on him and his community. The video then moves to the young man walking in to local businesses and asking if they are hiring, only to be refused because of his age and then ridiculed about how he is dressed. The video ends up with the grim reality many youth face when they are not in school or working; they end up getting looped back into the juvenile justice system. The maps and skits together communicated youth experiences and needs to the intergenerational audience of youth participants and adult allies in a powerful way.

Even the best quantitative data maps can only tell a very partial story about young people’s lives. However, integrating these analyses with youths’ real-life experiences helps to start the intergenerational discussion, planning, investment, and action we need to strengthen Central Valley communities and redraw these maps.

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