When Stockton, Calif., declared bankruptcy in 2012, it was the largest municipal failure in American history, but it wasn’t exactly a surprise, according to a Bloomberg analysis. By the late 20th century, the city had already become a symbol of urban decline. Once a hub of canning, farming and manufacturing jobs, Stockton saw its major employers begin to leave the region; the city’s tax base consequently evaporated, and housing values plummeted. As Michelle Wilde Anderson recounts in her new book, The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America, Stockton’s economic woes deepened in the wake of the Great Recession. Since it couldn’t keep up with its outlandishly overleveraged bond payments, Stockton began slashing emergency, health and recreation services. Even as the nation recovered after 2015, joblessness rates in Stockton remained elevated, and fully a quarter of people under 18 lived below the poverty line. Homicide rates soared, as did civilian killings by police. Anderson tells the story of Stockton and three other places facing extreme hardship: Josephine County, Ore.; Lawrence, Mass.; and Detroit, which dethroned Stockton as the largest municipal bankruptcy on record in 2013. In all four, local governments suffered decades of fiscal decline, ending up with “no more loans to take, taxes to raise, services to privatize, or assets worth selling,” she writes. But in each place, community members mustered reformist efforts to step in and fill the gaps as public services vanished.
