Rebuilding Broken Cities
A local community's job base vanishes, evictions escalate, and mortgages go into default. This triggers a decline in property taxes, which leads to...
A local community's job base vanishes, evictions escalate, and mortgages go into default. This triggers a decline in property taxes, which leads to shrinking public services. Libraries are shuttered, public school class sizes increase, the school year is shortened, the professional fire department becomes a volunteer force, and publicly funded ambulance services vanish. Not surprisingly, people of color and immigrants bear the brunt of this disinvestment. 'Between 2000 and 2009,' Anderson writes, 'there was a 31 percent increase in the number of municipalities, counties, and census-designated places where at least one in five people lived under the poverty line.