Left for Dead: Local Government in the Post-Industrial Age

by Michelle Wilde Anderson

Left For Dead will take readers inside places where the local governments charged with managing American poverty can no longer provide decent services. These communities are rural, suburban, and urban. Some vote blue, some red. Some are nearly all white or nearly all black, some are diverse. Some went through bankruptcy, some came under fiscal management by a state receiver, and some were left on their own. All of these areas share a mighty past as capitals of the American working class—the homes of workers in mills, mines, manufacturing, and military production. As men were replaced by machines and their employers chose global markets for raw materials and manufacturing, hundreds of thousands of pink slips cut through families dependent on Pennsylvania steel, Alabama iron, West Virginia coal, Michigan factories, Oregon timber, and the Pacific Naval Fleet.

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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.