How can local officials help build up their communities with a long history of poverty? How has the tech boom affected our country’s industrial powerhouse cities? Have tax cuts exacerbated income equality? How is wealth inequality trickling down to smaller cities? Manny’s is honored to welcome Stanford professor Michelle Wilde Anderson to our space to discuss her new book, The Fight to Save the Town. Wilde Anderson presents a sweeping and authoritative study of wealth inequality and the dismantling of local government in four working-class cities across the US & 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.