How America Is Putting Itself Back Together
Many people are discouraged by what they hear and read about America, but the closer they are to the action at home, the better they like what they see.
.. A coast-to-coast drive across America has its tedious stretches, and the teeming interstate corridors, from I-95 in the east to I-5 in the west, can lead to the despairing conclusion that the country is made of gas stations, burger stands, and big-box malls. From only 2,500 feet higher up, the interstates look like ribbons that trace narrow paths across landscape that is mostly far beyond the reach of any road. From ground level, America is mainly road—after all, that’s where cars can take you. From the sky, America is mainly forest in the eastern third, farmland in the middle, then mountain and desert in the west, before the strip of intense development along the California coast.
.. A version of today’s hierarchical awareness is the concept of the “big sort.” This is the idea that if you have first-rate abilities and more than middling ambitions, you’ll need to end up in one of a handful of talent destinations. New York for finance; the San Francisco Bay Area or Seattle for tech; Washington, D.C., for politics and foreign policy.
.. A great, underappreciated advantage of “everywhere else” in America: The real estate is cheap. In New York, in San Francisco, in half a dozen other cities, everything about life is slave to hyper-expensive real estate. In Sioux Falls, South Dakota; in Allentown, Pennsylvania; in inland California; across the south, costs are comparatively low. This has an effect—on how much you have to work, on what you think you need, on the risks you can take. Every calculation—the cash flow you must maintain, the life balance you can work toward—is different when a very nice family house costs a few hundred thousand dollars rather than a few million.
.. A quarry and workshop in Columbus that supplied marble headstones for the military and that thrived during the Vietnam War closed.
.. When we first visited early last year, Joe Max Higgins took us to the most modern “mini-mill” for producing steel in North America, in the Golden Triangle industrial zone. This “mini” structure is what most lay observers would consider to be unimaginably vast.
.. This was the closest I have come in the United States to the experience of major factory life in China—and it was in rural Mississippi
.. Based on everything we could see, the problems of immigration that presidential candidates have seized on for political advantage were largely another “rest of America” problem. That is, people generally saw things as manageable or improving locally, but believed they were falling apart everyplace else.
.. One version of what happens next is familiar to anyone who’s ever read a newspaper. Richer, whiter people think that public schools, public places, center cities are no longer for “people like us” and withdraw themselves, their children, and their tax support to the suburbs or private schools.
.. Brian Davis, who grew up in a white farming family in Michigan, began a campaign to get major new bond funding for the schools. This was in the depth of the financial collapse, in a hard-hit state, in the same election cycle in which the Tea Party made its debut—and Davis was asking a mainly white electorate, most of whom did not have children in the public schools, to refinance the schools. And they did. The new programs and facilities paid for by the bond, according to Davis, helped reverse a decline in public confidence in the schools. “We have children who come from homes with $1 million–plus annual income, and ones who come from homes with incomes under $20,000,”
.. “Pittsburgh feels as vibrant as it does—museums, opera, restaurants, but not much traffic—because we’re living in an infrastructure built for twice as many people as live here now
.. It is known as the City of Asylum project, and its goal is to revive a run-down area of Pittsburgh and make it a haven for persecuted writers from the rest of the world.
.. “Fresno is the bohemia of California,” she told us when we visited. “That’s because you can afford to live here! And the pace of life is such that you can have a full-time job if you need to, but not be so stressed out or have the 90-minute commutes of L.A. You can afford the garage as your studio, if you need it, which you can’t do in San Jose anymore.”