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- This journey really started back in 2011.
We'd been living in China for about five years
traveling and reporting for "The Atlantic" magazine.
When we came back to the U.S.,
we wanted to look at our own country the same way.
- We're coming back at the end of the recession.
America was still trying to find its balance,
trying to find its way back.
We decided to go out and see what was going on
in small-town or even big-town America.
- We were looking for towns
that had some kind of story to tell.
Something had happened to them,
often involving some economic shock.
- Jim put a posting on his blog...
- Saying, "Tell us the story of your town."
Within a week, we got a thousand essays,
people saying...
- Not just, "Come to my town,"
but, "Here's the story of my town.
"Here's the passion of my town.
Here's why you have to come and visit my town."
- "Here is why the story of my town
is the American story of this era."
- We thought there must be something going on in America
that so many people wanted to talk about their hometowns.
We had a little plane
that we'd been flying for about 20 years
and thought, "This would be a great way to go to places
where you can only get to easily in a small plane."
We decided to do what we had always done in China.
Go out, get connected with not what you'd find
in the national media, but what we would find
in the daily lives of people in these towns.
- We went to these places before the pandemic,
but what we saw about how towns rise and fall
and fight to recover has a lot to say to our world right now
as we try to create a new future for ourselves.
- When people ask me where I'm from,
I always say I'm from California.
They say, "Well, where?" and I say, "Near Los Angeles."
They say, "Well, where?"
I say, "Well, from the Inland Empire."
And that will stop 'em because the Inland Empire
is a place that people don't know.
Start driving inland from Los Angeles
towards Palm Springs.
You get to the area where
it's much flatter, it's much hotter.
It's sort of just the fringe of the Mojave Desert.
People in Los Angeles or San Francisco would think
that's where the hicks of California live
and just zoom on through
when they see what looks like some sun-blasted hellscape.
I think being from here has really shaped my self-image
as a sense of being from a place
most people have either never heard of
or if they have heard of it, they often look down on it.
I knew growing up how proud people in our town were
of a place everybody else thought of
just as drive-through country or flyover country.
As Deb and I have gone to other parts of the country,
I feel as if, "Yeah, I know what it's like
"here in South Dakota.
I know what it's like here in West Virginia"--
the same pride and awareness of how you're seen.
My own hometown is Redlands,
which is near Riverside, which is growing,
and San Bernardino, which used to be the economic powerhouse
of the Inland Empire.
But San Bernardino was brought down
by a long string of problems and seriously bad luck.
How many cities
have had an interstate highway literally move away from them?
- When Jim was growing up,
this was Norton Air Force Base.
At its peak, Norton supported 12,000 jobs
and poured a couple of billion dollars
into the surrounding towns.
The base closed in '94.
Now it's home to a scrapyard for old planes
that will never fly again.
After all its losses,
San Bernardino declared bankruptcy in 2012.
- I've spent most of my life in San Bernardino.
This place was thriving when the base was open.
When the base closed down,
it put us in an economic chokehold.
San Bernardino gets a black eye
because, you know, we had the terrorist shootings.
There's a lot of gang activity.
So this is the neighborhood that we live in.
- This is Project Fighting Chance.
We have five national champions,
a junior Olympic gold medalist.
We're a safe haven. We feed the kids.
We have a chess club. We have a art program.
- Can I get a light blue?
- We have our Guitars Not Guns program.
- I knew there was a catch.
- There's always a catch, buddy.
- They think, "Oh, this is just a boxing gym."
But that's far from the truth.
We are trying to be a part
of fixing what needs to be fixed around here.
- A lot of America's citrus fruits
come from the Inland Empire.
The groves and packing houses
have relied on immigrant workers
and been a source of jobs for them.
- When I grew up in Mexico, we barely could afford shoes.
My dad picked the family up, we traveled to California.
I've been in the citrus business for 45 years.
I started when I was 15 years old.
Now I am the manager at Redlands Foothill Groves
and probably the biggest grower.
The people that work here, 99% are immigrant people.
They do go back to Mexico, like, mainly for Christmas.
But we have employees that have been with us
over 30 years, and that's really hard to find.
I've seen a big change in the last two, three years.
We used to have people waiting in line
to go and pick in the field.
Right now if I need two people by tomorrow,
I'll be lucky to get one if I do.
The lack of labor is forcing us a lot
to look for automatic machines.
I know of one packing house,
they run almost with no people now--
all automatic.
- A huge amount of the stuff we all buy
is made in Asia, shipped through LA,
then brought to the Inland Empire
for distribution to the rest of the country.
Land here is flat and cheap-- perfect for warehouses.
For San Bernardino to get back on its feet,
new jobs for warehouse workers,
delivery people, and truckers are critical.
But those jobs are also
the ones most at risk for being automated.
- We're expecting that the future of automation
will attack specifically those jobs.
Think about self-driving trucks...
the levels of automation in the warehouses,
office, sales jobs, restaurants--
income inequality will worsen.
So, if we don't manage to get an area like San Bernardino
back on its feet, it will be really troublesome,
because then all the other areas
will also get into economic hardship.
And just think about what will happen
if places like Minnesota or Michigan in the winter
see large levels of unemployment
and possibly forced homelessness
for economic reasons.
They're not going to stay in Michigan in January.
They will come south into the sun.
- We've seen homelessness
everywhere we've been in the U.S.
It's especially bad in California.
Volunteers in San Bernardino take part in an annual census
to count people experiencing homelessness.
It's a national program called in the Point-in-Time Count.
- Good morning. all: Good morning.
Everybody nice and warm? Ready to hit the streets here?
I cannot thank you enough for what you're doing
so we can help those people that are out there.
Without you counting them,
showing us where they are, who they are,
we can't get the resources to them to help them.
- Hello. Good morning.
- Good morning, sir. - Good morning, sir.
- Be extremely careful. You're waking somebody up.
Maybe you're walking into a camp.
Just like somebody walking into your living room,
that's their little, sacred area.
- Would you mind taking a survey with us?
- Sure.
- We have a film crew from HBO here.
Would you mind getting filmed? - No.
And how old are you?
- 63. - Okay.
Did you sleep outdoors last night?
- Of course.
I've been homeless 25 years. - Wow.
- I can't be indoors. I don't know how to be indoors.
- Do you have any income?
- Retirement. - Disability? Oh, retirement?
How much per month would you say?
- 300.
- I'm 60 years old. August 21, 1958.
- Oh, okay. Hispanic or Latina?
- Azteca Mexicana, Cherokee Indian,
San Bernardino.
- Native American. Okay.
Do you have a spouse or partner who is also homeless
and living with you?
- No. - No?
- I'm by myself. - Mm.
Have you tested positive for HIV?
- No.
- Are you experiencing homelessness
because you're fleeing domestic violence?
- No. My mother died.
- A new application that we're using
is the ArcGIS 123 created by Esri.
We are able to send live data right there and then.
- And that data is broadcast up to a cloud,
aggregated so we can see patterns
and relationships of homelessness on a map
and on a dashboard.
These inform government leaders about the severity
of what's going on in the field.
And the dots on maps can be "inquiried."
- Social services receive that information right away
so they are able to able to reach out to these clients.
- So we had someone that was homeless for 40 years
that we helped.
And it took them a long time,
but they're living in an apartment.
- It takes a while, yeah.
But, you know, like, I can't afford no place.
- No, but we have affordable housing.
Is that something that you would be open to?
- At $300 a month? - It's only 30% of your income.
- Thank you very much for your time.
- Thank you. Thank you for your time.
- Here is a little goodie bag for you.
- Thank you, ladies. Thank you. - Thank you for your time.
- We're gonna leave this bag with you, okay?
Well, my name's Maria. - Okay.
Just a homeless guy.
- Through American history,
the idea of getting off the farm,
getting out of the little village,
going to the big city, testing yourself,
has been one of the big themes.
There's a reason why everybody has heard about New York.
If you can make it there,
you can make it anywhere, et cetera.
It's slipped from public awareness
how many people in America
feel as if they could be performing anyplace,
but they place they really want to perform
is either where they started out
or some other place they feel is their responsibility.
And they want to be there not just because
it has great restaurants or great street life,
but because they can help create
great street life there.
In this town of Redlands, where I started out,
a lot of the virtues of the way it is now
is because people who could've been anyplace
made that decision.
- It's not a passive activity to be a part of a community.
One of the things about Redlands I fell in love with
is how people engage.
- Clint Brown works at Esri,
which makes the app used in the homeless count.
Esri is a computer mapping company
that adds a billion dollars a year to the local economy.
- Why is this company here and not in Seattle
or San Francisco or Boston
or Brooklyn?
- Oh, simple answer.
We came from Redlands.
We find it's a much better place to live--
smaller towns.
much more affordable for our employees,
can actually afford a home,
a much richer culture, and a pace of life which is human.
- When the French writer Tocqueville toured America
200 years ago, what amazed him most
was that everyone seemed to be involved in everything.
I'm struck by that same thing in my town of Redlands.
I took it for granted when I was growing up.
I did all these sorts of things.
I had jobs as a newspaper boy,
newspaper sports editor, orange picker, mailman.
- I'm from a Czech immigrant family.
I've always had a dream
about going out to see the rest of the world.
It's not an unusual dream
for people who grow up in the Midwest
like I did in Vermillion, Ohio.
First, you say Midwest is a great place to grow up.
On the other hand, you really also knew
that you needed to get out and see the world.
First visit to California to see Jim's family,
which was intimidating,
Redlands itself was everything
that I imagined California would be and then some.
- It's hard to explain what Circus is in this community.
I mean, you come to Redlands,
and Redlands is known as a circus town.
You're driving around, and on the side of the road,
there's a kid riding a unicycle.
Circus is really important to this community,
because first of all, it's a second family.
You get in here, you meet all these different people.
- So how many kids have you got in the program?
- Right now we are pushing 500.
Um...
- Yes.
- I need everybody. Let's do it again!
- We like to use Circus as social work.
We've gotten more people in, more ages, more families.
We're truly a community circus.
We're here to support each other
and literally lift each other up.
- When I was a kid in the '60s,
Riverside, the city just down the road from Redlands,
wasn't the happening place it is today.
Riverside was just trying to hold on as a citrus town
and was fading as a resort town.
- We've made an emphasis on investing in downtown.
The Mission Inn, the Fox Theater.
There was public money
that was put into that.
I think it was close
to $100 million.
Now seeing apartments, restaurants,
retail coming back to downtown.
- Riverside is making itself
into a place people want to live.
A few miles away,
San Bernardino is trying to do the same thing.
You have to start with young people.
They need to feel their hometown
will give them a chance.
- When you typically think of a high-poverty community,
you sometimes don't think of high levels of success.
Bridging college and career is what this school is known for.
- Kayley's proposing
obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.
- They have, like, unwanted thoughts that cause stress...
- Cajon High School's graduation rates
were among the lowest in the state.
Now they're over 90%.
They have over 50 career pathways,
like advanced robotics and animatronics.
- And we know that the medical field is always in need,
so we have a very strong medical assistance program.
- Ready? Go.
One, two, three, four...
- The students in dark-blue scrubs
love to teach what they know.
They're proud of the skills that they've learned.
- We're gonna start here.
- They can definitely start working
right out of high school if they choose to.
A lot of them who have gone into the military,
now registered nurses.
A lot of them will go to college.
And I know as soon as they go on their internships,
all the lights are gonna go on,
and they're gonna really find
that perfect position for them,
what they really want to do.
- Tonight the prosecution is confident
that we will prove beyond a reasonable doubt
that the defendant is guilty, Your Honor.
- Over 40 years ago,
San Bernardino was named an All-America City.
- I will be portraying Sam Colostian.
- Publish...
- They were recognized for innovation
and their strong sense of community.
- I'll be representing the people
of the state of California.
- Cajon High School gives you hope
for San Bernardino's future.
- Most people's lives follow the same basic arc.
You're born, you grow up, grow old,
and, finally, you die.
Some towns can have a similar fate.
A town left behind by economic change
may just die off.
But sometimes a town whose life was in the past
becomes reborn.
My view of American history
is the country's always been in trouble,
and the story of any given moment in American history
is how the in-trouble quotient is balancing out
with the responding- to-trouble-quotient.
I'm always asking people,
"In the long graph of this city's history,
"of your history, where are we?
Is it an upslope or a downslope?"
- I think we look at things really differently.
Jim is the historian.
I'm listening on the sidewalk
of what's going on at this moment.
I find that the best parts of getting a sense of the town
are in the public spaces.
The kind of small bits,
how people relate to each other,
to me, are really important.
- Five years ago, a little more than that,
I put an item on "The Atlantic" site,
saying, "Tell us the story of your town
and why we should go there."
And the qualifications were,
first, that it should be a small-er place,
in the sense that the media only went there
when there was a problem.
You know, when there was a shooting,
when there was a public-health problem.
But there wasn't the sort of three-dimensional portrayal
of it as a real place.
When we showed up in these towns
over the last five years,
they had no idea we were coming.
They weren't putting on
some big chamber of commerce presentation.
We just showed up and said,
"We'd like to know the story of your town."
And so we were catching people sort of unawares.
- Another thing about getting a sense of the town--
this comes from our living in Japan, actually.
There are two words in Japanese, tatemae and honne.
And tatemae is when
people say what they think that you want to hear
in a very nice way.
And then there's the honne, which is what they really mean.
Going into any place that you don't understand,
the tatemae comes first,
but then people can't help themselves.
You finally get what the honne is after a while.
- Every 99 minutes, a satellite scans the Earth...
gathering imagery and data about the planet.
Those pictures are beamed down to EROS,
a government facility outside of Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
EROS holds the world's largest collection
of images of the Earth's surface.
- Two miles south,
Raven Industries is also gathering data from above.
Raven makes balloons for everything
from the military to Macy's parade.
- Three, two, one, release.
- You wouldn't think in a farming community,
they would have high technology and aerospace.
It's a really key aspect
of why it's great to live here.
Whenever we bring people to Sioux Falls,
we bring 'em downtown, and they really are surprised
to see that here in a small town in South Dakota
that there's really so much going on.
There's a lot of life, a lot of activities.
- It's got the best of both worlds.
Small enough you don't have traffic,
you don't have a commute to worry about.
It's big enough that got a symphony,
we got plays coming through.
- There are opportunities for jobs.
You got great bars and restaurants.
Since six years ago, we went from one brewery--
we're now gonna have 14 by the end of the year.
- People want to be downtown.
They want to live down here, they want to shop down here.
And it wasn't that way even ten years ago.
- In the 1980s, Sioux Falls had a wave of growth
when South Dakota changed its laws on credit cards.
Suddenly, by moving their headquarters to South Dakota,
banks could charge customers much higher interest rates,
which meant big profits
from people who don't pay off their credit card each month.
Companies like Citibank and Wells Fargo moved here,
creating thousands of jobs.
In Sioux Falls, right by the iconic falls,
is the meatpacking plant,
where around 18,000 hogs a day are slaughtered.
When the pandemic hit, this was a COVID hotspot.
The jobs are physically demanding
and are often done by immigrants
with limited English.
- Sioux Falls has long relied on refugees
and immigrants as workers.
Lutheran Social Services
is the agency that helps settle them.
- We're kind of the one-stop shop
for all services for refugees in South Dakota.
We provide welcome on arrival,
but we also do housing and job placement
and English language classes and citizenship.
- Technology--
that was a new word last week maybe.
Technology.
- Tablet. - Tablet.
- Uh-huh. - Cell phone.
- Okay, tablet, cell phone, smartphone.
What else?
- Keyboard. - Keyboard.
- The majority of our full-time staff,
they're former refugees themselves.
- I'm a medical specialist.
I help take clients
to their doctors' appointment
upon their arrival.
- I came as a refugee.
Lived here five years and then became a citizen.
My "childrens" are citizen.
I'm very happy to live in Sioux Falls
because this is a very nice place to raise family.
- As you drive around,
you'll see great diversity in our small businesses.
People that move in to this community
that start barbershops or hair salons,
grocery stores, restaurants.
- I'm a refugee, I'm a Black,
I'm originally from Somalia, and I'm also Muslim,
so which means I'm a combination of four elements.
I'm not a threat.
- My gosh, think of what they've overcome,
especially refugees, to get here.
I don't know what we would be
if we didn't have refugees and immigrants in our country.
- I wouldn't be here, for one.
- 99% of the people living in America
are either immigrants or refugees.
The reason why America is a great country now--
it's because of people like me and you and everyone.
- When I say Sioux Falls, South Dakota,
people think of Mount Rushmore.
We are on the map because of public art,
because somebody carved these four faces
into the side of a mountain.
- Most of my art comes from just observation of nature
and the "Arc of Dreams" is a good example of that.
In terms of the narrative of the "Arc of Dreams,"
the idea is that we have dreams
that originate somewhere in our consciousness
and we can take 'em a certain distance, but at some point,
we have to trust ourselves and the future.
The synapse between the two arcs
represents that leap of faith.
- Public art--it's a significant component here
in terms of the quality of life,
why people stay and don't move away.
And if they do move away at a young age,
they almost always come back
because of the quality of life.
- Good evening. I'm Angela Kennecke.
Tonight...
- Angela Kennecke is a well-known reporter
in our market.
Her daughter died from a fentanyl overdose
a little over a year and a half ago now.
And her daughter was actually our family's nanny
for a couple years, and she was a very special gal to us.
And that really hit us hard when that happened.
- Nobody thinks this is going to happen to them.
I knew there was a problem with my daughter.
I didn't know she was using heroin.
She didn't want me to know what she was doing
because she was ashamed of it.
Emily was just a brilliant kid.
She was a gifted artist.
- By sharing our story, you know,
we can help some people out.
- If fentanyl hadn't been in my daughter's heroin,
she would still be alive.
- Angela, using her platform as a reporter,
has really done a good job
of trying to create an awareness in our community
of what the opioid challenges
that we face in Sioux Falls are.
I think we're very good at hiding those things
and not talking about the problems.
- We need to replace judgment with compassion,
and we need to replace punishment with treatment.
- Angela's sharing what she went through
with her daughter,
talking about the opioid epidemic
in the context of an illness.
I think it's had a tremendous impact far beyond Sioux Falls,
probably far beyond South Dakota.
- South Dakota's biggest industry
has always been agriculture...
but it's done by fewer and fewer farmers.
So the little towns that support farm families
often wither.
- My dad has a number of little quips.
One of his sayings is,
"Farming is a great way of life
as long as you don't have to make a living at it."
I've wanted to farm my whole life.
That's all I ever wanted to do.
My dad told me and had the foresight to know
that our farm is fairly close to Sioux Falls
and may or may not be here in the future.
It will likely be developed at some point in time.
He said I had to get a real job.
- Karl Oehlke's real job when he's not farming
is as a physician's assistant at a Avera Health.
Knowing the stress farmers are constantly under,
whether from flooded fields or low commodity prices,
Karl helped create the Farmer's Stress Hotline.
- It's 24 hours a day. It's confidential.
Talking to me on the phone,
I can empathize with them and explain to them,
"Yeah, I know exactly what you're going through."
The biggest thing we're dealing with right now--
fear, anxiety.
"I'm working extremely hard,
"yet I have nothing to show for it.
How can I keep my kids in shoes?"
Trying to prevent suicide,
is, of course, our biggest concern.
Prototypical farmer was always the stereotype of a very stoic,
hardened person, you know?
And to let their guard down
is not something that they're used to doing.
I've heard so many farmers say to me
even by the end of the interview
and maybe I haven't even offered them a medication,
they just felt better talking.
It's just like this sense of calm comes over them.
- Our history is shaped by migration and conflict.
In the 19th century, European immigrants moved west
into the homelands of the Dakota Sioux
in the central U.S. and Canada.
After a series of broken treaties,
wars, and public hangings,
the Dakota were driven out by the U.S. government
and scattered to small reservations.
The Flandreau Santee Sioux
settled on land near Sioux Falls.
- Where we're located here in Flandreau,
we were two to three hours
from all other Dakota communities,
so we all stay in touch.
- Anywhere we go, we're Dakota.
Don't matter if we're in DC or we're in China
or we're here in the homelands.
We'll be Dakota.
- How many here? 300 and some here on rez?
- Yeah. Close to it, yeah.
- And total, 500, 600? - About 600, 700.
- There was a thing called Indian Court of Offenses
back in the day.
We weren't even allowed to gather like this.
"Kill the Indian, save the man."
The boarding-school era.
Started cutting our hair, putting us in little suits,
putting us in boarding schools.
To speak to culture, the language,
you were punished.
And then the freedom of religion was, like, in 1978.
That's not that long ago.
So his grandpa, my dad,
they were both fluent speakers, but...
sometimes it was hard for them to speak
just because of that era.
- My older relatives, grandparents and whatnot,
they were forced off the reservation to find employment,
to make better lives, if you will,
in the eyes of the United States government.
- Growing up in Minneapolis,
we just knew we were Indian.
We knew that we went to the little Indian programs,
and that was about it.
I had no idea of the history that I was born in
from the land.
- The Royal River Casino opened in 1990.
The tribe runs it.
At that time, we were the only show in town.
- Awesome. - All right.
- The casino itself is a huge economic engine,
not only for Flandreau, but the surrounding areas.
The impact, it multiplies everywhere else.
- Brought a lot of the economy back,
and it brought a lot of people back, too.
- Come on, come on.
- And it provides for social programs,
everything that the tribe needs--
government services.
You can say it helped springboard us
into the revitalization of the language program.
- How many people speak Dakota?
- Well, I can speak for just this community.
Maybe three.
The tribe here made the effort
to push for a language-immersion class.
Who are we if we don't have our language?
- Powwows--it's not just for one tribe.
It's many tribes.
We may not all speak the same language,
but we all come together.
I'm Santee Dakota. Ho-Chunk and Meskwaki.
As Native Americans,
I think it's real important to have that cultural identity
for dancing and beadwork and crafts and leatherwork.
I tell my kids, I said, "You guys have to learn this,
because when I'm gone, there's not gonna be anybody."
A lot of Natives have never been exposed to culture,
you know, like this.
And if we can get more people
to be courageous and get out there
in the center and dance with us...
Just listen to the music,
and you'll get the rhythm and you'll go.
- Last night at the Wacipi, there's a little girl,
and she looked at me, and she said...
That was saying hello.
And then all the other little girls around them
were saying... . "Hello, hello."
It gets emotional to just hear them speak their language.
- It's saving our life. It's saving our kids.
It's giving a chance, a future...
for us to continue.
- The dark chapters in American history
are still unfolding in life today.
In our travels, we've been struck by how differently
different communities approach their past...
And which parts of it they embrace and which they avoid.
Columbus, Mississippi, is on the geological Black Belt,
a band of fertile soil dating back millions of years.
The soil made it a good place for plantations.
In Columbus, antebellum mansions are reminders
of life during the Confederacy.
The markers in Friendship Cemetery are, too.
After slavery ended,
Jim Crow laws and civil rights abuses
into the 20th century and beyond
are things to be reckoned with across the country.
Sandfield is Columbus' historic Black cemetery.
- Today we are so elated to stand here and tell you
that we have a marker for Sandfield Cemetery.
Established before the Civil War,
among people buried here are Robert Gleed,
a former slave who served in the state senate.
Reflect back, lest we forget our history and our heritage.
all:
- We're here today because on the 8th of May in 1865,
Union troops arrived in Columbus.
That is effectively when enslavement ended.
- Chuck Yarborough teaches
at the Mississippi School for Mathematics & Science.
It's a public high school, and every year
they explore the town's history at the public library.
- He says in the diary,
Dr. Wilson received a threatening letter
to the school today.
- "If you don't leave, we will hang you."
- We gonna get the rope
and then we're gonna hang you with the rope.
- Yeah. - Like...
- There's some specificity to that
that's even more ominous feeling, right? Okay.
- So the first thing that you'll notice that--
- In the archives,
students learn about life in Columbus 150 years ago.
- But even right here,
you can find "one Negro woman named Milly."
- Finding the Milly that was associated
with this court case is a whole nother thing.
- Then they write scripts to perform in the cemetery
on Emancipation Day.
- Good afternoon, good people of Columbus,
although my experience ought to have taught me
that the people of Columbus aren't always so good.
- The next document we're going to look at--
page one and two of the newspapers.
It says, "Columbus, Mississippi,
November 3, 1875."
- "Under these instructions,
"a number of Negroes were arrested
"and turned over to the proper police officers.
"I regret to state that the following Negroes
were shot and killed."
- And as we move through downtown,
a mob led by Jacob Hunter Sharp
attacked us.
They shot into our group,
killing four innocent Black men and wounding three others.
- Makes them way more brave in my eyes
because, like, they're actively, like,
threatening to kill them
and telling them how they're gonna do it.
- The ex-Confederates didn't stop with the rumor, though.
We received a letter threatening death
if we continued to educate the freed people.
- I think this actually shows
that the people who threatened them
understood the importance of education
and how it could be problematic
if people knew how to read and how to write.
Taking away the education
keeps the community in a submissive position,
and they would do that by any means necessary.
- I feel like my story
is just the ultimate American success story.
I am the son of a man and a woman who were enslaved.
But my father bought his freedom before the Civil War.
- Some of you mistakenly believe
that only men helped establish this community,
but let me let y'all in on a little secret.
Behind every strong man,
there is an equally if not stronger woman.
- I'm Mississippi State Senator Robert Gleed,
a notable business owner and political leader
in Columbus and Lowndes County.
Now, I used to tell my children,
"We all stand on the shoulders of someone who came before us."
We had our setbacks as a country
and as a people in our day,
but it's clear that progress has been made.
And I like to think that you folks can reach higher
even when times are tough,
'cause those many years ago,
I offered my shoulders for you to stand on,
and I hope you'll do the same for those that follow you.
- When I moved here from New York,
I experienced a little racism.
You know, I was managing this hotel,
and some guests did not understand
that I was the manager, that it wasn't anyone above me.
But as the town began to grow
and I began to meet more people,
there's more of an acceptance of African American people
getting in leadership position,
management position.
It takes some getting used to, and it's not all of the South.
The younger generation is very accepting of diversity.
They are making that change.
The past is the past,
and Mississippi is striving for change.
- Factories around Columbus used to make things
like blue jeans, hot dogs, pork chops, and toilet seats.
Those industries disappeared, leaving 20% unemployment
in the poorest state in the country.
Getting out of that kind of depression
doesn't just happen.
It takes community action.
The region around Columbus
started a development agency called LINK
that's brought in lots of high-tech manufacturers.
- If it can be done here, it can be done anywhere.
- Convincing companies to move here
is the job of Joe Max Higgins and Brenda Latham.
- And we've built a new industrial park
and are in the process
of doing a new industrial park in Starkville.
- We found a niche in advanced manufacturing.
We acquire property. We install infrastructure.
We locate companies.
And if it all works out well,
we get that company in, and we get 'em going and running.
Then we go and we do another one and another one.
But first thing we got to do a lot of times
is just put aside issues or concerns or beliefs
that may not be true.
You know, people tell us we're last in everything good.
- Well, I mean, that's the rap we have,
whether it's true or not-- we're last in everything good.
- Mississippi was the last state to still have
the Confederate stars and bars on its state flag.
- Columbus has a foot in antebellum
and a foot in the future.
Some days they almost feel confused.
And when I got here, I said,
"Before I take this job, answer a question for me.
"Are you a community
that values your past more than your future?"
They said, "Oh, no."
Now, look, I understand heritage,
and I understand culture,
but if you may offend somebody that might want to invest here
and create jobs here, why would you do that?
- It's a real shock when traditional jobs disappear...
- The future will be working alongside the robots.
- And the new ones call for skills
that local people don't have.
As we've seen around the country,
community colleges are incredibly important
in preparing students for new jobs
and, in the bigger picture, fighting inequality.
This is the Communiversity near Columbus, Mississippi.
- This is highly technical.
It is not the old shop.
The old vocational school was sometimes
a penalty a person paid.
- Press at every station.
- We are second chances
for people to get that high-school equivalency,
to get a job.
Many individuals in our community
are one flat tire away from losing their job
or not finishing their education.
We help bring partners to removing those barriers.
We lift up the community as a whole.
- That's the best description of community college
and what you do that I've heard anywhere.
- If it can happen here
in the poorest of all states,
then surely the positive things
are replicable elsewhere.
- You go into this business
because you love this business,
because it is the most interesting way
you can possibly spend your life.
An unexpected truth about most people who are reporters,
including me,
almost all professional reporters
are psychologically introverts and shy.
And so you are looking for a structural excuse
to go out in the world, meet people,
and ask them about things.
If I'm just on the street, I'm not gonna talk to anybody.
But if I'm on the street as a reporter,
I'm gonna talk to everybody.
I have a license to say, "Tell me your story.
Tell me your hopes. Tell me what I don't know."
There's this secret power that being a journalist gives
to almost everybody I know in this business.
- At the far eastern tip of the United States
is the tiny town of Eastport, Maine.
- When we very first came here in 2013, I did an article.
Its headline was, "The Little Town That Might."
The conclusion was, "Will Eastport make it?
I don't know."
Eastport has the deepest port on the East Coast.
On the other hand, it's so far away.
- There are just not many people--
1,300 people
in a town that used to have about 10,000
in its heyday of sardine fishing.
The town has had so many surprising disasters
come their way.
Everything on Main Street burned down in 1887
or just before, and they had to rebuild
the entire main street of the town,
which they have in a beautiful fashion.
- That was a sardine place.
That was the last one in this area, wasn't it, Dickie?
- It was '83 I started working there.
And I got laid off 'cause there was no fish,
so I went blueberry raking.
Happiest phone call I ever got. Said, "We got fish."
I said, "I'll be back."
Man, that clam digging. Nope.
- You have to love living here.
If you don't love living here,
you wouldn't put the work in that it requires.
People are doing one, two, three different things.
I'm the executive director of the Port Authority.
I'm also a reserve police officer here in town.
I'm the chairman of the county commissioners.
I coach soccer at a local high school.
And--oh, and my wife and I,
we flip real estate on the side in our spare time.
That's the commitment that you have to put in to be here.
It is a different type of person.
"Resourceful" is probably
the best word that I can come up with.
- I'd say there's kind of two Eastports.
Right now we're in the colored Eastport.
It's summertime, and there's a lot of people around.
There's things constantly happening.
And then there's sepia-toned Eastport in the wintertime,
where everything kind of calms down.
A lot of the colors go away,
but it's also a cleanse spiritually and for your mind.
I'm 17, I'm a senior at Shead High School,
and I also take online college classes
with the UMaine system.
And I'll going on to either go to Maine Maritime
for marine transportations and operations,
or I'll be headed off to a trade school.
I moved to Eastport seven, eight years ago
with my parents from the Jersey Shore.
I've kind of seen how city life is.
I much prefer this.
It's summertime right now. Primarily, I'm a lobsterman.
Spend most of my day in this fishing aspect of Eastport,
which is one life,
but then I'll go home, and I'll shower,
and I go out to the arts center to a gallery opening
or a gig or a classical concert.
With climate change and all,
I'm not really expecting to fish
for more than 15 years lobstering.
I think it's gonna move north.
I think we're gonna have more opportunities
for the oysters and mussels,
and I'd like to take my lobstering money and put that
into a sustainable aquaculture business,
employing a lot of local people,
but I think lobstering's gonna go away.
- In 2003, a group called The Women of the Commons
renovated a run-down building down the waterfront,
making a shop and gallery space for local artists.
- 2003, there were a lot of boarded-up buildings.
They were a new kind of energy for the downtown.
Okay, just checking. - Good, yep.
- Some of them are from here, some of them aren't.
Otherwise, things are good? - Yes.
I'm about to call for more copies of "The Lonely Loon."
- Now they've taken on an even bigger project--
turning an old sardine cannery into workspaces,
restaurants, and apartments.
- We'll hopefully get this done by the end of September.
- Uh-huh.
Hugh French grew up in Eastport.
Like people we've met all over the country,
he moved away, then came home to try to help his town.
He started the Tides Institute
with his wife, Kristin McKinlay.
- We're committed to this place.
That means collections, exhibitions,
fostering new work,
getting involved in the downtown heavily.
That's how you create change.
- One of our programs
is the StudioWorks Artist-in-Residence Program.
So this year we'll have 13 artists.
- My interaction with the tide
has been to wrap the pilings
of this old sardine factory.
I came up from Brooklyn,
and we get a month in this little town
and make work based on it.
Eastport, it's amazing.
People are cool and weird,
and I'm weird.
- The Passamaquoddy tribes near Eastport
celebrate their history every summer.
- We're proud Passamaquoddies of this time of year
and all the time.
- The Ancestral Paddle really symbolizes what we've done
for thousands of years
using the waterways to sustain ourselves.
- In its time, Eastport has found and lost
so many ways of sustaining itself.
It was once one of the busiest shipping ports
till shipping went elsewhere.
There were 13 sardine canneries
on the waterfront,
but that industry moved to Canada.
Traditional salmon fishing ended
when the wild fish were depleted.
Now there are salmon farms.
The town has invested millions in the cargo pier
so they can ship wood pulp from Maine forests.
- And we're one of the last places
on the East Coast of the U.S., if not the last place,
where the forest comes right to the sea.
We've done up to 400,000 tons in one year, just wood pulp.
- How does a town like this
keep coming up with new ways to create a future for itself?
It's not like Downeast Mainers are famous for their optimism.
There's a fine line between looking for the possibilities
and denying reality.
When we lived in China, we used to joke
about how all the headlines in the papers were
"Happiness Sweeps Nation as Joy Abounds" or something.
And so I think that you don't want to have
this kind of denying reality happy talk.
But sometimes you just have to try things,
realistic or not.
- Pregnant cows.
In 2010, we did get a phone call
from a company that was interested
in exporting pregnant dairy cattle.
Okay, they want to put a pregnant cow in a box
and ship it to parts all over the world.
My general manager said,
"We don't know anything about shipping pregnant cows."
I said, "Skip, neither does anybody else."
What started off as a little adventure of 450 cows
turned into approximately 50,000 head of cattle
that was exported through the port of Eastport.
But the area of Turkey these cows kind of went to
was affected mightily by the Syrian conflict
there on the border, and as a result,
right now that industry has dried up and stopped.
You know, geopolitical forces,
we think, just, you know, matter on TV.
But even in a small town, they can affect
how many pregnant dairy cattle we put in a box.
- Thanks to the Internet,
small towns have the same access to national news
as big cities...
but local news is a different story.
In many towns,
the local papers have gone out of business,
or they're taken over by investors
who cut local coverage.
Eastport's paper is "The Quoddy Tides."
- My brother Hugh is director of the Tides Institute.
We bookend the downtown,
with the Tides Institute on one end
and "The Quoddy Tides" on the other end.
"The Quoddy Tides" started in 1968 by my mother.
- Edward French is the editor.
He publishes it with his wife, Lora Whelan.
She's also a reporter.
- Papers like this around the country
are under all kinds of pressure.
Your paper is thick, and it is absolutely full of news
from 20 correspondents.
What's your secret?
- I don't know that we have a secret,
but I think it's important for newspapers not to keep cutting,
because if you keep cutting,
there's less and less reason for people to buy the paper.
- We try to focus
in a way that relates directly to local issues.
- So we've had long debates here
over an oil refinery or the tribal casinos.
And we present what's happened elsewhere.
Communities that don't have a local paper,
the cost for local government increases, for instance.
We try not to enter into the national debate too much.
It can, particularly in this polarized time,
just put people off.
- Playing the role of the newspaper in a small community
is always a delicate balance.
- I always feel, you know,
I'm okay as long as there's no more the half the population
that crosses over to the other side
when I walk down the street because they don't want
to talk to me.
- People will come up to you or give you a call and say,
"This is what I'm worried about.
"Is there any way that you can look into it
and write about it?"
That's a really beautiful feeling
to have someone trust you like that.
- Right, right. - Yeah.
- We try to provide a voice for the people
and the communities that might otherwise
might not have a voice
so that people in power have to address their concerns.
I think without community newspapers,
democracy will really suffer.
- We've now been to Eastport five times in six years.
Maybe asking if Eastport will make it
is the wrong question.
The town was established over 200 years ago...
and Native people were here
for thousands of years before that.
Countless generations have made a life here...
and countless more will.
- When you tell somebody you're from Eastport, Maine,
or any small town for that matter,
they just assume that you've never seen
the bright lights and the big city.
They'll look at you and say, "Well, this is a cell phone.
You ever seen one of those before?"
It's just that belief
that, somehow, by living out here,
we're not as metropolitan and as savvy
as to what's going on with the world.
I would argue perhaps we know it even a little better
because we take the time to focus on it,
and that makes us a whole lot more worldly
than people believe.
That's probably one stick jab, if you will,
from if you go to a big city
and somebody finds out you're from a small town.
They just assume that you haven't been paying attention.
- All of the travel and living in far-flung places
that we've done
has also changed our relationship in some way.
I mean, we're stuck together forever
because we have so many shared experiences,
a lot of them challenging, a lot of them glorious.
We have a shortcut for so many things we can say.
No one else would ever understand us.
- Or "grasscutter for dinner." - Grasscutter for dinner.
That was Africa. That was our honeymoon.
- It was a giant rat. - Yeah.
We knew it bonded us as a family
when we did a lot of this travel with our little kids.
We were a unit, and sink or swim,
we were in this together.
We had to figure it all out.
- Historically, geographically,
very difficult to get through here.
People that came over here,
they were okay with being isolated.
They had to be.
If you have a tougher kind of person...
There was a poet laureate, Louise McNeill.
She wrote a book called "Gauley Mountain."
The very last poem in it, it says the people here
"now possess the last dark current of the wilderness."
- Jeff, could you give me a level check?
- Hi, this is Jeff Daniels with the Ben Daniels Band.
Join us this week
in live performance on "Mountain Stage."
- West Virginia tends to make the national news
for a few, predictable things...
The collapse of coal mining
and for being one of the first places
hit hard by the opioid crisis.
There are growth problems, too.
Charleston has about half as many people as it did in 1960.
- We have a few rules when we go to a new city.
We never ask about national politics
because that conversation goes nowhere.
Airspeed is coming alive.
79 knots and full power. Up we go.
- We do look for things
that people are struggling with or achieving locally
that the national press doesn't usually notice.
- The "Mountain Stage"!
- The West Side of Charleston
looks like what you might expect
when you hear about the city's troubles...
But every town is full of things you don't expect.
- John and Tighe and Ellen Bullock came up to me,
and I thought they wanted me to paint
something on their building like an advertisement.
And they said, "No, no.
"We want you to paint something on the building
"that will change the community,
change community, change this whole place here."
These are Union troops from the 34th Ohio Regiment.
They were stationed right over here.
Painted some homeless people.
Her name was Froggy. She passed away.
And Jim pushed her around.
She was a Navy veteran.
Natalie Tennant, first female mountaineer.
Just various people came by.
Smitty would come by every day and say,
"You got to put me in with my dog.
You got to put me in there with my dog."
I said, "Where's your dog?"
He said, "Oh, my dog's been dead for ten years."
I said, "Oh, oh."
- I'm from a small coal town in West Virginia
that had just become dilapidated over the years,
and when I moved to Charleston and I saw this neighborhood,
I thought, "Why is nothing being done about it?"
Tighe Bullock and his sister Megan
have been renovating old buildings on the West Side.
- This was my first project.
It's the Bully Trap Barber Shop.
Elk City Records.
This is Charleston's newest distillery.
We're gonna do a quality West Virginia corn whiskey.
This is a future Books and Brews site.
- I was a coal miner.
I started off mining at the age of 18, actually.
Right before bankruptcy,
kind of exited out and opened a restaurant.
- He's so committed to the project
that he actually moved his family in across the street.
- Back in the studios
at 580 WCHS, the voice of Charleston, West Virginia.
And I have some special guests in the studio,
James and Deb Fallows.
And these are-- Good morning.
- Good morning, Mr. Mayor. - Good morning.
When we were here in 2014 at the election time,
there was a levy for the library.
People waving placards saying
"come vote yes on the library levy,"
and it passed.
- Yeah, but they have another one.
Might be hard.
You know, the argument against it,
ladies and gents, is the fact that,
"We don't need libraries. We have computers."
- Oh, Deb has the whole counter-argument.
- Oh, no, oh, no. Wrong answer.
- Well, then take it, Deb. Take it, take it.
- Really, the libraries are the heart and soul
of the communities.
It's more than books,
and it's more than computers and resources now.
Libraries have become a combination
of education centers, civic and social center.
There are classes on how to do your job résumé...
- Go ahead and write, "in eBay" there for me.
- How to be an eBay merchant.
Libraries have free sessions with a nurse,
or they'll bring in a lawyer.
If you go into any public library in the country,
people who don't have computers at home or Wi-Fi
will come for access,
which is, as we know these days, just critical.
I would really argue,
"Yes. Vote yes on that library levy."
- I'll vote for it if that helps any.
All right, James Fallows and Deb Fallows.
We'll break, and we'll back on 580 live.
- I came here when I was 22 on a grant.
I lived in Los Angeles at that time.
Beginning. From the beginning. From the very beginning.
I took to it immediately.
Loved the people, the country.
So beautiful.
You count it down and--
Started "Mountain Stage."
Public broadcasting,
West Virginia public broadcasting,
wants to do a live show on radio.
We had no expertise. We had no equipment.
We had no money.
Took us 26 shows till NPR invited us
to be a national radio show.
- Our host and co-founder,
he's also the artistic director of "Mountain Stage,"
Mr. Larry Groce.
- Like that! Beautiful.
Okay, here we go. Thank you guys for coming.
I hope that you enjoy the show.
- When you're out of here, you find out sooner than later
that people have a certain view of West Virginia.
People in the big picture.
They assume certain things about you,
and they assume you have limitations,
and they assume that you're gonna be a certain way
and your style is gonna be a certain way
because that's what people do there.
And, of course, that's not the way it is.
I mean, people here are like everywhere.
Their tastes are wide.
They like a lot of kinds of music.
- But I think it's gonna take a long time
to reverse some stereotypes that people have.
I mean, it's gonna be a long time
before people see West Virginia like they see Vermont,
even though we have a lot of similarities.
- When you tell people you're from Charleston,
what's the main thing you feel like they misunderstand?
- Well, usually when you say you're from Charleston,
they say, "I love your fabulous restaurants."
- Yes, okay.
- "I love the"...
- The coastline.
- I say, "Charleston, West Virginia,"
not South Carolina, and they say, "Oh."
- And what do they say then?
- Like, "Sorry." Like, feel sorry for us.
- In 2016, the "Gazette-Mail" exposed
how pharmaceutical companies were dumping massive amounts
of opioids on small towns in the state,
resulting in the highest overdose rates in the country.
Eric Eyre won a Pulitzer for his reporting.
- People went to legitimate doctors at first,
who actually thought they were doing the right thing
because of all the marketing by Purdue Pharma.
Then they would get hooked, and the doctor would cut them off,
and then they'd wind up at the pain clinic.
You had these small towns.
Kermit, that has 400 people,
had nearly 9 million hydrocodone pills
in two years.
And they were doing the same thing here.
I don't know if you've talked
to the public health commissioner--
- Not yet.
- His point was
we're not gonna solve this addiction crisis overnight,
but we can stop the deaths.
She did say that he's supposed to come to drug court today.
But his mom said that there's a bag packed under his bed.
- He knows he's going to placement.
- He's not listening to her.
He's not doing anything that she asks.
- To try to prevent addiction and crime before they happen,
Charleston, like many cities, has a drug court.
- I don't think we should. Let's keep him.
- Keep him. - Restrict where he goes.
- Yep. - Right.
- Judge Joanna Tabit and her team
at the juvenile drug court
divert teens who've abused alcohol or drugs
away from traditional court or jail.
As a treat for the kids for making progress,
everyone comes out to the ball game.
- I'm doing a lot better.
All my drug screens have been negative,
and I've been good and everything.
- She'd been, what, ten when I got you?
- Yeah. About six years.
Yeah.
If it wasn't for her,
I wouldn't be getting my head on straight and going good.
- And I'm the grandmother. I'm not the mother.
I got custody of her.
I think it's a good program.
But it's just a lot on me,
'cause where I work, strange hours.
I work 7:00 P to 7:00 A,
and, you know, sometimes I get mandated for 16.
And then you got to go to drug court or you have to go...
You know, it's a little time-consuming,
but it's working.
Do whatever works.
- In the '80s, as in so many cities,
an enormous urban mall came to Charleston
and crushed the local downtown stores.
But years later, the mall failed,
and the old downtown started to revive.
- We're here on Capitol Street.
This is kind of the central, developed area of Charleston.
We're gonna visit later on,
and it's actually where you're gonna be speaking tonight--
Taylor Books.
Ann Saville, she and her husband
really became the anchor tenant
for the further development of this area.
- We had a view of the country
that was different from the prevailing view in this way--
almost every place we went, people said,
"Yeah, the U.S. is really in horrible shape,
"but here in Starkville, Mississippi, you know,
things are really moving ahead."
Local-level engagement, innovation, experimentation
is actually doing much better.
In Charleston, they found some really creative ways
to rehab the West Side.
West Invest is a plan to get teachers and cops
to move into challenged neighborhoods,
where they could help buying and fixing up a house.
Two police officers came up with the idea.
- You got two guys. Now, here's our plan.
Let's get officers this grant.
They will be able to take this grant,
buy a home in what we call neighborhoods of challenge
which includes crime, dilapidated buildings,
lack of neighborhood norms.
- You know, I noticed that yeah,
a lot of us worked here,
but a lot of us didn't live here.
It's affected how we policed.
I just really wanted officers to move back into the city,
get that baseline of how Charleston really is.
- You just have a real buy-in
when you live there with the people and all.
And they become more than just neighbors.
They become family.
- And, Reverend Ealy,
I believe this has been divinely inspired.
We started a construction company
solely to employ felons.
So, other than the licensed contractors
who have agreed to serve as mentors for these guys,
if you don't have a felony, we don't want to talk to you.
And they'll be paid the same wage
as we would pay anybody in the free world.
We have banks willing to come in
and coach these folks financially.
Now we're improving their credit scores
before they ever leave prison.
- I'm going home in five months.
Can't wait for that.
And this here, it definitely does get you used
to being not stuck back sitting with a bunch of inmates.
- What we're finding is good, honest, hardworking people
who just have hit brick wall after brick wall
in trying to get started again.
- A lot of people tried to get me
not to put my restaurant over here,
and I'm like, "Why?"
I said, "If you do it right, everybody come."
We have town hall meetings in here.
Everybody that's running for something
come, want to do something in here.
- Adrian Wright played in the NFL with Tampa Bay.
He moved back to Charleston to take care of his mom
and opened a barbecue place.
- Here it is seven years later.
I'm the number-one barbecue.
Getting voted to be on Food Network.
My daughter and my wife
basically run the day-to-day operations now.
This definitely make me feel good
that my kids came to live with me.
I'm glad I came back home
to experience this and to help build Charleston up.
- We were moving up from California to the Northwest...
And heard Bend was a gorgeous town...
in the High Desert,
which always has this really evocative sense to it,
the High Desert.
- Bend, Oregon, is the culmination of this journey
because it's a town that found its way back from failure.
- Bend was a pretty depressed place.
Talking about the '80s
right after the logging boom had sort of ended,
it was just sort of a tough time.
- Bend was very much a blue-collar town.
It has become a four-season tourist destination.
- People had heard of it being a vibrant community.
Next thing you know, we're gonna move here.
- The people who've come in the last ten years
don't understand what it was like 30 years ago.
This was a small, depressed timber town
that had to reach bottom.
But we were committed.
- I was an actress in LA, and it was great.
But we wanted to raise our family up here,
so I am actually gonna go back to school
and get my master's and be a school counselor.
- My company's based in Austin, but I can do most my job here,
you know, through video conference or whatnot.
- When I was in LA and sitting in traffic on the 405
and I had to drop everything to go for this audition
and, like, missing my kids' play,
I'm like, "What the--am I doing?"
You know?
And, like, I probably won't get the job.
I didn't get the job. And I'm like, "This is insane."
I want to just be present.
- This is one of the best places
to bike and run and swim.
Because of that, there's high demand to live here.
My wife was a professional distance runner.
I was a professional triathlete.
We started a company making food products for ourselves.
Bend is a place where people move because they want to.
It means that you will even work in a job
that you're maybe less fulfilled in
because you can fulfill yourself
in the other aspects of your life,
primarily in recreation.
There's a general understanding
in the business community
that if it's a fresh-powder day, your employees
probably aren't going to be in until 11:00 or 12:00.
And we support that.
- Yeah!
- It's just a little bit different priority system,
value system, I think.
- You got that!
- That's part of why we live here.
- Yee-haw!
- Bend has over 20 brewpubs
and is the home of Deschutes beer.
After first-hand research all over the country,
we've determined that the number of breweries in a town
is a great indicator of how it's doing overall.
- I was voted most likely to succeed in high school,
and that's still-- that still is gonna happen.
Here we go.
- Work it, work it. - Work it, work it.
In Bend, freelance can be really ups and downs.
My dad moved to Bend in 1962.
And he worked for Brooks-Scanlon, the sawmill.
- And so the Bend of the 1960s when you came here,
what was it like? - It was just a mill town.
And the Brooks-Scanlon Lumber Company was a huge operation.
- Like West Virginia,
Oregon's economy always depended on one thing.
In West Virginia, it was coal.
In Oregon, it was trees.
But in the 1980s, the timber industry crashed,
and sawmills closed.
Bend suddenly had the highest unemployment in the country.
- It was pretty staggering.
We had a lot of mill workers
that had a lot of skills and nowhere to go.
It was really hard on most people.
- Downtown Bend was kind of boarded up.
- There was a saying in Bend, you know.
"The last one to leave downtown,
turn out the lights."
- Bend was pretty empty when I was a kid.
I think that Bend was really kind of grasping
for what was gonna be next.
My friends, whose parents were in other industries,
there was hope.
More tourism was starting to happen.
Bend has always had Mount Bachelor to rely on,
and people were still coming to ski.
- We began to realize a lot of people were moving here
who had come here on vacation.
They may have come to ski.
But then they said, "You know, this is a pretty nice town."
- Mike Hollern was also at Brooks-Scanlon.
He saw that the land where they once grew timber
could be used to build communities.
They created a series of planned neighborhoods
designed to encourage a social life,
with front porches and back alleys.
Stores and schools are close to houses.
- The reason that people like living on the Westside of Bend
is that you can walk everywhere you want to go.
That's not always available
in the newer, suburban model of development.
- As the mills were shutting down,
a plan to turn them into a retail district
was led by Bill Smith.
- When the sawmill closed, they had 30 people employed.
Now there's 4,000 people employed in the area.
- Bend has become this haven for remote workers
that work for companies outside of Oregon.
I tell entrepreneurs,
"You can build your business anywhere today."
Technology allows that.
Capital and your customers
don't care where you're located.
- Deschutes County has about 6,000 people a year
moving into the county.
So many new people are moving in.
A lot of times, this is
the first place people will go
because they don't know
anybody else in the community
and they need to start making some social connections.
Last night, we had a program out at a brewery in here town
with author Rich Benjamin.
- I've written a book called "Searching for Whitopia."
How do I define a whitopia?
That it is at least 85% white,
the majority of that growth has been from white residents.
- Bend has more than 90% white people.
Why is that happening?
- About white-on-white gentrification.
- Last night was a really great conversation
for how we can embrace diversity.
How do we make this a welcoming place
for people that are moving into Deschutes County?
- If I could change anything in Bend, it would be diversity.
- Tom Bedell and his stepson, RA Beattie,
make custom guitars in Bend.
What would the naysayers say is wrong with Bend?
- It's too big.
- Yeah, if they got here first,
they would now say it's too big.
I wouldn't say that.
So there's always pressure, you know?
Like, now that I live here, Californians, stay home.
- Right?
- Yeah. - But that's not fair.
- It's really hard to complain
about the people that are making your economy work.
- Growth is fascinating because communities think
that the secret to their...
prosperity is growth.
And I believe
that our whole culture is gonna go through a change
to where growth isn't "the ideal thing."
If climate change comes from growth, right?
Expanding economies isn't necessarily
adding to the quality of life of humans on this planet.
- The real question is, how do you grow in a fashion
that doesn't create continued reliance upon the automobile?
I have so many friends now
that are looking to either move out of town
because they can no longer afford to live here
or are forced to commute 30 minutes a day.
And so that sort of corrodes
a community, you know, cohesiveness
because it no longer allows people
to live in the communities where they work.
- Who determines a town's relationship to nature?
There are still places
where you can imagine a world without people.
When Europeans arrived, they carved out farms and ranches.
Small towns were places to buy and sell goods.
But as the country industrialized,
the landscape turned into something unrecognizable...
Or these days, all too recognizable
because the same strip malls,
box stores, and chain restaurants are everywhere.
And when nature is erased, how can you ever get it back?
It's a tense question in Bend.
- My name's Sky Sharp, and what we do here
is we raise beef in a good way,
and we sell it farm to table.
I chose this life a long time ago
because it was just where I felt right, you know?
My whole adult life, I've been a cowboy.
Like, bunched cows and rode horses.
I just ended up really liking cows
more than I liked people.
My horses and my dogs, we try to work as a unit.
In the five years that we've been here,
it's growing so fast
as far as people moving from California and wherever.
Lots of farms and ranches
getting turned into subdivisions.
Doesn't feel like communities see food producers
as necessity.
It's hard.
I met those cows when they're born.
You know, I witnessed their first steps.
And I also take away their last breath, you know?
So it's emotionally tough.
I love watching the subtleties of things
that always reminds me as a human being
that I'm part of something much bigger.
My whole life, I've felt like I had a purpose,
and that purpose was to be a shepherd
and a steward to nature.
That's what we try to do here.
- We started this project
in the wake of a global financial crisis.
And as we finish,
the world is dealing with upheavals
on a historic scale.
- The pandemic has transformed just about everything.
And inequalities in race and class
are now in everyone's sight.
- It's easy to forget
that our history is full of convulsive moments.
Every town has had its heartbreaks and setbacks.
And these days, every town is dealing with new ones.
- On this journey, we've seen
how towns have pulled themselves up in the past.
We can learn from how they did it.
Recovery takes working together.
It's harder in polarized times,
but towns do it by focusing on local issues
that are outside the divisions of national politics.
- Each town has individuals
who feel a responsibility to their community.
- We tried a lot of different things with you.
Nobody gave up on you,
so we don't want you giving up on yourself.
- Democracy has always depended on leadership.
- The woman chief is powerful. The women ruled.
I don't know how it shifted to the men.
I hope these girls look at me and say,
"I could be that one of these days."
- Community colleges help people start
and restart their lives.
- We take everyone. We're open to everyone.
Everyone has an opportunity here.
- Local newspapers and media play a crucial role.
National news isn't gonna tell you what matters in your town.
- Voters need journalists at their city council meetings
and their school board meetings.
This community stepped up to say,
"We want you to stay here and keep doing journalism."
- Public art helps us understand
where we've been and where we're going,
especially when people disagree on those things.
- If you're at a place where there is no scene,
you make your own scene.
I'm the person dumb or crazy enough
to put my money right here.
I'm going to do contemporary art
in San Bernardino.
- Forward-looking towns take on climate change
and growth.
The pandemic reminds us that humans aren't above nature.
We're part of it.
It seems like wherever we go,
people have a certain kind of stubbornness.
Even when things are dark...
They're imagining a better future.
- People would ask,
why am I spending so much time on this?
Why am I not doing this in a bigger city?
I found this quote in "Julius Caesar"...
I always felt this way.
This is a place where, actually, the tide's in,
and if you put your boats out
or if you put your ventures out right now,
you know, we can make something of ourselves.