City on the Edge: Hard Choices in the American Rust Belt

"Why do people stay in a failing city? City on the Edge deals with that very question through the lives of five people in Syracuse, New York, the quintessential rust-belt metropolis which sorely needs the brainpower, sweat, and leadership of citizens if it is to thrive again. Once a booming industrial center with a dynamic civic life and prominence on the world stage, Syracuse has been brutalized by decades of economic depression, absent-minded political leadership, crime, drugs, and population decline. Only its people remain to point toward a better day. The people in this book-a former teenage drug dealer, a refugee from Cuba, an urban farmer, a community activist, and a city elder, each of whom find a way to make life work against formidable odds-suggest there's reason for optimism in struggling cities across middle America. Michael Streissguth spent more than two years interviewing the men and women he calls the Syracuse Five as they turned their ideas, frustrations, and disadvantages into new hope for the city. He contextualizes their extended commentary and storytelling with appealing secondary characters and various episodes, such as a tragic Father's Day riot and the trial that followed, sidewalk fistfights, and a regional consolidation proposal that may slip through the city's hands. He also pays particular attention to the family of one of the Syracuse Five who arrived in town during the late 1940s Great Migration of African American people. Representing a 60-year-long thread, the family's story tracks many of the city's crucial issues: racism, urban renewal in the 1960s, drug abuse, the hope of upward mobility and, most importantly, the question over whether to leave the city or stay"--