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Losing the War of Attrition: Mobility, Chronic Decline, and Infrastructure

Michelle Anderson maintains that providing assistance will take more than reducing formal legal barriers to interstate mobility. Meaningful improvements—whether social or geographic—will require a new antipoverty agenda for declining regions, as well as fiscal and environmental responsibility for ex…

Article

The New Minimal Cities

Between 2007 and 2013, twenty-eight urban municipalities declared bankruptcy or entered a state receivership to manage fiscal insolvency. To cut costs and divert revenues to debt payments, these cities have taken dramatic austerity measures—an unwitting experiment wit…

Article

Dissolving Cities

121 Yale L.J. 1364.

During the twentieth century, thousands of new cities took shape across America. Stucco subdivisions sprawled and law followed, enabling suburbs to adopt independent governments. That story is familiar. But meanwhile, something else was also happening. A smaller but sizable numb…