In the 1990s, downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania was a place where many feared to tread after sundown.
Now, Lancaster, with a population of 60,000, where 40 percent are white, 40 percent are Latino and 15 percent are African-American, is a vibrant, foodie haven that showed up on a top 10 list of coolest places to visit. What was the trick?
The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman just wrote about this in a piece called, “Where American Politics Can Still Work: From the Bottom Up.”
Friedman did an interview with public radio WUNC in North Carolina, in which he described the “complex adaptive coalitions” that are helping to revitalize old towns.
Photo of downtown Lancaster by Scanlan via Wikipedia.