Equity, Growth, and Community: What the Nation Can Learn from America’s Metro Areas (original) (raw)

also contributed to some of the data interpretation and analysis, while Jackie Agnello Wong, Michelle Saucedo, and Lauren Portillo provided essential administrative and logistical support. Knowledge production is a collective process, and the entire PERE team has been an important hub for collective research, thinking, and writing for many years. While one of us (Pastor) has the pleasure of working with this team on a day-today basis, including with some staffers for well over a decade, the other (Benner) has also worked closely with PERE staff for nearly as long, and also had the great pleasure of spending a sabbatical year at PERE while working on this book. We cannot imagine having a better crew-and certainly this book would still be just questions in our heads without their ability to keep us on task and on time. We also want to thank the financial supporters who made this book possible. First and foremost is the Institute for New Economic Thinking, whose grant (no. 5409) enabled Benner to spend a sabbatical year at PERE and work more or less full-time on this project. The Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation also provided invaluable grants to PERE that enabled this research, particularly in the creation of a standardized database to use in case-study selection and our econometric investigation of the relation between measures of inequality and the length of growth spells. We would also like to thank all the people we interviewed in the regions we visited. The full list of interviewees is included at the end of the book, so we won't repeat it here. But we wouldn't have been able to write this book, or share their stories, without the time, knowledge, and wisdom they generously shared with us. In their own ways, they are working to build a more inclusive and successful America, and we hope we have done their efforts justice in these pages. x | Acknowledgments We have also benefitted from the intellectual insights and contributions to this research from many colleagues along the way. The Center for Regional Change at the University of California, Davis, has been an important hub for thinking about regional equity and provided valuable feedback that helped the analysis. We are particularly grateful to