The American Dream is broken. Spartanburg found a fix.

Violent crime dropped 77% while 3rd-grade reading scores jumped 40 percentage points. How? We traveled to Spartanburg, South Carolina (the 3rd-fastest growing metro area in the U.S.) to visit the Northside neighborhood. Here, a unique coalition of government officials, school district leaders, and local residents stopped looking at neighborhood development through a traditional lens. Instead, they used advanced manufacturing principles — including kaizen, a Japanese philosophy popularized by Toyota — to support resident leaders and guide one of the most inspiring neighborhood transformations in America. Beyond crime reduction and reading scores, the teamwork in Spartanburg also built hundreds of units of new housing, a brand-new community center, a state-of-the-art child development center. Spartanburg and its Northside are providing a national model for how discipline, resident leadership, and a community coming together can completely rewrite a neighborhood's future. VIDEO CHAPTERS 00:00: Spartanburg Intro 01:32: Northside Neighborhood 03:59: Building a Team 05:07: Coaching the Team 06:07: Kaizen 08:02: Northside Voyagers 09:13: Getting Control of Oakview Apartments 10:56: New Community Center 13:05: Northside Development Group 13:47: Purpose Built Communities Model 14:42: Mixed-Income Housing 17:59: Drop in Violent Crime 18:32: Saving the Elementary School 21:26: Jump in 3rd-Grade Reading 21:59: New Child Development Center 24:34: The Northside Today SOURCES AND RESOURCES We spoke to dozens of people while researching and reporting this story. But we're not the only journalists who have! FOX Carolina covered this story in 2024: https://www.foxcarolina.com/2024/12/1... And David Brooks covered it back in 2018: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/op... And here's some links to the relevant organizations mentioned: Northside Development Group: https://www.spartanburgndg.com/ Spartanburg Academic Movement: https://learnwithsam.org/ The Franklin School: https://thefranklinschool.org/ Purpose Built Communities: https://purposebuiltcommunities.org/ StriveTogether: https://strivetogether.org/ A BIT ABOUT ME Hi! I'm Joe Posner. I've been a lot of things, including a creative leader behind ‪@Vox‬ Video, working with Vox co-founder ‪@EzraKleinShow‬ and many, many more people. Over 8 years we built an amazing channel with over 2 billion views, 10 million subscribers, won awards, and hired and mentored people who have gone onto become the most amazing video journalists on YouTube – including ‪@CleoAbram‬ ‪@johnnyharris‬ ‪@Howtown‬ ‪@christophe‬ ‪@SearchParty‬ and many others. Together, we created and produced TV shows with multiple networks for Vox, including 70 episodes of the “Explained” series on ‪@Netflix‬ and the Emmy-nominated "Level Playing Field" on ‪@HBO‬. Now I'm back on YouTube doing a series I've always dreamed about. AND ABOUT US The show is produced at Fire-Works in Brooklyn, NY by Joe, James Watson, Nishtha Shanti, and in collaboration with Harvard’s EdRedesign Lab, with support from The Hearthland Foundation. Director of Photography for this episode was Dave Mayers, and graphics by the amazing ‪@craftedbycm‬ with additional graphics work by Alex Burholt. WITH MUSIC BY: Michael A Davidson ‪@iliveministries1845‬ Gemma: https://gemmanyc.bandcamp.com/, Joe Posner ‪@jposner‬ If you’ve made it this far – Please do subscribe – and hit that 🔔 bell 🔔 to get notified when we publish new episodes! Do you have stories about people, programs, places fixing the American Dream? Send them to us: https://forms.gle/dyi2Vg6VMyXEw62q7