How Birmingham Thrived Despite a County Bankruptcy

There was a time in Jefferson County, Alabama, when layoffs were measured by the gross. It was a time of shuttered hospitals, weeds as big as fourth graders, and potholes up to your elbow. Dead cows dotted the side of county roads, too expensive for anybody to come and clean up.

It was the Age of Municipal Bankruptcy, and it cratered the biggest county in Alabama. Detroit reconfigured our scale for such things, but Jefferson County’s $4.2 billion tab in 2011 was the largest the U.S. had ever known at the time, a budgetary abomination that torpedoed the county’s bank account from $312 million to $152 million in 36 months. There was no money for anything—“a new era” of reduced services, one commissioner put it—and the county’s credit rating, Moody’s said, was among the worst in the United States.