Urban decline has been around just about as long as there have been cities, but the degeneration of America’s industrial heartland, because it cuts across a wide swath of the country and is as much about jobs as it is about habitation, has seemed both intractable and inevitable. Earlier efforts to address it involved razing whole neighborhoods and erecting Robert Moses-inspired projects. But in places like Youngstown, Detroit and Pittsburgh, as well as satellites like Braddock, where urban blight was not just a matter of run-down neighborhoods but of manufacturing plants packing up and moving away, even such radical solutions offered little hope. It’s one thing to replace substandard housing stock, quite another to reinvent an economy.

Typically, when John Fetterman talks about his town, he starts with the long list of businesses that once lined its main street. “In 2010,” Fetterman then invariably says, “those numbers have dropped to zero.” It is a stunning, almost unfathomable decline, and it suggests why Braddock has become a favorite media stand-in for Rust Belt devastation, even if what Fetterman says is not precisely true. A medical clinic, auto garages, a florist, an optometrist, three markets, a preschool, a parochial school, a dollar store and Carnegie’s first public library continue to do business alongside empty buildings wrapped in barbed wire.

John Fetterman showed up in Braddock in 2001. He had tried the family business, insurance, but it didn’t take, and he ended up joining AmeriCorps and moving to Pittsburgh in the late ’90s. After a two-year interlude at Harvard’s Kennedy School studying education and social policy, Fetterman was hired to start a program for at-risk youth in Braddock, a town beset by violence. Two years later, Fetterman bought the church that was part of his Aspen slideshow, which he planned to turn into a community center. He squatted in the church for a while, then, entranced by the town’s “malignant beauty,” bought the warehouse next door and turned it into a Dwell-worthy loft, topped by two remodeled shipping containers for additional living space. Four years after arriving in town, he ran for mayor.

In Braddock, executive decisions are made by an elected six-person borough council, and day-to-day municipal affairs are run by a nonelected borough manager. The mayor, who works for a salary of $150 a month, has two main functions: to break a tie and to oversee the police (he has veto power but can be overruled by a majority council vote). Fetterman knew this, of course, but he thought being mayor would give him a “bully pulpit.” Fetterman made no attempt to hide his belief that most of the borough council members had little interest in furthering the fortunes of the town and were using their positions mainly to benefit themselves. The borough manager, Ella B. Jones (who was later charged with forgery and theft of $178,000 of the town’s money, a charge to which she pleaded not guilty), considered Fetterman to be a wealthy interloper, the “great white hope” of Braddock, as Jones put it. “Council makes the laws,” Jones said in 2006. “They do it all. They have the vote. They make the rules. And he doesn’t.”

So Fetterman built a back door — he started a nonprofit organization called Braddock Redux, financed until recently primarily by family money. (His father is its largest individual donor.) Because Fetterman is the head of a nonprofit that uses Fetterman money, and because for the longest time it had only two other members, Jeb Feldman, a friend, and Helen Wachter, the head of the countywide KEYS-AmeriCorps program (which supplied volunteers to the nonprofit, including an assistant for Fetterman), Braddock Redux is known around town as John’s Nonprofit. Before it became part of Braddock Redux, the Fettermans put up the money for the church next to the mayor’s house, which is popularly called John’s Church. Braddock Redux owns the convent across the street from the steel mill, which is known as John’s Convent. Feldman has the title to the convent school, which is known as Jeb’s School. The church houses the county’s summer program, the Braddock Youth Project, among other things. The convent sometimes serves as a hostel for potential “urban pioneers,” and the middle school as a gallery and studio space. By heading a nonprofit that is a major property owner, the mayor was able to advance what he calls his “social-justice agenda” without having much political power, or the burden of it, either.

In 2009, when the Levi’s jeans company wanted to use Braddock to promote a line of work clothes, it approached Fetterman, not the borough council. The million and a half dollars Levi’s offered in exchange went to John’s Nonprofit, for John’s Church and community center, rather than the town’s coffers. It was a closed loop that didn’t sit well with some of the mayor’s constituents, even those who voted for him in the last election, in 2009, which he won, 294 to 103.