It is rich in its agricultural output and potential; you name the high-value crop (other than corn or wheat), and farms through the Central Valley are likely to play a major role in world supply.

It is poor in the usual sense: by far the highest unemployment rates in the state, lowest median incomes, highest rates of poverty, worst remaining consequences of the financial crash of 2008, most serious pollution and public-health challenges. By many calculations, if California were indeed broken into six states, as the venture capitalist Tim Draper has proposed (hint: this won't happen), the resulting state of Central California would be the poorest in the country.

Fresno shares its region's strengths, as an agricultural center, and its challenges, of poverty and pollution. It also shares a trait with other places where we've spent time, notably the Golden Triangle of Mississippi (as explained via Joe Max Higgins here and the Mississippi School of Math and Science here) or much of the state of West Virginia (as explained by Larry Groce)—or parts of South Dakota or South Carolina or Georgia or rural Maine or the Rustbelt generally.

That trait is an acute awareness of being looked down on or condescended to by big-city fashionable America. I feel entitled to say that, both because it's true and because I grew up in, and still think of myself as being "from," a place in the same situation: the unloved "Inland Empire" of semi-desert Southern California. (The locus classicus of my home town as loser-land is of course Joan Didion's "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," which came out when I was in high school.) That awareness—the realization of connoting the opposite of "the Bay Area" or "Cambridge" or "Westside LA"—plays a part in the drama of these areas, and, as we'll show, in their efforts at turnaround.

***

Now the two maps that set up the story of Fresno. I'm not counting the "six Californias" map, since that's imaginary. The two below, which we saw in the office of Fresno's popular Republican mayor, Ashley Swearingen.

The first is where Fresno's richer people, and its many very poor people, live. The triangular area near the bottom, where the shading is darkest and where 40 percent or more of the people are impoverished, is where all the buildings of the historic downtown are located.

The second is where the city has grown in the 70 years since the end of World War II. The blue area shows the city's concentrated downtown growth through the end of World War II. The red is where development—mainly suburban sprawl and malls—has happened since then.

"Fresno is famous as a victim of sprawl ... " I said last week when beginning a question to Mayor Swearingen; in her six years in office, she has been a big booster of downtown renewal efforts. "I'm not sure I'd use the word victim," she broke in to say. "We were the perpetrators!" She was referring to a build-toward-the-horizon policy through much of the postwar era.