• Downtown as bellwether. As we've traveled around the country, we've become stronger and stronger believers in the connection between the condition of a city's downtown district, and the overall state of the city's economy and culture.

Yes, you can find exceptions. But most of the time, when you've got a downtown district with a self-sustaining combination of retail outlets (especially non-chain stores); restaurants and bars and brewpubs and music sites (to draw people downtown at night); public art or festivals or live events (to give people a civic sense-of-self); and, crucially, residential spaces (where people who don't have children or whose children have grown up live in second- and third-story apartments above stores and restaurants, providing street life through the evening and a general sense of bustle in downtown)—when find a place with those things, it's very likely that all the other economic, cultural, civic, and educational indicators of local well-being will be positive too.

• Stages of downtown recovery. But a successful downtown is not all-or-nothing proposition. We've seen cities at almost every imaginable point along this curve. Full, functioning ripeness—as in Greenville, South Carolina; Burlington, Vermont; Columbus, Ohio; little Holland, Michigan; or Riverside, California. Nearly there—as with Sioux Falls, South Dakota, or Winters, California. Moving in the right direction—like Duluth, Minnesota, or Columbus, Mississippi, or Redlands, California, or tiny Eastport, Maine. Just kicking off a big new effort—as in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Or trying to figure out what to do next—as in San Bernardino, California.

Along this arc Fresno occupies an interesting position. To outsiders, it looks as if the downtown is still in quite tough shape. To the people working on its recovery, the big, important decisions about moving forward have been taken, and the payoff is about to appear. As suggested by the ubiquitous stickers for the downtown "I Believe" campaign. By the way, the I Believe Fresno site has a useful interactive timeline to illustrate the rise, fall, and hoped-for rise-again of the downtown district.

• Background source of trouble. In a few cities, the main problem has been fundamental economic dislocation. In Ajo, Arizona, as we'll soon describe, a giant copper mine closed, suddenly eliminating most of the area's job. Similar pressures have affected Charleston, West Virginia, as the coal and chemical industries contracted, and Pittsburgh long ago (before its rebound) as the steel factories went down.

But in many other cities, the problem is: sprawl, sprawl, sprawl. As I mentioned last week in kicking off the Fresno coverage, the city is kind of laboratory study of the destructive power of sprawl. All of the tract-home development and malls went to the north side of town, and the poor people and the blood banks and the payday check-cashing operations were concentrated in what was once the downtown commercial center. Here again is the useful map that we saw in Mayor Ashley Swearingen's office of where the city grew before World War II, in blue, and where it grew after that, in red.

The blue area is full of once-grand, now mainly run-down commercial and civic buildings, plus the city's poorest residents. The red is familiar mall-and-tract-home territory and economically better off.