The Poisoned City, page 26
17. “The State of Public Water in the United States” (Washington, D.C.: Food & Water Watch, February 2016), p. 10; and John Wisely, “Flint Residents Paid America’s Highest Water Rates,” Detroit Free Press, February 16, 2016. The Food & Water Watch report notes that when it conducted its survey (January 2015), Flint had “the most expensive water service in the country,” with an annual bill of $910.05, but during August 2015, a judge ruled that certain rate increases were unlawful and ordered the city to reduce its rates by 35 percent and to end a service fee.
18. Matthew Dolan, “Scared Residents Search for Hope,” Detroit Free Press, January 24, 2015, pp. 1A, 13A.
19. “One of the most important recent milestones has been the recognition in July 2010 by the United Nations General Assembly of the human right to water and sanitation. The Assembly recognized the right of every human being to have access to sufficient water for personal and domestic uses (between 50 and 100 litres of water per person per day), which must be safe, acceptable, and affordable (water costs should not exceed 3 percent of household income), and physically accessible (the water source has to be within 1,000 metres of the home and collection time should not exceed 30 minutes).” This is from the UnitedNations.org page “Global Issues: Water,” n.d., http://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/water/.
20. Anurag Mantha, “Understanding Flint’s Water Infrastructure Crisis: Water Infrastructure Inequality in America.” FlintWaterStudy.org, December 9, 2016.
21. According to a 2013 study, “The city’s current water efficiency is 65%. Typically water utilities operate at 85–90% efficiency. An increase to 85% efficiency would result in increased revenues in the range of $1.5 million to $3.0 million annually.” This is from the “City of Flint Water Reliability Study: Distribution System,” prepared by Rowe Professional Services Company and Potter Consulting, December 2013. For news stories on water lost to leaky lines: Kristin Longley, “Massive Water Leak, Theft Contribute to Flint Water Rate Increases, Officials Say,” MLive—Flint Journal, May 10, 2012; Kate Wells, “Flint’s Water System Is Falling Apart. Fixing It Could Cost $100 Million” Michigan Radio, August 9, 2016; “Half of the Water Coming into Flint Is Lost to Leaks, Water Theft,” ABC 12, WJRT-TV, April 20, 2017; and Mary Williams Walsh, “Detroit Plan to Profit on Water Looks Half Empty,” New York Times, May 25, 2014. Flint may have had it especially bad, but this is a problem elsewhere, too: David Schaper, “As Infrastructure Crumbles, Trillions of Gallons of Water Lost,” All Things Considered, NPR, October 29, 2014.
22. Ted Gregory, Patrick M. O’Connell, and Cecilia Reyes, “Precious Resource, Private Profits,” Chicago Tribune, December 27, 2017.
23. Some of this material about infrastructure is adapted from an article by the author that appeared in Next City (“The City that Unpoisoned Its Pipes,” August 8, 2016).
24. Wells, “Flint’s Water System Is Falling Apart.” It’s worth adding that fixing a break is cumbersome. A work crew has to control the water spilling out of the main, pinpoint the damage, dig into the ground without compromising any other utilities, repair the main either with clamps or by replacing a length of pipe, turn the water back on, and then restore the excavated area.
25. Gary Ridley, “15 Years and $60M Needed to Replace Flint’s Lead Water Lines, Emails Show,” MLive—Flint Journal, January 21, 2016; Ron Fonger, “Flint Data on Lead Water Lines Stored on 45,000 Index Cards,” MLive—Flint Journal, October 1, 2015; and Ron Fonger, “Flint Water Line Replacements have 22 Percent Failure Rate,” MLive—Flint Journal, May 17, 2017.
26. Ron Fonger, “Flint Flushes Out Latest Water Contamination, but Repeat Boil Advisories Show System Is Vulnerable,” MLive—Flint Journal, September 14, 2014.
27. “City of Flint 2014 Annual Water Quality Report,” City of Flint, Mich., 2014, https://www.cityofflint.com/wp-content/uploads/CCR-2014.pdf.
28. Almost exactly one month after the water switch, a New York Times story mentioned how Flint’s rates were going to increase anyway, if perhaps more slowly than they would have on Detroit’s water system. “‘Why isn’t it possible for the water rates to go down?’ demanded Wantwaz D. Davis, a city councilor. He said rising water rates were driving away residents, and he argued that if rates could be reduced for a few years, people might stay. If Flint’s decline could be slowed, he said, it would improve the financial prospects of the new pipeline. And now there is no turning back. The first $220 million in construction bonds for the new pipeline has already been sold. Flint is supposed to repay about one-third of that, and Genesee County will pay back the rest. The new pipeline is scheduled to go into service in 2016. In the meantime, Flint has been getting its water from the Flint River. It turned off the tap on Detroit on April 25.” Walsh, “Detroit Plan to Profit on Water Looks Half Empty.” See also Ron Fonger, “Flint Residents Get a Chance to Speak; Blast Water Rates and State Oversight,” MLive—Flint Journal, June 9, 2014.
29. After the switch, there were still 266 customers of Flint water who lived outside the city limits. Neal Rubin, “Outside Flint’s Borders, but Stuck with Its Water,” Detroit News, January 29, 2016.
30. This councilman, Scott Kincaid, filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the city had, in 2011, hiked water and sewer rates by far more than it had been allowed. Adams, “Flint Monthly Water and Sewer Bills Highest.”
31. Ibid.
32. The city’s five-year financial projections (2015–19), including its adopted budget for FY15 and FY16, were detailed in “City of Flint, Michigan: Setting a Sustainable Course for the City of Flint,” prepared by Gerald Ambrose, finance director, and Antonio Brown, deputy finance director, 2014, p. 5, https://www.cityofflint.com/wp-content/uploads/FY15-FY16-Adopted-Budget-Document-21.pdf.
33. Adrian Hedden, “Councilman Leads Protest at Flint City Hall, Addresses Police Chases, Water Rates,” MLive—Flint Journal, July 14, 2014.
34. Another big issue of contention: water deposits. All prospective renters were required to pay not only a security deposit prior to move-in, but also a deposit against future water bills. In 2013, the mandatory deposit went from $100 to $350. “When residents don’t pay their water bill for months at a time, that cost is passed on to those residents who do pay, and that’s just not fair,” said Ed Kurtz, the emergency manager at the time. “Our goal … is to recover more of the costs associated with non-payments, shutoffs, and those who vacate rental properties without paying.” But this created an impenetrable barrier for many, according to Henry Tannenbaum, a longtime Flint resident and landlord who served on the board of realtors. To rent one of his houses, he said, people had to come up with a water deposit, security deposit, and monthly rent before move-in day. “People … don’t have $1,000 laying around,” he said. “City Raises Water Deposit on Rental Properties,” NBC25, WNEM.TV, February 25, 2015, updated March 25, 2013; Michigan Civil Rights Commission: Housing and the Flint Water Crisis, Statement of Henry Tannenbaum, Genesee Landlords Association and owner of TDM Realty, July 14, 2016.
35. Laura Sullivan, interviews with the author, Flint, Mich., May 13, 2016, June 17, 2016, and October 26, 2017.
36. Ron Fonger, “Flint Starting to Flush out ‘Discolored’ Drinking Water with Hydrant Releases,” MLive—Flint Journal, July 30, 2014.
37. The press release was issued on July 30, 2014. See also Fonger, “Flint Starting to Flush Out Discolored Drinking Water with Hydrant Releases.”
38. Ryan Felton, “Flint Residents Raise Concerns over Discolored Water,” Metro Times, August 13, 2014.
39. “City of Flint 2014 Annual Water Quality Report,” Flint, Mich., 2014, https://www.cityofflint.com/wp-content/uploads/CCR-2014.pdf.
40. Fonger, “City Adding More Lime to Flint River Water.”
41. Ibid.
42. Fonger, “Flint Flushes Out Latest Water Contamination.”
43. Amanda Emery, “Flint Issues Boil Water Notice for Portion of West Side of City,” MLive—Flint Journal, August 16, 2014, updated January 17, 2015.
44. Dominic Adams, “Flint Officials Say ‘Abnormal’ Test to Blame in E. coli Scare, Water Boil Advisory Remains,” August 18, 2014, updated January 17, 2015.
45. Ron Fonger, “Second Positive Coliform Bacteria Test Means Flint’s West Side Water Boil Notice Still in Effect,” MLive—Flint Journal, August 18, 2014, updated January 17, 2015.
46. Ron Fonger, “Flint Says Drinking Water Advisories Will Continue into Tuesday,” MLive—Flint Journal, September 8, 2014; and Ron Fonger, “Flint Lifts Boil Water Advisories for West Side of City, Says Investigation of Contamination Will Continue,” MLive—Flint Journal, September 9, 2014.
47. Ron Fonger, “Flint River Water Complicating City’s Efforts to Battle Contamination, Boil Advisories,” MLive—Flint Journal, September 18, 2014, updated January 17, 2015.
48. There’s a nice map here that gives an outline of the breadth of the advisories: Fonger, “Flint Flushes Out Latest Water Contamination.”
49. Ibid.; and Steve Carmody, “Flint Officials Working to Resolve Water Issues,” Michigan Radio, September 15, 2014.
CHAPTER 3: REVELATIONS
1. For what is probably the very best telling of the Great Migration, look no further than Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010).
2. This song is quoted in Andrew R. Highsmith’s Demolition Means Progress: Flint Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 1, to which this chapter in particular owes a great deal. Some of the material in this chapter first appeared, in a different form, in articles by the author that appeared in Splinter (“‘An Equal Opportunity Lie’: How Housing Discrimination Led to the Flint Water Crisis,” with Josh Kramer, December 5, 2017) and in the New Republic (“Flint Prepares to Be Left Behind Once More,” March 3, 2016).
3. “All Change!,” Time, January 9, 1933, p. 59.
4. Gordon Young, phone interview with the author, January 2016.
5. “Detroit Needs Labor,” New York Times, April 23, 1919, p. 21.
6. Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, pp. 31–-32.
7. Ibid., pp. 81–84; and Rhonda Sanders, Bronze Pillars: An Oral History of African Americans in Flint (Flint, Mich.: The Flint Journal and Alfred P. Sloan Museum, 1995), p. viii. Sanders: “From the early 1900s until the early 1940s, the main jobs open to blacks were domestic ones such as cooking, cleaning or chauffeuring for wealthy white families. A few worked in trades as barbers, furniture finishers, barn builders, doctors or lawyers. Most black men who worked in the automobile factories were janitors, although some worked at Buick’s hellish foundry.” Beginning in the 1940s, black women, albeit only those with light skin, were hired to operate elevators in banks and hotels (pp. 92–93).
8. Sanders, Bronze Pillars, pp. viii, 2, 32; and Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, p. 32. It’s worth pointing out, though, that there appeared to be more flexibility when the proportion of African Americans in Flint hovered at about 3 percent: “Blacks could not live anywhere they wanted until a legal mandate in 1968. However, many blacks and whites lived in the same neighborhoods before World War II and formed close friendships,” as Rhonda Sanders describes it. She quotes William Hoskins, who arrived in 1936 from Mississippi. “When I first came to Flint, there was no such thing as a black neighborhood. The Italians, Polish and everyone else (including blacks) lived together.” Some black children learned to speak foreign languages from their playmates.
9. Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, pp. 30–37.
10. “The Realtor should not be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality or any individual whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in the neighborhood.” That appeared in the code of ethics of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers in 1950. The same sentiment appeared in textbooks the organization published as early as 1922. The code is quoted in: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “Understanding Fair Housing,” Clearinghouse Publication 42 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, February 1973), p. 3.
11. Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress. Highsmith describes these neighborhoods, including where their borders fell, on pp. 30–31. He also notes that up until 1940, 60 percent of St. John was made up of white immigrants, mostly Catholics from Eastern Europe, though about three quarters of them left over the next ten years, while the number of black households tripled (p. 151). According to the memory of those interviewed by Rhonda Sanders, even as many of the white immigrants moved out of St. John, they kept up family businesses in the neighborhood. As for Floral Park’s roots, Sanders builds on the early history of Flint as a place of refuge for former slaves. “Some of the first blacks to visit Flint may have been fugitive slaves en route to Canada. Detroit was the most direct stopover on the Underground Railroad network that secretly led runaway slaves to freedom in Canada. Flint is believed to have been an alternative route that directed fleeing slaves through Port Huron into Canada.” Sanders, Bronze Pillars, p. 4.
12. Flint’s first evaluation by the Home Owners Loan Corporation was in the summer of 1937. The GM neighborhoods got a B rating, the second-best category. The one exception to the all-white neighborhoods that were redlined because of their proximity to African American residents was a part of Woodlawn Park that bordered Floral Park. “Will hold up,” the assessor noted. “Pride of ownership.” As Highsmith writes, “West Woodlawn Park no doubt contained many proud homeowners, yet the neighborhood’s blue grade stemmed also from its abundance of racially restrictive housing covenants and the impermeability of the Lapeer Road color line that separated it from Floral Park.” Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, p. 41.
13. A scanned version of the original evaluations are presented in a wonderful interactive by Mapping Inequality, a project that shows the primary materials for how redlining worked in New Deal America. Two received this same “undesirables” notation that first year: the areas labeled D12 and D18, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=12/43.0303/-83.6896&opacity=0.8&area=D18&city=flint-mi&adimage=4/67/-123.
14. “The Flint Water Crisis,” Michigan Civil Rights Commission, pp. 36–38.
15. Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, p. 71.
16. Ibid., p. 34; and Young, Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City, p. 72. This was at the end of the 1930s. Flint was behind Miami, Florida, and Norfolk, Virginia.
17. Also, there was nothing compelling lending institutions from working with African American mortgage applicants, even with the Veterans Administration guaranteeing the loan. “And so home ownership quickly soared to two out of three, then more gradually reached its current zenith of three out of four. Home ownership rates for black and Hispanic families during the postwar boom years, however, hovered at or below 40 percent; and even today, while the children and grandchildren of white veterans enjoy all the benefits of that government-sponsored home equity, black and Hispanic home ownership rates remain stuck below 50 percent.” Edward Humes, “How the G.I. Bill Shunted Blacks Back into Vocational Training,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 53 (Autumn 2006): 92–104.
18. Ibid.; and Richard Rothstein, “Modern Segregation,” presentation to the Atlantic Live Conference “Reinventing the War on Poverty,” Washington, D.C., March 6, 2014. Text published the same day at the Economic Policy Institute website, http://www.epi.org/files/2014/MODERN-SEGREGATION.pdf.
19. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 US 1 (1948). The Court found that racially restrictive covenants are a contract that private parties can voluntarily engage in, even though state enforcement of the covenants would violate the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the case, the Shelley family, which was African American, tried to buy a home in St. Louis that had a covenant attached that banned “people of the Negro or Mongolian race” from owning it. The neighborhood sued to keep the family from moving in.
20. “The Flint Water Crisis,” Michigan Civil Rights Commission, pp. 60–61.
21. Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress, p. 69. Another resistance tactic: constructing entirely new houses. “Many blacks who were turned away from Woodlawn Park proper resolved the problem by building homes on vacant land to its immediate south and east,” including the first black president of Flint’s Board of Education, a civil rights attorney, and the first black woman elected to the school board. Sanders, Bronze Pillars, p. 20.
22. Sanders, Bronze Pillars, p. 22. Another story Sanders captures is from Bill Williams, who moved to northwest Flint in 1968. “I had two cars,” he said. “One I left home with my wife and one I drove to work. I have a one-car garage so I’d park the good one in the garage and the work car in the driveway. I’d come out in the morning and find eggs all over the car and garage. The tree in the yard, we had decorated for Christmas; I came out and the lights had been stolen and it had been decorated with toilet paper.” The harassment subsided after a few years, Williams believed, because his house was one of the best-kept in the neighborhood (p. 25).
