The poisoned city, p.22
The Poisoned City, page 22
Lansing was fortunate to be able to pay for its new pipes through a simple rate increase. Madison, Wisconsin, used a different model, although it was also served by having a city-owned and -operated system. Within eleven years, it replaced eight thousand lead water lines in a pioneering $19.4 million effort. The city offered $1,000 rebates to homeowners who replaced their own pipes, with the cost averaging $1,300. (Apartment owners paid more.) The reimbursement money came from revenue the Madison water utility received from providing space on its water towers for cellular antennas. The idea of using public money to help pay for replacing private pipes was controversial, especially when some doubted the risk of the lead service lines. But, especially in the wake of the Flint water crisis, the city has received national acclaim.
“Infrastructure issues were never a partisan thing,” Bernero said. “We built this country with the greatest infrastructure in world, which resulted in the most productive society, the most incredible middle class in modern history. Now our infrastructure is beginning to go by the wayside, and there’s this Tea Party mentality that makes people afraid to raise taxes for anything.
“People will suffer,” he said, “and of course, the poor suffer the most. Let’s face it, the rich can insulate themselves from travesty … [they] can afford bottled water. They can move out to suburbs or wherever. The rich have always found ways to insulate themselves. Though ultimately, when we have a complete and utter infrastructure failure … no one is safe.”
America’s lead service lines took decades to install, and even a wholly committed effort to root them out will in turn take years. It’s critical to do so, advocates say, but at the same time, we cannot wait for that to happen. There are other steps we can take now to address lead in drinking water. Among them: taking a closer look at what counts as “lead free” plumbing fixtures; addressing high water bills (since shutoffs cause stagnation, which can worsen contamination); and closing the loopholes in the federal Lead and Copper Rule.
If utilities sampled water in a way that truly set out to find the worst-case levels, between 54 and 70 percent of those with lead lines in their systems would uncover severe contamination, affecting up to 96 million people. That’s according to a study by the American Water Works Association, and it echoes the sampling that was flagged in, for example, New York City schools.18 Yanna Lambrinidou, the medical anthropologist, has continued her advocacy against lead in drinking water, and through public information requests, she’s found other ways that water authorities undermine the spirit of the Lead and Copper Rule. Philadelphia’s water department, for example, instructed samplers to “run only the cold water for two minutes” before taking a sample, since lead dissolves more easily in hot water. This was similar to stipulations given to people, for example, in Rhode Island and Michigan.19
The EPA, perhaps in an effort to repair its beleaguered reputation, urged state governors, environmental agencies, public health commissioners, and tribal councils to reckon seriously with the Lead and Copper Rule, to warn people about the risks of lead pipes, and to seek ways to go beyond minimum requirements to make water safe.20 Its own reevaluation of the LCR—scheduled for 2017, but delayed—could be an opportunity to address the gaps that are routinely exploited. These include pre-flushing and using small-mouthed bottles, but also the absence of any requirements for testing at schools and the lack of a federal limit on the amount of lead allowed in tap water in any individual home. The LCR formula requires action only when there is excessive lead found in many homes.21
One way or another, the point is to do something—not perpetuate the kick-the-can strategy of past decades. In Michigan, in Snyder’s last year of office, he called for a program to replace every lead line in the state. He also wanted the state to implement lead rules for drinking water that were tougher than the federal regulations, which were, after all, a baseline; states can choose to go further. Maybe, instead of being a national disgrace, the Great Lakes State could become a national model.
III.
Civic Park was looking forward to its one hundredth anniversary. From rise to decline to resurgence: that’s the journey that Pastor Sherman McCathern hoped to see captured in a centennial mural that the church’s Urban Renaissance Center commissioned from an artist.22 In the early months of 2018, the artist, Cardine Humes, who had moved to the area from the South, was hard at work. Bundled in a parka, he painted on an outside wall of the Dort Meats Company on Dupont Street, bringing color and shadow to ordinary neighborhood scenes, making them as grand as anything: a school, a lawn, a pine tree, children at play. In the center, community leaders are pictured, planning for a better future.
If there’s any message to take from Flint, not only the water crisis, but its full history, it’s that nobody has a monopoly on wisdom. Lived experience is as important as technical training. One of the ideals of environmental justice—that people should have a meaningful voice in the decisions that affect them—isn’t intended just as a respectful courtesy; it also leads to better decisions. The people of Flint had no say at all in what came out of their showers and kitchen sinks, certainly not with four consecutive state-appointed emergency managers in place when critical changes were made to the city’s water supply. Residents used every democratic means available to them—meetings, protests, grassroots organizing, citizen science—to spotlight the deteriorating quality of their water. Not only did their concerns go unheard but there was no accountability for poor decisions made under the EMs’ tenures, at least not until states of emergency had been declared at every level of government.
The Michigan Civil Rights Commission, which investigated the Flint water crisis, ultimately recommended that the state’s EM law be replaced or restructured. It specifically said that EMs should have regional authority, rather than city authority, because many of the most serious problems plaguing cities are not contained by their own borders. Cities are connected to their neighbors, and always have been. For the same reason, the commission suggested that a form of regional government, or at least regional cooperation, be implemented that would require core cities and suburbs to work together collaboratively to solve the problems to which they are both party. In a separate investigation, a joint select committee of the Michigan Legislature suggested that the single emergency manager be replaced with a three-person team, including a local ombudsman, and making EMs liable “for certain harms they cause.” Some Flint leaders wanted to see the oversight system completely abolished.23
What of the other principle of environmental justice—that specific minority groups not be disproportionately burdened by environmental harm? The people making the ill-fated decisions in Flint were not necessarily racists and did not mean to treat the city differently because most of its residents are black, according to the civil rights commission. But, it said in its report, “the disparate response” to the crisis—the delays and dismissals—was “the result of systemic racism that was built into the foundation and growth of Flint, its industry, and the suburban area surrounding it.”24 Decades of segregation created a cascading series of problems that prove the error in the “separate but equal” doctrine espoused by a flawed U.S. Supreme Court decision more than a century earlier.25 Current civil rights law is not adequate to address the problems in the state, the commission argued. It’s designed for individual complaints, with proof that someone acted in an overtly racist way. That does not appear to be the story of the Flint water crisis. One decision after another, one policy after another: they were colorblind. Nobody explicitly argued that Flint should settle for water with high lead levels because it is mostly an African American city or because so many residents are poor. And yet.
“If this was in a white area, in a rich area, there would have been something done,” said Yolanda Figueroa, a Flint resident, at one of the civil rights hearings. “I mean, let’s get real here. We know the truth.”26
Half a century after the civil rights era, segregation persists so much that core cities serve as proxies for communities of color. Disinvesting in cities means disinvesting in them. The legacy of housing discrimination deprived Flint of its political clout—not only by losing half its population, but by losing the power to elect its own empowered city representatives. The commission itself acknowledged that it had failed to take the residents’ concerns about the water seriously. Way back in January 2015, in the midst of the TTHM crisis, its staff was among those who had received coolers and bottled water from the state for its Flint office.27 The report said that most of the commission had some vague “awareness of what was happening.” The lack of serious attention spoke “to the level of importance we ascribed to ‘those’ people in Flint at the time, not that they didn’t exist.”
People in Flint were frustrated by the unlikelihood of the state dismissing their complaints had they lived in wealthier and whiter communities. African American leaders in Flint pointed out that the water crisis didn’t seem to register until “our white sisters”—people such as LeeAnne Walters and Melissa Mays, who were also married and mothers—became the face of it. Putting them forward in media accounts was a strategic choice, they said. But not only people in Flint. “I mean, everybody on the street was asking that question, and by asking the same question, everybody had the same answer. The answer was ‘no, it probably wouldn’t have,” said Ken Sikemma, co-chair of the task force that Governor Snyder commissioned to investigate the crisis.28
That erasure didn’t really end, even when the Flint disaster was widely known. There was an addiction to hero narratives, as Yanna Lambrinidou has described it. As the news story began to shift uneasily into history, the narrative tended to single out one or two figures—especially Marc Edwards and Mona Hanna-Attisha—while minimizing the role played by community organizers well before they came along. The hero narrative replicated a dangerous dynamic of “saviors” and “saved” that disempowered the community all over again, and what’s more, it was simply false; it didn’t sync with what actually happened. As writer Derrick Z. Jackson observed, in later years, when there were major environmental or social justice awards to give, many with large cash prizes, they typically went to non-black figures: Walters, Edwards, Hanna-Attisha.29 Of course, the trio indeed made major contributions to bringing the dangers of Flint’s water to light, and they deserved recognition for it. But those who organized the early protests, the pastors and local businesses that ran bottled water drives, the local politicians who spoke out—they were missed by late-coming national media and then overlooked again by the awards circuit. These anonymous black residents of Flint “have not been recognized as possessing the agency of non-black figures involved in the crisis,” Jackson wrote. “They figured into the national narrative almost exclusively as helpless or hapless victims.… America still too often requires a non-black hero or victim before it can turn proper attention to an issue that primarily affects African Americans.”
Environmental disasters don’t solely affect people of color—just look at Love Canal or Toms River, New Jersey, both middle-class white areas, or the extraordinary lead-in-water crisis in the nation’s capital city. But the higher probability of them is in the DNA of segregation. That’s the logical outcome of concentrated vulnerability. Not long after the Love Canal movement, a North Carolina community protested chemical dumping in a landfill near a residential neighborhood where mostly poor African Americans lived. Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, were contaminating the soil. The protests won the support of the NAACP and led to two national studies that described how hazardous waste facilities were consistently located in places where people of color tended to live. This fact is so persistent that race is the very best predictor of the presence of pollutants, even when controlled for other factors such as income and property values.30
In an echo of the racialized practices of the mainstream housing industry, the land where it is most cost-effective for a company to build its hazardous facility usually happens to be near where black and brown people live. Their very presence is part of what, historically, makes the land cheap. The downward cycle continues as the industrial polluter devalues nearby homes even more, undermining residents’ stability and the area’s tax revenue. While the polluter partly makes up for that devaluation by paying its own share of taxes, the dynamic still results in one of the trademarks of environmental injustice: the polluter’s contributions create equal benefits for all the region’s residents—taxes, jobs, economic stimulus—but only one group of people bears nearly all the harms and risks, often without their knowledge or consent.
In Flint, about 37 percent of the residents are white. But as researcher Laura Pulido points out, “they suffer a fate similar to their Black neighbors insofar as the entire city is racialized as Black.”31 (To say nothing of other communities in Flint, particularly the sizable Hispanic population.) That’s an echo of the days of redlining and racially restrictive covenants, when a neighborhood could be black or it could be white, but never both.
The more that cities are divided by race and class, the more that environmental racism becomes likely. And this isn’t just a local metropolitan trend anymore; regional inequality skews it even further. In 2017, the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy examined shrinking legacy cities in the Midwest and Northeast—cities such as Flint, Akron, Syracuse, Muncie, Camden, Scranton, and Albany. Of the twenty-four locations it looked at, twenty were home to at least one Fortune 500 company between 1960 and 2015. Many were home to five or more. Today, only twelve are. Thousands of jobs—between 2 and nearly 40 percent—were erased in nearly all the cities in that time. Flint had the largest drop. (It was home to 62,700 jobs in 2002 and only 39,200 in 2014.) Some of these jobs moved to the suburbs, which grew over the same time period. However, as wealth and economic opportunity have concentrated in a tiny handful of major American cities, even these suburban metropolitan areas are losing ground. And when inner-ring suburbs start looking like core cities—whether because of pollution or crime or unemployment or the presence of people of color—exurbs are built farther and farther away.
To avoid association with hollowed-out cities that have become largely black and poor, some suburban communities have changed their names, zip codes, and school districts. School secessions go back to 1954 in the South; it was a supposedly race-neutral way to redraw the lines of segregation after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling.32 Today, a “local control” movement has led to a wave of communities splintering off into new majority-white school districts. In Boston in 2012, the Hyde Park neighborhood won its battle to change its zip code so that it would no longer have the same postal number as neighboring Mattapan.33 In 2017, Flint Township, the same suburb that allowed the GM engine plant to hook on to its water, made moves to change its name to Carman Hills and get new zip codes. “You gotta take every step to secure your business and that got me thinking separating ourselves from Flint started to make sense,” a dive shop owner in Flint Township told a local news station.34
Despite trying to make ever-finer distinctions between “here” and “there,” the dividing lines are not always neat. Andrew R. Highsmith, in his history Demolition Means Progress, observes that the “ascendance of the suburbs during the twentieth century was without question one of the most consequential developments in American history.” But while it fostered “easy stereotypes of suburban plenty,” there were also “schoolchildren attending study halls in gymnasiums, taking shop classes in converted coal sheds, and learning to read in tents”—images that defied assumptions about suburbia.35 That’s true in the modern era, too. With the rise of exurbs and regional inequality, and with larger numbers of racial minorities and immigrants moving to the suburbs—more than half of African Americans nationwide live in suburbs now (most immigrants, too)—the distinctions have blurred.36 Nobody has a single story. People in every kind of community, from city to suburb to countryside, experience a particular mix of privileges and disadvantages through which they navigate their lives.
At the same time, the pattern is plain and must be named. The structural underpinnings of environmental racism, replicated again and again, are what the Michigan Civil Rights Commission was trying to get at when it asserted that “it is not enough to say the result is unintended.” We must recognize that “being colorblind is not the solution, it is the problem.”
Epilogue
Living here is tossed body overboard,
Sacrificing,
It is being Jonah and knowing the whale’s belly,
Flourishing in the dark.
We’ve trained our eyes to still embrace light.
Remember light.
We are that light.
—Raise It Up! Youth Poets, “Flint” (2016)
I.
In the spring of 2018, Joy Tabernacle was still at home in the blond-brick church at the corner of Chevrolet Avenue and Dayton Street in Civic Park. A historic plaque honored the Presbyterian congregation that first filled its pews, and the words “God is Love” were etched above the entryway. Though it was still a neighborhood anchor, Joy Tabernacle was not only a community church but more of a campus. Once-vacant homes nearby had been transformed into sacred spaces of a different kind. One had become the Civic Park Health and Wellness House, serving people’s medical, dental, and vision needs. That was done with the help of the University of Michigan-Flint, which now held four classes a week at the church’s social ministry, the Urban Renaissance Center, in subjects like social work and English linguistics. The makeshift college classroom had seats reserved for neighborhood residents. Another house was slated to become an agriculture center, where people could learn to garden and farm on vacant land, and then preserve food through canning. Renovations were carried out through an apprenticeship program led by one of Joy Tabernacle’s ministers, which trained five young men in construction work. Pastor Sherman McCathern and his collaborators called this widening community Ubuntu Village, using a Southern African term for “I am, because you are.”1
