Water, Memory, and Reparations in Flint, Michigan

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City of Flint

In October 2015, local and international headlines exposed the glaring irony of the “Pure Michigan” slogan. Flint residents, who for over a year had complained of brown, acidic-tasting drinking water had finally captured national attention; the community had been consuming toxic levels of lead from their spouts since the city switched its water source in April 2014.

Public health officials conclude that this massive lead poisoning will have detrimental impacts on Flint’s 100,000 residents, with the most severe developmental consequences falling on children. Though headlines have receded, Flint is still in crisis. The corroded pipes continue to release lead, despite the city’s switch to a cleaner source. To date, adequate environmental and health reparations have not been made. 

Historical Context

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The Flint Crisis is most often framed as purely the fault of government oversight and corruption, but the city’s history of environmental injustice adds a crucial element of explanation. Viewing this crisis through a historically contextualized lens—emphasizing the memories and racial dynamic of residents— reveals the underlying inequalities, poverty, and socioeconomic barriers to safe, clean water and neighborhoods.

Flint’s history of migration, segregation, degradation, and inequality makes race and class impossible factors to ignore. The health of Flint residents was in jeopardy decades before lead entered the drinking water. General Motors’ birthplace and international manufacturing headquarters is in Flint, and this corporation is the largest employer of the city, especially throughout the 20th century. Because of the manufacturer’s substantial presence, GM has played an important historical role in shaping the economy, population, social trends, and environmental quality of the city.

Rapid population growth began in Flint following World War II, as a direct result of General Motor’s corporate growth plan “that centered on the suburbanization of manufacturing” (Highsmith 2014). This steady stream of laborers built and maintained ‘Buick City,’ a General Motor’s plant whose emissions suffocated the neighborhoods with smog and a rusty residue throughout the second half of the 1900s.

Flint was one of the northern destination cities of the Great Migration, the period between 1916 and 1970 when about six million African Americans moved from the South to the North and West. Black Americans, mostly from Mississippi and Alabama, travelled to Flint for GM employment (“The Great Migration” 2021). While GM attracted employees across racial groups, certain national, state, and city excluded black residents. Residential segregation had a particularly long-lasting impact, with negative health and economic consequences that persist through generations. 

Following World War II, populations in every major city- including Flint- increased rapidly with the return of soldiers and rise of industrialism. The Housing Act of 1949 attempted to account for the new shortage in viable housing by making homes outside of urban center more affordable (Nelson 2015). The Federal Housing Administration implemented a mortgage policy that would allow white laborers to purchase homes in the suburbs at a subsidized rate, but the same opportunity was not granted to black workers. This overt housing racism in the 1950s was replaced by a more covert—though equally effective—residential segregation tool that persists to this day: redlining.

Redlining is known as the process of classifying certain blocks or neighborhoods within city limits to reflect “mortgage security.” These measurements of investment security— used by lenders, developers, and real estate appraisers— are visualized with color-coded maps. Neighborhoods receiving the highest grader are colored green, and are deemed “minimal risks for banks and other mortgage lenders” when determining safe investments, and those coded red were considered “hazardous.” (Nelson 2015). If a resident in a redlined neighborhood applies for a loan, lending institutions are less likely to finance that mortgage. This map displays the original categorizations for Flint, Michigan drawn by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the 1950s.

Even after racial stipulations were removed from the 1949 Housing Act, the practice of redlining persisted, effectively keeping black residents in the most heavily polluted neighborhoods. These maps display data comparing the percent of loans accepted, and the distribution of black residents in Flint in the late 1970s. Twenty years after the explicitly racist 1949 Housing Act, there is a strong geographic association between race and mortgage approval. The northern portion of the city, for instance, has the highest percentage of black residents, but the lowest percentage of loan approvals. Racial segregation in Flint was divided among similar lines when the water was contaminated, and Flint’s history of racial redlining strongly influenced who is affected by the city’s contaminated water today.

These racial divisions resulted in decades of inequality in Flint. Median household income in 2019, for instance, was much lower in neighborhoods originally ‘redlined’ in the 1950s. The map on the left indicates median household income (red is the lowest income), and the map on the right represents original “mortgage security” rankings. If you swipe between maps, you will see that the red polygons representing low mortgage rankings typically remain red to indicate low income.  

The water crisis was particularly severe in Flint, as the city is one of the poorest geographies in the state of Michigan. Compared to nearby Ann Arbor, for instance, Flint’s poverty and income indicators are much grimmer.

Socioeconomic and Housing Characteristics, Ann Arbor and Flint, MI

Notably, the average assessed housing value is substantially larger in Ann Arbor (by nearly $300,000), and the percent black population is much lower (by 47.3 percent). Ann Arbor was one of the metropolitan neighborhoods made affordable to whites in the 1950s, and as a result, home ownership and accumulated wealth have increased for this advantaged population. For Flint’s black residents, segregation, income, and property values have stayed relatively stagnant.

(“U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: Ann Arbor and Flint, Michigan” 2019, Kantor and Nystuen 1982).

Timeline

Environmental and Health Degradation

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In 1966 alone, the U.S. Department of Interior evaluation of the watershed reported 10 million gallons of waste per day were dumped between Flint’s embankments (Renwick 2019). Despite a 1960 directive by the Michigan Water Resources Commission to “abate unlawful pollution of the Flint River,” (Carmody 2016) the river’s quality—particularly downstream— did not improve. A study of the river following the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972 revealed raw sewage from Flint’s wastewater plant, and phenol, ammonia, and other toxins from GM plants. If ingested, these bacteria and chemicals can cause “skin rashes, cardiovascular and gastrointestinal diseases, and other health problems” (Carmody 2016). In addition to lead poisoning from the corroded pipelines, the treatment of the Flint River with chlorine also produced carcinogenic byproducts (trihalomethanes). These trihalomethanes also increased the acidity of the river, further corroding the pipes.

Due to decades of pollution, paired the more recent addition of carcinogens into the primary drinking water source, Genesee County—where Flint is located— has the highest rate of cancer diagnoses in the state (Fonger 2020). A 2015 report by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services concluded the spike in cancers can be attributed directly to the tainted water, and the zip code 48505 is particularly affected. Nearly 85% of this zip code’s population is black or African American, and the zip code is also located near the Genesee Power Station, a health hazard which “burns low-value wood fiber, such as broken crates and pallets, turning them into useable biomass fuel” (Fonger 2020).

Within a few weeks of the switch, residents noted a negative difference in the color, taste, and odor of their tap water. In May 2014, officials were informed that children were developing severe rashes. General Motors began complaining that the water was corroding engine parts and switched their source to Flint Township in October 2014 (Zahran, Mcelmurry, and Sadler 2017). During the summer of 2014, three boil-water alerts were implemented within a 22-day period after E. coli and coliform violations were confirmed in drinking water.

In September 2015, more than a year after the mass contamination, Dr. Mona Hannah-Attisha, a pediatrician who discovered elevated lead levels in children’s blood sounded the alarm to the public. Hannah-Attisha’s study revealed that after the city’s water source switch, lead levels increased nearly 7 percent inside Flint and the surrounding area (Hanna-Attisha et al. 2016).

A geospatial analysis resulting from this report predicted that the harshest consequences of lead blood poisoning would be in Flint’s poorest neighborhoods, with over a 60% child poverty rate (Hanna-Attisha et al. 2016). 

Reparations and Restorative Justice

The Flint Water Crisis resulted in the poisoning of an entire generation of residents. Children are especially vulnerable to lead poisoning, as developing brains and nervous systems are more susceptible to lead's effects on the body. Since lead poisoning can never be fully flushed from the body, health consequences will stay with an entire generation of Flint natives, increasing gaps in wealth and privilege. Dr. Hanna-Attisha stated in a subsequent report that although calcium-rich diets can mitigate lead’s harm in the body, “the most potent medication we can prescribe is to lift our families out of poverty as we strive for equity, justice, and opportunity.” (Hanna-Attisha 2017).

Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a fierce advocate for Flint and reparations, speaks of the risks of poverty that led to the crisis.

In the midst of this country’s national racial reckoning, we cannot ignore the fact that this poisoning occurred in a majority black city. For years following the initial media frenzy, politicians spoke of a $600 million settlement that would bring relief to affected Flint families. But many families say a one-time payout could never compensate for the damage done to their homes and their children. Parents have noticed developmental side effects in their children, often related to learning, physical, and behavioral disabilities. Adults have also seen severe health impacts; Takisha Moller, for example, had a hysterectomy shortly following the city’s switch to the Flint River due to fibroid tumors (Keefer, 2020). Not only must the residents who remember this crisis face severe aftereffects, but the following generation may also be affected by higher blood lead levels and generational cancers. The proposed reparations do not include financing to support children with lifelong health consequences; their healthcare bills and supplemental education programs, for instance, with be much more costly than a one-time payment. Matia White summarized the inadequacies of these reparations after her eight children were affected:

“It’s lifelong. It’s generational. It will affect my children’s children.” 

Conclusions and Recommendations

Flint’s history of racial inequities left certain populations—namely, black residents in the redlined, northern area of Flint—most susceptible to cascading health impacts. Though preliminary research on blood lead poisoning and cancer rates has been conducted, we may not uncover the extent of the damage until years or decades from now.

Chronic threats to secure water, health, housing, safety, and a clean environment existed for decades before the more publicized water crisis. To ensure the health and safety of Flint residents, reparations must be made. Although individual monetary reparations are certainly necessary, community-level reparations which consider the environment, residential segregation, disparate incomes, lower generational wealth, and opportunity should also be included in the national budget. Investments in long-term, resilient places— such as healthy and safe schools, homes, and neighborhoods—is where healing will begin.

Bibliography

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  • Hanna-Attisha, Mona, Jenny LaChance, Richard Casey Sadler, and Allison Champney Schnepp. 2016. “Elevated Blood Lead Levels in Children Associated With the Flint Drinking Water Crisis: A Spatial Analysis of Risk and Public Health Response.” American Journal of Public Health (1971) 106 (2): 283–90. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2015.303003.
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Socioeconomic and Housing Characteristics, Ann Arbor and Flint, MI