Origins of the Flint Water Crisis: Uneven Development,Urban Political Ecology,and Racial Capitalism

Introduction

The research on urban disasters is anchored in two interrelated claims: that preexisting racial and class inequalities structure the impact of urban disasters and patterns of urban resettlement and that neoliberal urbanism prefigures the scope of urban disasters and shapes the trajectory of economic redevelopment. Though these two bodies of work have improved our understanding of the causes and consequences of such crises, they are not so helpful in explaining the timing or ecological content of the Flint Water Crisis. The puzzle that animates this article therefore is “why water and why now?”

Drawing on a content analysis of meeting minutes, 25 in-depth interviews with Flint residents and Michigan officials, and more than three years of participant observation, we argue that the Flint Water Crisis occurred when and how it did because Flint became a pawn in a larger game to shift control of municipal water rights from the cities to the suburbs. Specifically, suburban actors worked with the state government to establish two new regional water authorities: the Flint-area Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA) and the Detroit-area Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA). Flint was a lynchpin of this plan in two respects: first, suburban and state actors needed Flint’s borrowing power to finance the KWA pipeline, and second, to switch Flint’s water supply from the Detroit Water and Sewer Department (hereafter DWSD) to KWA, the city would need a temporary water source while the new pipeline was being built, the Flint River. ¹ This not only placed Flint residents on a toxic water source but also enabled the takeover of the DWSD. That is, removing Flint, DWSD’s largest wholesale customer, from Detroit’s balance sheet made the public water utility look more fiscally insolvent than it was, thereby further justifying the regional takeover. The Flint Water Crisis was therefore the consequence of an extractivist project of White state and suburban actors to “regionalize” and thereby expropriate the assets and natural resources controlled by the predominantly Black working-class city of Detroit. This process was achieved not through the physical occupation of urban space, but the reconfiguration of space through a mechanism of public governance: the regional water authority.

The case of Flint offers several reminders that work to environmentalize urban sociology. First, after decades of deindustrialization in the automotive industry, political and economic actors sought to attract surplus capital to Southeast Michigan. This process had ecological implications. In the case of Flint, regional water authorities marketed themselves as a prime source of raw water for corporations interested in fracking. Second, the search for new markets was structured by what urban political ecologists (UPEs) call the “urbanization of nature.” Until the crisis, Detroit held a monopoly on the transport and treatment of water in Southeast Michigan, and the city’s water utility, DWSD, sold and delivered that water to city and suburban residents. It was that particular commodity circuit that became the object of political struggle and expropriation. Finally, following scholars of racial capitalism, the Flint Water Crisis demonstrates that the foregoing process resulted in the dispossession of communities of color. For all of these reasons—because of the ecological impacts of uneven development, the ongoing urbanization of nature, and the dynamics of environmental racism ² in cities—the urban is always already environmental.

In the following, we first critically review the literature on urban crises and then synthesize the research on uneven development, urban political ecology, and racial capitalism to theorize the Flint Water Crisis. Second, we present our case selection, methods, and data. Next, we lay out our empirical data, with special attention to the transfer of municipal water rights. Finally, we end with a summary of the article and directions for future research.

Urban crises and Disasters

The contemporary scholarship on urban crises emerged in response to the social dynamics of disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, and 9/11. Two related logics of explanation cut across this body of work and are increasingly used in tandem. One logic was born of the claim that such crises are not “natural,” instead suggesting that social inequalities such as race and class shape both the impact of natural disasters on urban communities and the process of resettlement (see, for example, Adeola and Picou 2012; Briggs 2006; Elliott, Hite, and Devine 2009; Greenbaum 2006; Logan 2009; Hartman and Squires 2006; Medwinter 2020; A. Reed Jr. 2005; B. Reed 2006; Venkatesh 2006; Weber and Lichtenstein 2015; Wyczalkowski et al. 2019). A related logic suggests that neoliberalism (variously theorized as neoliberal urbanism and the growth machine) conditions the severity of the crisis in a given case and the market-oriented character of economic redevelopment (see, for example, Adams 2013; Gotham 2013; Gotham and Greenberg 2014; Gould and Lewis 2018; Johnson 2011; Klein 2007; Peck, Theodore, and Brenner 2009; A. Reed Jr. 2021; Tierney 2015).

Though the foregoing work has contributed greatly to our knowledge of urban disasters, by themselves they tend to undertheorize the latter’s timing and ecological content. First, because the proffered causal mechanisms driving urban crises have been in operation for several decades, they cannot explain the timing of contemporary urban crises, especially those not linked to climate events or terrorist attacks that carry a specific time signature. For example, given that Flint has endured decades of racial segregation and neoliberalization (Dandaneau 1996; Highsmith 2016), we might ask why the recent mass poisoning of Flint residents began in 2014 and not before.

Second, the existing literature tends to presuppose the reoccupation and economic redevelopment of physical urban space. Accordingly, they underemphasize modes of asset expropriation and natural resource extraction across multiple spatial scales in favor of processes that entail the selective “revitalization” of urban neighborhoods, whether through the gentrification of poor Black communities or the relatively rapid resettlement of affluent White communities. This relative silence on resource extraction finds an echo in the claim that urban disasters are not natural, an argument that works unintentionally to reinforce the false separation of cities from nature. Accordingly, attention to the ecological content of urban disasters has been somewhat muted in the literature, though it is by no means entirely absent. ³

Uneven Development, Urban Political Ecology, and Racial Capitalism

Theorizing the complex dynamics leading up to the Flint Water Crisis entails a synthesis of three otherwise isolated bodies of work. The scholarship on uneven development helps to frame the relationship between the cities and suburbs of Southeast Michigan within the broader political economy. David Harvey’s (2004) concept of accumulation by dispossession is especially important in this regard. UPEs (Arboleda 2019; Kaika, 2005, 2006; Keil 2018; Swyngedouw 2015; Swyngedouw and Kaika 2014), in turn, allow us to visualize how the urbanization of nature structured uneven development in this case. Third, urban sociologists from Du Bois ([1899] 1996) to Dantzler (2021) insist that race relations shape the political economy of cities. Accordingly, we frame the foregoing process partly in terms of the emerging literature on racial capitalism within urban sociology.

The concept of uneven development emerged and evolved in response to successive theories, which held that all nations were proceeding inexorably through ever more advanced stages of economic and political development. The competing claim, advanced by Trotsky (1970, 1977), Frank (1966), and Wallerstein (1974), was that capital accumulation required uneven or combined development; that is, the underdevelopment of some economies enabled the development of others.

In the shadow of the Second Iraq War and the depredations of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, David Harvey (2004) argued that uneven development under neoliberalism operated on the logic of “accumulation by dispossession.” Capitalism is cyclically beset by crises of accumulation, in which the market is unable to absorb surplus capital (e.g., inventories of unsold goods) and labor (i.e., mass unemployment). In these moments, capitalists may employ a “spatio-temporal fix” that he calls “accumulation by dispossession.” The latter opens developing countries up to international competition (e.g., through free trade and the privatization of state industries), thereby furnishing new markets for surplus capital to move on from places where capital accumulation has stalled (2004:76). More recent work allows us to translate these global dynamics in subnational contexts. Neil Smith (2008), for example, suggested that uneven development occurs at multiple levels of analysis due to the “fragmentation, dissociation, and recombination of places and events at all spatial scales” under neoliberalism (2008:12). Capital has notably forged new markets by undermining the public institutions of cities and states in crisis. Thus, Lipman (2011) argued that Chicago charter schools, like the markets of developing countries, have furnished a new profit center for surplus capital to migrate.

Uneven development is a necessary but insufficient causal explanation for the Flint Water Crisis, however. One can argue that the latter is partly a function of uneven development at subnational spatial scales: better-resourced suburban and state actors exploited Detroit’s assets and Flint’s borrowing power to create a new market in water in the face of automotive deindustrialization. The problem with this story is that it is ahistorical with respect to ecology and race: on that account, the agents of capital, seeking new outlets for surplus capital in a crisis of accumulation, realized that they were located next to the largest source of freshwater in the world and decided to exploit it. Ecologically speaking, such a story sidesteps the preexisting institutional arrangements that invested the City of Detroit with the right to source and treat water from the rural hinterland and sell it to other cities and suburbs across Southeast Michigan. Those institutional arrangements—the previous urban political ecology—predisposed this specific case of uneven development to unfold in the way that it did. Furthermore, one cannot understand the transfer of municipal water rights without attending to the racialization of urban and suburban space. To address the first of these blindspots, we turn now to the literature on urban political ecology (UPE).

UPEs seek to disrupt the fetishized separation of city and nature. Massive investments in labor power, capital, infrastructure, engineering, and public policy make it seem as though the city and nature are separate space envelopes. Thus, in the case of water treatment in Athens and London, Kaika (2005) observes that nature was initially constructed as wild and in need of control; with the advent of modern infrastructure local actors spoke of humanity’s triumph over nature through feats of engineering; finally, with the lack of funding and deterioration of urban infrastructure, nature was framed again as untamed and the source of urban disasters. In fact, however, city and nature had been inextricably intertwined all along. The work of transporting water from “nature” to the taps of city residents is a complicated undertaking, bringing the natural resources of the remotest rural locales into the ambit of urbanization. Likewise, Arboleda (2019), focusing on the linkage between cities and rural mining in Chile, urged a move toward a theory of extraction that brings together “natural resources and built environments, as well as city and non-city space, into novel and ever more intricate configurations” (p. 3). These include what he calls, “a commodity circuit of extraction, formed by all the webs of infrastructural and logistical connectivity that enable the journey of raw materials from sites of extraction to their realization in the market” [emphasis in original] (Arboleda 2019).

Importantly, because these processes operate across spatial scales, they can become the object of struggle in regional politics. Thus, Swyngedouw (2015) documented social conflict over the diversion of up to 4,000 cubic hectometers of water from the Ebro and Tajo rivers in the North and middle of Spain to the more arid regions of the South and Barcelona. So-called “water wars” ensued, with northern ecologists and farmers and southern irrigators and development boosters each demanding their “right to water” and a “just distribution” of natural resources (p. 6).

UPE thus brings us closer to theorizing the Flint Water Crisis. The ecological content of that crisis—that is, that it turned on water transport and treatment—is not solely a function of uneven development. It was, we argue, also a function of a preexisting urban political ecology that invested Detroit with a monopoly on municipal water rights. What remains missing from this more fully fleshed-out story is the way in which race structured the relations among state and local actors. To address this second blind spot, we consult the emerging literature on racial capitalism in urban sociology.

There have been two overarching approaches to race in urban sociology: a colorblind approach beginning with Robert Park and the Chicago School that frames the experience of racialized people as an unfortunate exception to the overall trajectory of urban settlement, and another approach, typified by Du Bois and others, that frames race and racism as key organizing principles of U.S. cities (Dantzler, Korver-Glenn, and Howell 2022). As an alternative to the former and a continuation of the latter, Dantzler (2021) advanced a framework that synthesizes David Harvey’s work on accumulation by dispossession with scholars of racial capitalism, especially Cedric Robinson ([1983] 2000). Whereas Harvey treats racial inequalities as an unfortunate effect of uneven development (thus unwittingly embracing a colorblind approach to capital accumulation), Robinson held that racialization was fundamental to the development of capitalism. Accordingly, Dantzler argues that capitalism shapes the urban process through racialized dispossession and displacement.

Bringing the foregoing theoretical clues together, we synthesize Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession with Dantzler’s insistence that capitalism fundamentally concentrates the dispossessory effects of uneven development on communities of color. At the same time, we hold that racialized dispossession occurs in the context of the ongoing urbanization of nature and entails the expropriation and commodification of natural resources across multiple spatial scales. In the case of Flint, the combined effects of uneven development, racial capitalism, and urban political ecology led to the formation of two regional water authorities, which shifted control over the treatment and delivery of Great Lakes water from Detroit to the state and suburbs. The regionalization ⁴ of municipal water rights, in turn, led to the mass poisoning of Flint residents beginning in 2014.

Case Selection, Data, and Methods

Instead of searching for statistical significance by choosing a “representative case,” we look for “societal significance” in the Flint Water Crisis, using Burawoy’s extended case method (Burawoy 1998; Burawoy et al. 1991). We invite colleagues to apply our findings to other urban disasters involving contaminated water (e.g., Jackson, Chicago, Oakland, and Camp Lejeune), but we maintain, as Burawoy does, that “The importance of the single case lies in what it tells us about society as a whole rather than about the population of similar cases” (Burawoy et al. 1991:281). The point of the extended case method is not to generalize, but to reach for the larger social forces that condition or structure the case (Burawoy et al. 1991:278; cf. Small 2009). For us the vital social forces are uneven development, the urbanization of nature, and racial capitalism; all hang together in a process that led to a water crisis in Flint.

The division of labor among the co-authors bears brief mention here: the first author (hereafter FA), an African American man and Flint native, conducted all the data collection and analysis for this project; the framing and puzzle come straight out of his dissertation. The second author, an Asian American man and former Michigander, wrote the literature review and lent his expertise in article writing. Most of what follows reflects FA’s experience in the field, the data he collected, and the methodological impulses that guided him.

The empirical data for this article are drawn from three years of ethnographic fieldwork, archival content analysis, and data from 25 in-depth interviews. In tandem, these methods work to contextualize the crisis, piece together the puzzle of water regionalization in Southeast Michigan, and capture the lived experiences of those poisoned in the aftermath of regionalization.

FA lived in the city of Flint during the water crisis. Through ethnographic fieldwork, FA documented the experiences of Flint residents, politicians, and other public officials. This fieldwork drew upon the connections, intuition, and insight that came from FA’s own upbringing and periodic residency in the city, and his willingness to embrace his role as a partial outsider. FA recognized early on in the project that community members, activists, and concerned citizens wanted to get to the bottom of why this crisis happened and had first-hand experience that was different from his own.

FA’s methodological perspective is partly influenced by Mario Small, who seeks to decolonize the “one dimensional portrayals of Black and Latino communities” by taking stock of what insiders see that “their white colleagues do not” (Small 2015:1). This is not to deny that “the stranger” can do valuable research, or indeed that FA’s status as a doctoral student at the time of fieldwork set him apart from his former neighbors. Nevertheless, FA’s roots in the community helped him gain access to important networks and actors that other scholars might have had more difficulty in obtaining, especially in the midst of a crisis in which community members were suspicious of the incessant poking and prodding of outsiders.

Building trust through his networks and contributing to the relief effort himself granted FA entrée into key meetings, activist demonstrations, and political events in the city. Becoming a regular at city council meetings introduced FA to well-known councilors and their political perspectives. Attendance at local activist organization meetings and state-sponsored discussions of water quality were additionally useful. This was especially true for one-off events such as protests led by water activists and a special political meeting, set by the city, held in a Black church, and requiring participants to follow church rules (no hats for men, no swearing).

Ethnographic data were supplemented with interview data. Respondents were selected using a purposive case selection strategy. FA created an organizational chart of elected officials and other leaders who were involved in city politics during and after the water crisis. From there, FA selected leaders based upon how much coverage they had from national media. They then were recruited through FA’s social networks, which often required expansion by attending meetings where prospective respondents were present.

Archival data contained in this work is composed of data released by the State of Michigan, including government correspondence surrounding the Flint water switch, cost and feasibility assessments of water sources, and the Detroit Bankruptcy. FA also scoured publicly released correspondence between Emergency Managers, KWA, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (hereafter MDEQ), and Treasury officials.

Media sources and their accounts of Southeast Michigan politics, the Detroit Bankruptcy, Emergency Managers, and water events were additionally used. FA examined seven and a half years of print and digital media from July 2013 to December 2020. Media outlets examined included Bridge Michigan, MLive, Detroit News, Detroit Free Press, Michigan Public Radio, the Detroit Metro Times, Crain’s Business Detroit, and the conservative Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

Policy reports provided insight into the complexity of the Detroit Bankruptcy and the Flint Water Crisis. These included studies from the Michigan Civil Rights Commission, the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, and Michigan State University, among others.

Origins of the Flint Water Crisis

I made a prediction a long time ago, and it’s come to pass. I said, “What we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn.”

-L. Brooks Patterson, Oakland County Executive (Williams 2014)

In 2014, the year of the Flint Water Crisis, Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson told the New Yorker just what he thought of the City of Detroit. Explaining his water regionalization plan, Patterson said that he and his compatriots would “herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn.” Patterson reveals that he and his associates had no interest in the gentrification or redevelopment of urban space, as scholars of urban disaster presuppose. Instead, they were content with enclosure and separation. In the following empirical section, we expose the multiscalar extractive project that precipitated the Flint Water Crisis.

Though the story ends in Flint, it begins in Detroit. Patterson and other suburban elites were the moving spirit behind regionalization, but their henchman in the city was Detroit Emergency Manager ⁵ Kevyn Orr. Like other officials who were the public face of regionalization, Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr was African American. Ken Buckfire, Manager of Detroit’s investment bank Miller Buckfire, acknowledges that he, State Treasurer Andy Dillion, and Rich Baird (special advisor to Governor Rick Snyder) considered race in selecting Mr. Orr. Buckfire said,

We strongly believed that the emergency manager should be an African American. Clearly given the political tensions and the history of race relations in the city, if the emergency manager was a white person, and even if they were the most qualified candidate, people would characterize the choice as “Whitey’s taking over the city again.” (Bomey 2017:34)

Like Black advocates of municipal restructuring in other cases (e.g., characterization of public schools), the presence of Mr. Orr and other Black leaders conferred legitimacy upon a corporate-state bloc that would have otherwise faced charges of racism.

One of Orr’s first initiatives was a ruthless water shutoff campaign aimed at recouping 118 million dollars in delinquent water bills (Bomey 2017:189; Chapman 2014). The city believed the best way to go about this was to go after residents who owed as little as $150 to the department or were just two months delinquent on payment of water bills (Badger 2014; Swaine 2014; Wisely 2014). Orr’s lieutenants marketed this effort as a crackdown on Detroiters who simply wanted to get one over on the DWSD. This claim ignored the data: that Detroit was the poorest big city in America in 2014 with “39.3 percent of the population living below the poverty line of $24,008 for a family of 4” (Bouffard 2015) and that government-owned property and businesses owed nearly double the amount of money that homeowners owed to the city ($41 million compared with $21 million for homeowners) (Kurth 2016).

Though their efforts did little for the financial health of the utility, they were successful in generating a media frenzy. Media outlets from the New York Times and Washington Post to more local outlets like MLive and the Detroit News provided both detailed information on the day-to-day happenings and investigative journalism that eventually uncovered the hypocrisy of the shutoffs. The Emergency Manager, they found, was targeting small time offenders while the three largest water debtors (the State of Michigan, Detroit Red Wings, and Detroit Lions) got off scot-free despite owing collectively over five million dollars to the DWSD (Clark 2013). The water shutoff campaign was so cruel that the Daily Show with Jon Stewart ran a segment on the hypocrisy of picking on Detroit’s poorest residents while allowing delinquent commercial and municipal accounts to slide ⁶ (Fournier 2014; Lacy 2014). Eventually, Kevyn Orr offloaded the management of the DWSD to mayor Mike Duggan who temporarily suspended water shutoffs to circulate information on financial assistance (Bomey 2017:190; Lambert 2014).

Flint and the KWA

While Kevyn Orr used the shutoff campaign to paint DWSD as hopelessly insolvent, successive Flint Emergency Managers Michael Brown, Darnell Earley, and Ed Kurtz helped to pry the city of Flint, DWSD’s largest wholesale customer, away from the latter’s balance sheet. This plan was orchestrated by suburban Genesee County, the MDEQ, and the State of Michigan. Even as the Detroit suburbs laid the groundwork for restructuring DWSD, the state facilitated the construction of a new regional water authority. Suburban communities had long wanted to break from DWSD but were never willing to pay the costs associated to do so. With Detroit and Flint in financial receivership, they would finally have their chance.

Planning began in November 2012, when Ed Kurtz wrote to state treasurer Andy Dillon suggesting that a regional water authority (later the KWA) was the best long-term water utility for Flint due to rising costs at DWSD (Campbell 2016). In 2013, Flint Emergency Manager Michael Brown agreed to purchase water from the KWA instead of DWSD, and a year later the Flint City Council would take a largely symbolic vote to approve the plan. Importantly, a lynchpin of the deal was to place Flint on a temporary water source as the city transitioned from DWSD to KWA. The city’s elected officials never had any input on the language of the Administrative Consent Order (ACO) that would be used to finance the KWA, nor were they included in the specifics of creating the new authority, such as the plan to have the city draw water temporarily from the Flint River (Egan 2016).

State officials knew that the Flint River was not a viable water source, as prior cost and feasibility estimates never established it as cheaper than Lake Huron alternatives. These reports also pointed out the volatility of Flint River water, the increased costs of treatment, the disposal of lime sludge (a byproduct of water treatment), and 100-year lows in the water table. This was information that both state officials and Emergency Managers Darnell Earley and Ed Kurtz would have been privy to. ⁷ Repeated warnings came from MDEQ officials and private contractors about the use of the Flint River as a primary source of drinking water, and yet by April 2013 Ed Kurtz would notify the DWSD that Flint would be terminating its contract one year later. By June, the KWA would break ground and Ed Kurtz would sign a contract with an engineering firm to prepare the Flint water treatment plant to begin using the Flint River as its primary interim source of water. Kurtz made this decision eight days before attending an all-day meeting of Flint officials, the Genesee County Drain Commissioner, and MDEQ officials about the feasibility of using the Flint River until the KWA was completed.

If there was any indication that an interim primary water source other than the Flint River would be considered, that died when the KWA started running out of cash. To address this issue, the state would orchestrate a “sweetheart” ACO in which Flint would finance 35 percent of the building of the KWA. Crucially the ACO stated that Flint “plans to use the Flint River as its temporary source of untreated water supply until KWA water is available” and that Flint “must undertake the KWA public improvement project or undertake other public improvement projects to continue to use the Flint River” (Egan 2016). With the ACO finalized, the KWA had the necessary bond money to continue building the pipeline, and Flint had no way of using DWSD water in the interim.

On the eve of the Crisis, Flint Mayor Dayne Walling raised a glass to water autonomy and regional cooperation, saying (now infamously), “Here’s to Flint!” Inside the Flint water plant was an entirely different scene. The plant was severely understaffed at that point. Those who worked there lacked proper training and equipment as the plant needed nearly eight million dollars in repairs to treat water (Kaffer 2016). This led water plant staff to pour water treatment chemicals through a hole in the floor as a means of water treatment “triage” (Fonger 2018).

State and local officials repeatedly ignored the warnings from Flint water treatment plant manager Michael Glasgow. On April 17, 2014, Glasgow emailed his warning to the MDEQ:

I have people above me making plans to distribute water ASAP. I was reluctant before, but after looking at the monitoring schedule and our current staffing, I do not anticipate giving the OK to begin sending water out anytime soon. If water is distributed from this plant in the next couple of weeks, it will be against my direction. I need time to adequately train additional staff and to update our monitoring plans before I feel we are ready. I want to reiterate this to management above me, but they seem to have their own agenda. (Campbell 2016:34)

If there was not already a preponderance of evidence of the unviability of treating river water, the warnings from the people responsible for running the day-to-day activities of the department should have been enough to slow down the transition. None of this, however, would matter because this was not about clean water, but rather a larger power play for water rights in Southeast Michigan.

Detroit and the GLWA

With the plan for Flint to go off DWSD now firmly in place and Detroit engulfed in a water war with its own residents, Kevyn Orr’s administration went to work crafting a deal to regionalize the DWSD in exchange for lease payments from the suburbs. The blueprint of Orr’s plan came out of U.S. District Judge Sean Cox 2011 “root cause” committee, consisting of several city executives and City Council members (Bomey 2017:182; Pinho 2013; Siegal 2013). The door was opened to implement the plan when Cox terminated federal oversight of the DWSD the week Kevyn Orr took office, effectively removing a key hurdle to establishing a new regional entity that would be called the GLWA (Bomey 2017:182).

The terms of regionalization took on many iterations but the one that stuck was a deal where the suburbs would lease the authority from the city of Detroit in exchange for operating it. Orr would enlist Detroit’s investment banking firm, Miller Buckfire, to adopt an augmented version of the root cause committee plan.

Suburban politicians rejected a proposed plan whereby DWSD would “transfer the system’s assets to an external authority that would pay the City of Detroit about $50 million annually over forty years” (Bomey 2017:185). Their objection was a provision that called for lease payments to be “deposited back into the city’s (of Detroit) general fund” (Bomey 2017:185). Detroit’s investment team knew that the new authority could cover these payments because under the city’s bankruptcy plan, cuts to pensions and retiree health care insurance would save DWSD an equal amount in costs over four decades (Bomey 2017:185). Those very bankruptcy provisions would put a wrinkle in the city’s negotiation efforts with the suburbs.

Longtime Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson swiftly moved to destroy Orr’s proposed deal and install his own. Patterson said,

If [the authority] has any kind of cash flow, it has to go back into the system and not in the general fund. That’s one of the tenets. The money stays in the system because we’ve got the huge cost of rebuilding and upgrading. We can’t let the water department become a cash cow to fund the [city]. (Bomey 2017:186)

In a sharp counter-maneuver, Kevyn Orr then threatened to privatize DWSD, which would put money into Detroit’s general fund and likely raise rates on the city and suburbs. This threat led the Deputy Oakland County Commissioner to warn Michigan Governor Rick Snyder’s chief of staff Dennis Muchmore of the dangers of privatization while reiterating they had no interest in putting a dime in Detroit’s coffers. The Deputy Commissioner wrote,

If there is any exposure of the suburbs assuming financial responsibility for Detroit’s morass, mismanagement, and corruption over the years, I seriously doubt that there would be any votes . . . God help this region if Orr chooses to try to privatize this matter with the increased costs that brings– it would light up [the region]. (Bomey 2017:187)

To quell the suburban outcry over privatization, Governor Snyder deployed his allies to smooth over tensions. Miraculously after one night out with L. Brooks Patterson, Kevyn Orr would soon forget his fiduciary responsibility to Detroit, drop his privatization plans, and come to an agreement to regionalize the DWSD. This time, however, the money that Detroit would receive would not go into its general operating fund. Instead, the authority would pay $50 million annually to the city in a fund that could only be used to finance capital improvements or pay debt service obligations for bonds issued on local or regional improvements to the water system (Ramirez and Watson 2015; Wisely and Guillen 2015). The deal gave Detroit taxpayers virtually nothing (Bomey 2017:184).

In sum, the foregoing maneuvers led to the establishment of two water authorities on the backs of two majority-Black cities. Flint financed one-third of the KWA and agreed to source its drinking water from the new authority instead of DWSD. In the transition to this new regional water authority, Flint emergency managers and state officials agreed to put residents on a temporary water source, the Flint River. The establishment of the KWA, in turn, removed Flint from DWSD’s balance sheet, a fact that made the Motor City’s water utility look even more insolvent after a public campaign of water shutoffs. Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr, along with state and suburban officials, then established the GLWA. Together, the founding of the Karegnondi and Great Lakes regional water authorities amounted to the largest transfer of water rights in generations. The casualties were the cities of Detroit and Flint. Detroit lost arguably its most valuable asset and public control of a vital natural resource. Flint was poisoned and, to add insult to injury, went ever deeper into debt by financing the KWA, the very vehicle of the crisis.

Brown Water for Black People

The consequences of this colossal undertaking were threefold. First, the environmental devastation of the Flint Water Crisis encountered the already existing crisis of socioeconomic inequality. Flint, once an industrial boom town, was home to 80,000 auto workers in 1978, second only to Detroit for the highest number of autoworkers in the United States (Dandaneau 1996: xxi). By 2009, metropolitan Flint would have just 6,434 auto workers (Highsmith 2016:272). The long history of racial segregation concentrated the devastating effects of deindustrialization on Black workers. Flint is a majority-Black city, with 56.7 percent of the population being African American and 69 percent of the population being non-White. Flint is also home to one of the highest poverty rates in the nation (35.5 percent) and has the highest concentrated poverty rate in Michigan. ⁸ By comparison, the suburban areas of Genesee County are 75 percent White and have a median income of $54,052 (a number brought down by Flint’s median income of $32,358). ⁹

Second, White suburbanites adjacent to Detroit and Flint gained two water assets, one which possesses the ability to sell raw water to corporate actors for fracking, and another that is the third largest water system in the country with roughly 4.5 million customers. These counties are overwhelmingly affluent and White. Oakland County, Michigan, for example, has a median income of $86,275 and is 75 percent White ¹⁰ ; its eastern neighbor, Macomb County is 79 percent White and has a median income of $67,828. ¹¹ Regionalization would ensure White suburban control of water rights into perpetuity.

However, the third and arguably most profound impact of this suburban extraction was the poisoning of more than 100,000 Flint residents and thousands who visited Flint over the ensuing years. The water crisis persisted for nearly two years without a change in water supply, and the harm lingers on to this day. This remains especially traumatic for children, who are more susceptible to lead poisoning than adults.

As Dantzler rightly observes, the effects of uneven development are concentrated in communities of color. This was not lost on the respondents in our study, who were clear that the Flint Water Crisis was an instance of racial and economic dispossession. One respondent said,

It was a coup. It was just a horrible, horrible land grab by the Republican institution, they sold our stuff to their corporate friends, and they made the 1% in Michigan richer. ¹²

Here a Flint resident frames the totality of this process as both a “coup” and a “land grab” on the part of Republican officials. Specifically, the respondent makes reference to the act of circumventing local Black democracies and “selling our stuff to their corporate friends.”

However, if Dantlzer argues that racial capitalism manifests as dispossession and displacement, our own work captures a related side effect of that process: social activism. In Flint, this was evident in the corresponding land grab of gentrification. The latter began to transform specific communities even as extraction via a coordinated regional effort, was poisoning the city. A second resident detailed this change in a neighborhood called Carriage Town:

Slowly just seeing every little aspect of like Carriage Town changing, slowly made me see what was happening. That’s why a lot of my politics reflect community self-determination, and the community coming together. ¹³

When asked to elaborate, Juan told me a story about his work with his mother to help homeless people in the city:

There was a property over by the Oak Street School, there was a property over there that we were trying to get into, the Vice President of the Grand Traverse Neighborhood Association said ‘Oh, we don’t want those people here’ in reference to what we were going to be doing (with the homeless community). There is a very deep classism in marginalized communities when it comes to gentrification, and it’s like seeing income inequality and seeing like the repression towards people who are being marginalized really created my politics in many ways. ¹³

In this passage, Juan says that the gentrification of Carriage Town and opposition to housing the homeless led him to a politics of “community self-determination” as well as an impulse to confront the classism within marginalized communities. The social reality of “two Flints” compelled him to be a part of resistance efforts. He did this first by demonstrating with the Standing Rock Water Warriors who came to the city to protest the water crisis, and then in going to protest a community “Town Hall Meeting” that ended in the arrest of six people (Acosta 2017; Foote 2017).

Like many other activists at the time, Juan became connected to Flint Rising, a grassroots organization started by Flint residents, that organized around three demands: replace all damaged service lines immediately using workers from Flint; 100 percent water bill reimbursement dating back to April 2014 and until the water is deemed safe; and health and education services for all children, adults, and seniors in the community. Flint Rising ¹⁴ was successful in pushing the city and state to replace lead service lines in the city and in building some degree of health and educational services for the victims of the water crisis.

Conclusion

The existing literature on urban disasters does not adequately address either their timing or ecological content. Accordingly, the puzzle that orients this article on the Flint Water Crisis has been, “why water and why now?”

Our answer builds upon the existing research but also incorporates the theoretical insights of the otherwise isolated literature of uneven development, urban political ecology, and racial capitalism. We argue that the timing and ecological content of the Flint Water Crisis hinged on the transfer of water rights from the majority-Black city of Detroit to the White suburbs of Southeast Michigan through the establishment of two regional water authorities. A lynchpin of both regionalization plans was to shift Flint’s water source from the DWSD to the Flint River. The result was the mass poisoning of Flint’s mostly Black working-class residents and the loss of Detroit’s most valuable asset and natural resource.

The article makes at least two contributions. First, we move beyond assumptions that postdisaster “revitalization” efforts center on the physical reoccupation and redevelopment of urban space. Instead, we foreground a process in which suburban actors regionalize the assets of urban communities. This process is multiscalar in character and emphasizes both the extraction of natural resources from the rural hinterland and the reconfiguration of preexisting institutional arrangements that centered on the treatment, commodification, and transport of water in the City of Detroit. Second, we synthesize the work of David Harvey and Prentiss Dantzler to highlight the ways in which uneven development results in the dispossession of communities of color. Through the mechanism of regional water authorities, state and suburban actors (1) expropriated Detroit’s most valuable asset, the DWSD, (2) exploited Flint’s borrowing power to finance the regionalization project, and (3) poisoned Flint’s majority-Black residents as a result.

As Flint residents suggest, regionalization goes hand in hand with gentrification. Urban sociologists should work to understand how these processes are interrelated. Doing so will uncover the multitude of ways in which extraction and occupation hang together and are then disproportionately wielded against Black, Brown, and impoverished communities. Some of this work is already being done (see Pauli 2019; Purifoy and Seamster 2020; Sadler and Highsmith 2016; Seamster 2018); however, much more work is needed to capture the local and specific ways in which communities are being transformed.

Finally, this article has done a great deal to explain the ways in which an extractivist project created an environmental crisis in Flint, but it has done relatively little to unearth the lived experiences of people after the disaster. Much like the victims of Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy have stories of hardship, abandonment, and displacement, survivors of the Flint Water Crisis remain forever impacted by this environmental harm. Future work must highlight these experiences: the trauma that is produced by the transfer of municipal water rights, is just as important as the orchestration of said transfer. The two stories are intrinsically linked, and both must be highlighted.