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PORTSIDE CULTURE

TOXIC DEBT: AN ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE HISTORY OF DETROIT  
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K.C. Compton
August 18, 2022
Early Learning Nation
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_ Over a period of the five years, beginning in 2014, the City of
Detroit cut of water services for over a quarter million residents.
This book, writes reviewer Compton, is a "dense, deeply researched
history of Detroit’s water disasters." _

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_Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit_
Josiah Rector
The University of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 978-1-4696-6576-4

Between 2014 and 2019, the City of Detroit shut off water service for
more than 141,000 residential accounts, depriving more than a quarter
million people access to water—one of the most basic elements of
human survival. The water shutoffs were concentrated primarily among
impoverished African Americans, disproportionately affecting single
mothers and their children, disabled people and elderly residents
living on fixed incomes. This wasn’t the first time the city had
taken such drastic, fundamentally inhumane steps. It was, in fact, the
latest in a long line of utility shutoffs affecting the least
advantaged people in the city.

_Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit, _Dr. Josiah
Rector’s dense, deeply researched history of Detroit’s water
disasters, lays out the origin story of this most recent catastrophe.
Beginning with the mid nineteenth century, Rector meticulously layers
fact upon fact to detail how politics, policy and societal changes
ebbed and flowed in Michigan’s largest city over multiple
generations to create a witches’ brew of race, class and gender
inequalities that translated into polluted water and scandalous
policies. If Rector’s cataloguing of these events has a certain
here-we-go-again, rinse-and-repeat quality, it’s because since the
late 19th century through present day, Detroit’s history has seen
incessant waves of income inequality, unregulated mass-produced
industry, lackadaisical or non-existent financial regulation,
environmental degradation and unrelenting racial segregation.

Is clean water a basic human right? The irony baked into this question
since Detroit’s earliest days is the fact that what Rector calls the
“dehydration of Detroit” has occurred in an urban area surrounded
by the largest freshwater system in the world.
Along with this history of metastatic industrial development,
staggering pollution, relentless corruption and breathtakingly bad
policy, Rector presents the other side of the coin: the fierce,
courageous, dogged commitment of activists pushing back decade after
decade, demanding cleaner air, better working conditions and water
that wouldn’t poison their children. Rector draws on dozens of oral
history interviews and extensive archival research to tell in
relatable terms what is likely the most comprehensive history of
Detroit’s environmental justice movement to date.

At the heart of the issues raised in _Toxic Debt _is the question of
whether access to water should be considered a human right available
to all, or a commodity available to whoever can pony up sufficient
money to pay a water bill. The irony baked into this question since
Detroit’s earliest days is the fact that what Rector calls the
“dehydration of Detroit” has occurred in an urban area surrounded
by the largest freshwater system in the world.

Throughout the Rust Belt in the 1990s and 2000s, union busting, cuts
to welfare programs and neoliberal trade policies that sent thousands
of jobs to Mexico took a toll on America’s working class. For
Michigan’s Black-majority cities, like Detroit and Flint, the toll
was even more profound as decades of racist housing policies, white
flight, and industrial and commercial disinvestment hollowed out the
cities’ economic core.

Rector doesn’t mince words in laying the water disasters of both
Flint and Detroit solidly at the feet of neoliberal policies of
austerity, deregulation and privatization throughout the 1990s and
2000s. Wall Street shares a sizeable part of the blame as legislation
during President Bill Clinton’s tenure removed the firewall between
commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms and insurance
companies, supercharging Wall Street’s affection for mergers and
acquisitions and enabling commercial banks to make increasingly risky
investments. Investment banks marketed high-risk “swaps” to cities
and Detroit, among many others, took the bait.

In 2013-2014, Detroit declared bankruptcy, resulting in Republican
Gov. Rick Snyder suspending democracy via Michigan’s Emergency
Manager laws, which gave the state the power to impose economically
and environmentally disastrous policies without any accountability to
the residents. Snyder put Detroit under an emergency manager and
imposed radical austerity measures that shut off or poisoned the water
of hundreds of thousands of Americans—largely African American
families—living there. (For a look at how these decisions created
the public health catastrophe of Flint’s water system, see our
review of Dr Hanna Attisha’s _What the Eyes do Not See: _ _A Story
of Crisis, Resistance and Hope in an American City_
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_Different calamity, same players and policies.)

During this time, Detroit’s poor and working-class African Americans
became a lucrative market for subprime loans, which treated home
mortgages as a casino. Balloon fees led to out-of-control mortgage
payments and as the families struggled to make these mortgage
payments, they fell behind on their water bills. Rather than come up
with ways to mitigate these payments, as had been done during the
Great Depression, the city just cut off the spigot. As the city
handled its bankruptcy—the largest in US history—it made a bargain
with its creditors and bondholders. Unsecured creditors—pension
funds representing thousands of active and retired municipal workers
and their families—had to take what the financial wizards called a
“haircut,” meaning they paid for the city’s bankruptcy while the
banks and insurance companies came out fine.

Two thirds of the water cutoffs involved children. In a cruel
Catch-22, child welfare authorities removed children from their homes
because of a state requirement that all homes housing children have
working utilities. On June 25, 2014, the UN Office of the High
Commissioner of Human Rights released a statement calling Detroit’s
policy for shutting off people who couldn’t pay “an affront to
human rights.” Protesters took to the streets demonstrating against
the shutoffs and blockaded the dispatch facility to stop the trucks
leaving to perform shutoffs.

UN officials visiting Detroit at the invitation of the Michigan
Welfare Rights Organization and the Michigan Coalition for Human
Rights found examples of the indignities families suffered from the
shutoffs, such as the mothers whose daughters had to wash themselves
with bottled water during their periods, parents with asthmatic
children who couldn’t operate nebulizers without water, families
unable to adequately bathe themselves and clean their homes. The UN
experts said the shutoffs violated international human rights laws
including the right to water and sanitation, and the right to
non-discrimination.

Two thirds of the water cutoffs involved children. In a cruel
Catch-22, child welfare authorities removed children from their homes
because of a state requirement that all homes housing children have
working utilities.
Even as the infamous Flint water crisis
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unfolded, Gov. Snyder’s policies were contributing directly to
increased lead poisoning among Detroit’s children as well. Austerity
cuts to the Department of Health and Wellness led to the department
ending its lead abatement program, despite evidence of “pervasive
exposure” to lead among the children of Detroit—nearly twice the
level in Flint. According to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, _no_ safe blood level of lead in children has been
identified and even low levels of lead have been shown to negatively
affect a child’s intelligence, academic achievement and ability to
pay attention.

Austerity measures and outsourcing also led to a toxic water disaster
in Detroit’s schools, as hundreds of the district’s unionized
maintenance workers were laid off, accelerating the physical decay of
its buildings. In 2016, Detroit Public Schools officials discovered
toxic levels of lead and copper in 19 out of the district’s 62
tested schools. As Rector writes, “Far from fixing DPS, austerity
policies had transformed centers of learning into sources of permanent
brain damage for unknown numbers of children.”

It would be satisfying to report that these matters are all safely in
the past and Detroit residents have finally gotten a fair shake and
fresh water. Sadly, that is not the case. In March 2020, Gov. Gretchen
Whitmer responded to activists’ demands for action by issuing an
Executive Order requiring that all public water utilities restore
water service to any residence where water had been shut off due to
non-payment. The policy would only last through the end of the
pandemic. Detroit has extended the shutoff moratorium through 2022 but
has shown little support for progressive water rate structures.

Rector writes that the water disasters of Detroit and Flint
demonstrate the “horrific human costs of sacrificing basic
environmental health protections to the short-term financial interests
of bond-holders and private contractors.” A major takeaway of _Toxic
Debt_ is how misguided the free-market approach to public services is.
Privatizing has an incredible allure to investors, but
“efficiencies” most often lead to underfunding the resources
necessary for the long-term health and viability of an economy and a
society. Public systems should be accountable to the public.

K.C. Compton worked as a reporter, editor and columnist for newspapers
throughout the Rocky Mountain region for 20 years before moving to the
Kansas City area as an editor for _Mother Earth News_. She has been
in Seattle since 2016, enjoying life as a freelance and contract
writer and editor.

* evironmental justice
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* power
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* Politics
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* Detroit
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* Racism
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* environmental racism
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