Water Shutoffs During COVID-19 and Black Lives: Case Study Detroit

Abstract

The present water shutoff crisis in Detroit, which has deepened with the spread of COVID-19, exists within an historical context of decades-old government-sanctioned racial residential segregation policies that continue today. This includes the decrease in black homeownership and wealth, integration, and democratically elected governance. Information collected by local grassroots organizations, Detroit newspaper reports, and academic research, specific to the metropolitan area, reveal the inter-relationships among banking/housing industries, water access, and government policies. The result has been diversions of taxpayer money away from affordable housing, home loans, and public services (i.e., water). Instead, public resources are distributed to support those in powerful political and economic positions. Although water has not been formally privatized, we argue that a system of commodification exists, which taxes/fines the impoverished black population of the City of Detroit, but provides free and/or reduced water rates to the elites and largely white suburban population. The immediate actions required are reconnecting household water, providing affordable housing, redirecting taxpayer funds to the benefit of the public good, and government transparency and accountability. Collaborative networks of local environmental organizations, including mostly black participants, are leading the public opposition to these policies and directly link water shutoffs to public health. We suggest that future research efforts focus on work that increases the public awareness of the systemic linkages among water shutoffs, public health, racist social structures, housing patterns, and government policies. Continued active democratic participation of community residents must be a priority in future research and organizing activities.

INTRODUCTION

Water shutoffs, public health, and racial inequities

As of July 2020, at least 10,000¹ Detroit homes are estimated to be without water service, even though Mayor Duggan reported water had been restored, as dictated by Governor Whitmer's March executive health order due to COVID-19. These data were presented by We the People of Detroit's Community Research Collective during their summer 2020 conference and affirmed by news media reports.²^,³^,⁴ Initially, >170,000 homes experienced water shutoffs, reportedly to save the city from financial ruin.⁵^,⁶

The Detroit Metropolitan Area (DMA) is sharply divided by white–black races with almost 92% of whites living in the suburbs and 80% of blacks living in Detroit.⁷ Detroit's poverty rate remains one of the worst in the country.⁸ When Detroit's nonelected Emergency Manager was installed by Governor Snyder during the 2014 bankruptcy, water service rates increased dramatically for the citizens within the city and shutoffs began; suburban residents were protected from shutoffs with late payment plans and lower rates.⁹^,¹⁰

There have been several serious efforts to document the relationships among water shutoffs, inequities, and public health impacts. Black residents make up at least 90% of the top 9 ZIP codes for cumulative water shutoffs. The 10th highest ZIP code contained 75.4% black residents.¹¹ Thus, highly black segregated ZIP codes have the highest water shutoff rates. Water shutoffs are significantly related to water-related illnesses by ZIP code¹² and these shutoffs are likely to increase COVID-19 incidence.¹³ In 2017, researchers from Detroit's Henry Ford Health System found those patients living in blocks that experienced a shutoff were 1.55 times more likely to have been diagnosed with a waterborne illness.¹⁴ Cumulative water shutoff occurrences were provided by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) for 2019 ZIP codes.¹⁵ Furthermore, the ZIP codes with the highest populations of 65 year old's, infants/children, and nursing home residents had the highest percentage of COVID-19 cases and COVID-related deaths in Detroit.¹⁶ The Haas Institute of the University of California, Berkley, also published an in-depth report reaffirming this previous research on the systematic causes and effects of the Detroit water shutoffs.¹⁷

In addition to and related to health impacts, there are other serious ramifications of water shutoffs for residents. Homes with water shutoffs are eligible for seizure and city auction¹⁸^,¹⁹ as well as seizure of children by Child Protective Services.²⁰^,²¹ Furthermore, citizens caught siphoning water illegally can be charged a 5-year felony.²²^,²³ Not surprisingly, water shutoffs were found to be significantly related to declines in mental health²⁴ and levels of distress.²⁵ In 2014, public unrest and protest spurred the United Nations to declare Detroit amidst a humanitarian rights crisis and cite that the water bills were three times the affordability threshold with rates that had doubled over 10 years.²⁶^,²⁷

DISCUSSION

Viewing the water crisis through an historical lens

Racial residential segregation is a structural basis for racial inequality. Homeownership has been the historic path to the accumulation of wealth, economic stability, and upward mobility in the United States. Homeownership also provides security in health and basic human needs such as water and heat. The historical confluence of government and private sector banking and housing industries gave rise to the patterns of racial and socioeconomic class segregation in the DMA. (Similar policies and patterns can be seen across other metropolitan areas of the United States). After the Great Migration (1916–1970), Detroit began to flourish with black-owned businesses and homeownership in the early to mid-1900s. However, the cumulative effect of various social policies, often deliberately designed, led to a tremendous loss of black business and homeownership. The contributing policies include municipal incorporation, mortgage insurance programs, neighborhood association covenants, real estate blockbusting, redlining, and freeway placement.

In the 1940s, white suburban municipalities incorporated themselves, focusing their political and economic power on the creation and maintenance of segregated neighborhoods based on race and class. From the 1930s to the 1950s the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) and Veterans Administration's mortgage insurance programs provided subsidized guaranteed mortgages and low-interest loans to suburban middle and working-class white housing but with substantially less financial support offered to future black homeowners. Starting in 1948, restrictive covenants of neighborhood associations (declared unconstitutional yet The Detroit Housing Commission continued to support) followed by real estate blockbusting further segregated residential communities.²⁸ During this same period, many black-owned homes and businesses were intentionally demolished by freeway placement.²⁹ The act of redlining by banks and later racial steering of the housing industry left the DMA with a majority black city center and a white suburban ring. Other deep and far-reaching consequences of government-sanctioned socioeconomic and racial residential segregation meant that jobs and other economic opportunities shifted from the city center to the suburbs, unreachable by black residents of the city.

Mortgage lending and housing discrimination persisted throughout the early 1980s. By 1990, Detroit was the most residentially segregated metropolitan city in the United States, regardless of income, occupation, or education. “With extreme racial segregation came extreme class segregation and one of the poorest cities in U.S……the stark inequality between poor blacks of the central city and the more affluent whites in the burbs makes the DMA unusual.”³⁰

Today: residential segregation and decline of black homeownership

Housing discrimination persists within the DMA rental/housing sales market. This is confirmed by paired audit tests and within lending (mortgage/business/home improvement loans) agencies as confirmed by analyses of Housing Mortgage Disclosure Act data.³¹^,³² Resultant outcomes are large disparities in health, wealth, income, education, occupation, pollution exposure, and so on that increase as black–white segregation by neighborhoods increase.³³^,³⁴^,³⁵^,³⁶^,³⁷

Since the housing market crash beginning at the end of 2006, early 2007, there has been a tremendous loss of homeownership through foreclosures by majority black residents in Detroit and across the country. Along with the earlier practices described previously, that initially led to housing segregation and drove continued decline of black business ownership, additional policies developed and implemented by government agencies, at various levels, include overtaxation, contract sales, redlining, mortgage lending discrimination, and definitions of “blight” for redevelopment. Following are examples of more recent Detroit policies:

A total of 28,000 Detroit homes went into foreclosure from 2010 to 2016 when Detroit homeowners were overtaxed $600 million through illegal overassessments. Of the >63,000 Detroit homes with delinquent debt during the fall of 2019, >90% were overtaxed—by an average of at least $3,700 according to calculations by The Detroit News.³⁸ The debt owed on ∼40,000 of those homes is less than the properties were overtaxed during those 7 years. In 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Education Fund attempted to stop the largest property tax auction in U.S. history, by suing the Wayne County Treasurer. They claimed the foreclosures were based on the city's “unlawfully” inflated tax assessments. State law requires that assessments not exceed 50% of a property's market value. These claims against the county were thrown out when a judge ruled the Michigan Tax Tribunal had oversight, not the court.³⁹

Furthermore, structural government changes in the housing market, following the financial crises, led to bulk foreclosure buying by contract sellers (private developers/investors including shell companies, many of which are bought from government-established FHA Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bulk sales). This allowed for increased use of land contract sales in Detroit to the poor without the protection of mortgages from banks but instead a private seller. This is often followed by foreclosures and evictions most severely felt by black Detroiters subjected disproportionately to predatory financial dispossession (predatory loans) and displacement reflecting pre-existing patterns of segregation. Some of these foreclosures were a result of delinquent water bills under the Emergency Manager. This was all conducted under the City of Detroit's purview.⁴⁰ Importantly, from 2007 to 2016, the DMA had the greatest contract seller acquisitions of foreclosed homes nationally, all in majority black cities.⁴¹

In addition, redlining policies by banks and insurance companies that deny home and business loans/mortgagees/insurance to residents based on race/ethnicity continues across the country and in Detroit aggressively. In 61 metro areas across the United States, people of color were more likely than whites to be denied conventional mortgage loans, even when controlling for the applicants' income, loan amount, and neighborhood location. In the Detroit-Dearborn-Livonia area, black applicants were almost twice as likely to be denied a conventional home purchase loan as white applicants in 2016. Detroit ranked 44th out of 48 communities nationally in which blacks were denied loans at a higher rate.⁴²

City housing authorities have pursued “dereliction by design” policies as reported by Kinney,⁴³ designating some properties as “blighted.” A building whose water lines have been disconnected may be designated as blighted.⁴⁴ This has driven down property values resulting in foreclosures that contributed to the 2008 Detroit foreclosure crisis and the Detroit Bankruptcy, which were used to justify the installment of a nonelected Emergency Manager. Under his management, Detroit City pensions were defunded, along with the public schools, and the DWSD, resulting in water shutoffs and the serious humanitarian crisis Detroit is experiencing today.⁴⁵

Public resources channeled to individual elites

Budget allocations reflect the priorities of an organization.⁴⁶ This is demonstrated in the policies designed and implemented by the City of Detroit. The city's decisions have revealed the relationships between capital, readily available for some individuals/projects and not others (i.e., water for 10,000 Detroit homes; housing loans). Instead of examining the ways that public tax dollars are redistributed by the city's governing systems, the water shutoffs are blamed on residents themselves who are reported as unable/unwilling to pay their water bills.⁴⁷ However, barriers to access are not primarily due to individual behaviors, but, as discussed previously, have been historically and systemically shaped by public policies addressing residential segregation and business ownership. The Detroit City governance system continues to channel public funds, which benefit and incentivize private interests and concentrate wealth. Unfortunately, these efforts are often cloaked in narratives such as rescuing Detroit through “saviors” who will “revitalize” the city, creating a “new Renaissance.” For example:

Dan Gilbert of Rock Financial and Quicken Loans has been deemed one of the biggest winners in the 2008 foreclosure crisis. This fueled the Detroit bankruptcy and installation of the nonelected Emergency Manager that led to the loss of Detroit pensions, school budgets, and DWSD water shutoffs. Gilbert currently sits on the Detroit Blight Task Force that defines which areas are to be considered blighted; not just vacant properties, but occupied ones as well. Furthermore, Rock Financial Services owned the fifth highest number of foreclosures in Detroit for the past 10 years, many of which were foreclosed due to subprime loans to black homeowners. Half of these properties were declared “blighted.” Gilbert was charged by the courts (2014) of causing foreclosures to declare “blight” so that the land would be devalued and reclaimed, for at times, $1 per city block.⁴⁸ Furthermore, Gilbert benefited from millions of taxpayer marketing capital spent by the city under the General Development Fund and The Transformational Tax Law allowing him a tax abatement of $618 million over 30 years for his Hudson Skyscraper and three other developments.⁴⁹

Mike and Marian Ilitch of Olympia Development/Entertainment, Little Caesars, Detroit Red Wings, the Detroit Tigers, Champion Foods, MotorCity Casino Hotel, and so on owned 70 properties before the foreclosure crisis and arranged to have these properties designated as “blighted,” driving down their land values and allowing for repurchase at an extremely low cost. The ensuing increase in foreclosures, along with Gilbert's, also contributed to the 2008 foreclosure crisis and the Detroit Bankruptcy. This was followed by installment of a nonelected City Manager, which resulted in the defunding of many public services as outlined earlier.⁵⁰ In 2017, $324 million of taxpayer funds, some of which were originally designated for Detroit public schools, were diverted to be used to build new properties on this land. The Ilitch's have also benefited from using millions of taxpayer dollars under the General Development Fund toward marketing their businesses. They, along with other larger developers, have also taken advantage of The Transformational Tax Law that allowed them a Detroit tax abatement; in 2018, 35 million was abated/gifted alone.⁵¹ Taxpayers provided $398 million for Little Caesar's Arena and District Detroit, a new development⁵² and an additional $57 million of public funds were paid to keep the Red Wings in Detroit.⁵³ Little Caesar's Arena also receives free water; at the same time thousands of homes have had their water shutoff as a result of policies implemented by the Emergency Manager.⁵⁴ Downtown parking concessions during games are also funneled to the Ilitch's, instead of added to public funds and distributed by the city, a prior standard procedure.⁵⁵

A variety of other players such as The Ford Motor Company and Chrysler have benefited from millions of taxpayer dollars toward building and marketing Ford's Michigan Central Station⁵⁶ and Chrysler's East Side Plant.⁵⁷

The real results of efforts to revitalize the city, the “need,” which was created by the city itself through historical policies, has been to increase corporate welfare, undemocratic governing, and the further impoverishment of its residents. Water, once considered a public good, in actuality has been commodified with high rates for the city's mostly black population and subsidized for businesses. Stratified political and economic hierarchical systems are maintained and strengthened.⁵⁸^,⁵⁹ As a consequence, revitalizing leads to the displacement of long-term residents. These gentrification processes cover up, figuratively and literally, serious disruptions in the quality of life for many Detroiters.

CONCLUSION

The city has a long deep history of resilience and activism, which must be acknowledged, respected and built upon. Many groups and organization are working together and creating a kind of “culture of resistance,” to confront and reverse the widening gap between the rich and the rest of us. They are notable for their construction of multiple layers of networks of allies, partnerships, friendships, and families.⁶⁰ The national Movement for Black Lives' mission demands restoration of housing and de-privatization of natural resources such as water. One of the platforms, COVID-19 relief, calls for a moratorium on water shutoffs across the nation.⁶¹ Missions of the national Detroit Black Lives Matter movement include eradicating white supremacy and working for a world in which black lives are no longer targeted for demise.⁶² The Detroit chapter has promoted local actions to intervene not only in violence against black lives but substantial protests regarding water shutoffs.⁶³ In Detroit, they are working closely with other organizations in a united front to make this happen.

As indicated previously, these organizations, along with many others (i.e., ACLU, Allied Media Project, Boggs Center, Brightmoor Food Pantry, Detroit Justice Center, Detroit People's Platform, Detroit People's Water Board Coalition, Detroit Community Research Collective, Fresh Water Future, Global Health Initiative at Henry Ford Hospital, Michigan Poverty Law Program/Michigan Legal Services, NAACP, Sierra Club Environmental Justice Office, and We the People of Detroit) are taking action at various levels: local, state, regional, and global.⁶⁴ These collaborative operations, in various spheres of activity (e.g., research, media, education, government, legislation, and public protests) have been key in changing the public narrative of “blaming the individual victims” for nonpayment of water bills to reframing water shutoffs as part of a larger public health issue. These organizations understand that they all are more effective when they collaborate together. They know, and act as if “the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts.” This study is built on work that has pointed to broader contexts for the water shutoffs, uniquely providing specific details about socioeconomic and racial factors underlying patterns of historic and current governmental policies. It describes the expenditure of public monies in ways that function to benefit the economic elite in the region, in contrast to taxpayer funds being used to strategically provide services such as water, housing, and transportation to support a thriving city.

Along with their deliberate efforts to collaborate, these organizations have designed their efforts to both increase community awareness and to include residents in their activities. For example, they have stepped in to fill the daily real survival needs to assist people in obtaining water for their households. They have built unique collective research models combining grassroots knowledge and academic rigor. In doing this, they have worked with community resident volunteers as part of research projects involving water access. Currently, they are exploring the use of an affordability program recently introduced in the Ohio Legislature, which included the input from residents who have been affected by the shutoffs.⁶⁵ Michigan still has no related legislation to address the water shutoff issues that many residents face, especially in cities struggling with aging infrastructures. The federal government has done little if anything to address the issue of water access nationally.⁶⁶

In summary, both these collaborative multipronged efforts at many levels, along with the deliberate democratic participation of community residents, may be unique to Detroit. The organizational approaches and strategies may serve as a model for other cities as they oppose efforts to privatize and commodify this precious resource. Detroiters have moved from separating and blaming individuals to cultivating a public framework that sees all of us involved in social systems founded on public health. This study has provided the historical context and detailed current data to deepen and broaden the discussion, and suggests additional resolutions to this crisis. It questions who/what has and continues to benefit from the collection and distribution of public resources (i.e., taxes). Some have noted that “politics is really about how to divide up the economic pie.” Systemic problems require systemic change in our economy, government, and social order.⁶⁷

Controversies exist around whether or not water should be considered a human right. In 2016, a Detroit judge, siding with the Detroit Water and Sewer Department and the city of Detroit in a suit considering water shutoffs, declared in writing that, “there is no fundamental right to water service.”⁶⁸^(p.19) However, water can be considered as a more critical right than public education, which, in the United States is viewed as a right and supposedly accessible to all youth. We must turn our attention to the role that local, state, and federal governments have, do, and should play in guaranteeing this as a vital resource for everyone to use and sustain, so that we all may survive and thrive.