All the Water in the World, and None of it to Drink

Published in

EJ @ stanford

12 min readJan 25, 2022

By Evan Kanji

This is a heavily abbreviated version of a full multimedia project on structural racism and reparations in the Benton Harbor water crisis. You can find the full project, which includes more details and an additional piece and set of interviews on reparations, at this link.

Less than a decade ago, the Flint water crisis made headlines as one of the worst public health failures of our time. In the majority Black city, which has shrunk in population from over 200,000 to under 100,000 since the 60s (Census Bureau), 100,000 residents were exposed to lead over the course of several years. Dozens died from a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak (PBS), but the full health toll from the lead exposure will continue to grow over the coming decades. In Detroit and neighboring Highland Park at the same time, another water crisis happened without the same level of national attention. In those majority Black cities, which have also shrunk in population by over half since the 60s (Census Bureau), thousands of low-income residents had their water shut off because they couldn’t pay exorbitant bills.

The St Joseph river, with Benton Harbor on the left (credit: https://img.marinas.com/v2/8c99d430f598c3faf5186943f79086578e6e0ee89a879c944e6c44b754852ab9.jpg)

Now, another water crisis has struck in Benton Harbor, a majority Black city whose population has been cut in half since the 60s. Residents complained about the water and advocated for years to get authorities to take action. An emergency manager slashed staffing in half at the water plant (Metro Times). For three years, residents drank lead tainted water from their tap: the lead tests have been well above the EPA action level since 2018 (Michigan Radio). Until a couple months ago, state, federal, and local governments sat by as the problem got worse, giving residents no information or guidance on the unsafe water even as the problem got worse. After three years of lead exposure with no action, it will be years before we understand the full devastation of the health consequences. Sound familiar?

At the root of all of these crises is systemic disinvestment, starting with the housing policy that cut the populations of these bustling industrial hubs in half and left those who stayed without meaningful economic opportunity. Long-term disinvestment in these now majority-Black core cities, coupled with local tax structures that keep tax dollars for infrastructure and social services in the mostly white suburbs, maintain the divide into the 21st century. We have set up a system where the responsibility for funding and fixing disinvestment falls on the disinvested-from.

Cities under emergency management in Michigan, compared to the Black population (credit: https://www.wethepeopleofdetroit.com/water)

Benton Harbor and neighboring St. Joseph are a classic story of American segregation and disinvestment: an 85% Black, low-income city separated from the mansions and resorts of the wealthy, 85% White St. Joseph by a river (Census Bureau). It wasn’t always this way. For most of the early to mid 1900s, Benton Harbor and St Joe were white communities. While Benton Harbor was never redlined, there were many other policies at play that incentivized the white residents of Benton Harbor to move out. Loans from the Federal Housing Administration, which heavily subsidized mortgages in the suburbs, were given almost exclusively to white families, incentivizing them to move out by giving them a long-term pathway to intergenerational wealth (Jackson 190–218).

As the decades wore on, Benton Harbor kept losing more and more people to the suburbs. Between 1940 and 1950 (the decade where FHA loans became available), the white population began to decline (Butzbaugh 59). The overall population peaked in 1960 at 19,000 people, and has dropped ever since, hitting 9,750 in 2019 (Census). In the 1960s alone, over half of the White population left (with the number dropping from 14,000 to 6,000), while the Black population more than doubled (from 4,800 to 9,700) (Butzbaugh 59). Today, the city is 85% Black, and has a median income of $21,000 (Census). With the population sliced in half and wealth in the city dropping, the city budget never had a chance to keep up with the needs of aging infrastructure.

In spite of this history of federally and state subsidized disinvestment at the root of Benton Harbor’s financial trouble, these financial struggles today are seen by those in positions of power as a local problem (Seamster 200–201). Water crises, whose immediate roots are typically in cost-saving measures, are a direct outcome of this failure.

When these systemic problems are treated as local mismanagement by state governments and other powerful institutions, they justify taking away community control. Under a 2011 law, Michigan could install an emergency manager to unilaterally take over the functions of local government in “financially distressed” cities (Seamster 177–185, Reedy 58–62). By 2014, nearly half (49.7%) of the Black residents of Michigan lived under emergency management, with effectively no local democratic representation (Reedy 64). Of the 8 cities under emergency management, seven were majority Black.

In Benton Harbor, emergency management meant a dramatic slashing of city functions. The emergency managers immediately set about firing city staff, terminating lines of institutional memory (Seamster 211). The water plant was hit particularly hard: the number of staff at the plant was more than cut in half, one of the reasons cited for slow action during the crisis.

A member of the Benton Harbor Community Water Council distributes bottled water (credit: The Guardian)

Benton Harbor residents have long complained about discolored, poor tasting, expensive water with negative health effects. Years of organizing around water issues coalesced into the Benton Harbor Community Water Council in 2018. They have put consistent pressure on the city, state, and EPA to pay for bottled water and pipe replacement and played a key role in obtaining and spreading information. Two and a half years ago, they took matters into their own hands, buying bottled water to distribute with their own money before eventually collecting donations.

The state finally began testing the water in 2018, finding elevated lead levels. lead levels have increased every year. Most recently, 15% of homes tested exceeded the EPA’s (very weak) action level; the highest tested home came in at 889 parts per billion (Michigan Radio). The Benton Harbor community has stood up for their rights at every turn: no meaningful government action was taken until community groups held government’s feet to the fire, filing a petition with the EPA in September to secure free bottled water and coerce the state into immediate action.

In shrinking cities with old infrastructure, a common pattern has emerged. Journalist Anna Clark described a “death spiral”:

“Flint’s infrastructure was in a death spiral. The water rates were expensive because the pipes were bad because vacancy rates were high because the city had been shrinking for so long. Costly bills tempted residents to move to the suburbs….Then there were even fewer people to pay into the system, which meant there was even less money to maintain it, which meant rates went up further” (Clark 20–21).

While Michigan paid for the replacement of Flint’s lead pipes, they put in place an “unfunded mandate” for cities to replace their lead service lines in the next 20 years. Much of this burden falls on Michigan’s oldest communities, primarily disinvested-from cities as well as lower-income rural towns: communities who are already paying disproportionately to maintain their infrastructure, and where water rates are already high.

In line with this attitude, the state initially ordered Benton Harbor to take several remediation measures, but didn’t give them any money to do so. Local officials pushed back, saying “Water rates, already the highest in the area, do not have the capacity to raise the (money) necessary to replace lead service lines.” In this way, dual crises converge: the crisis of affordability, brought on by depopulation, exacerbates the lack of money that creates lead crises.

Today in Benton Harbor, there are a lot of promises. The state has promised to replace all lead service lines in the next 18 months, lightning speed compared to the glacial pace at which these replacements usually happen (Michigan Advance). They recently started paying for bottled water and filters as well (Water Coalition members had been funding distribution themselves for two and a half years). All the while, community leaders have been pushing the state for pipe replacement, greater water funding assistance, and accountability.

But much of the damage is already done. Like in Flint, the full health toll on Benton Harbor will not be seen for decades. And even if the state follows through and replaces all of the lead pipes, they haven’t begun to touch the root issue — the fact that because of how intensely local our infrastructure funding is, that cities depleted by federally-incentivized suburbanization and disinvestment just don’t have the money to maintain the infrastructure required for healthy residents. Reparations for past crises haven’t begun to touch this reality: in Detroit and Highland Park, there has been only temporary pandemic-related relief; while in Flint, the individual reparations (while a crucially important piece of justice) do little to remedy the underlying issue, with some local activists calling it a “band-aid on a bullet wound.”

The conditions that led to the crises in Flint, Benton Harbor, Detroit, and Highland Park aren’t the exceptions — they’re the rule. Our state and federal governments must focus on what we can do to restructure our water systems and the finances behind them, and how we think about providing human rights more generally in deeply segregated places. Without systemic reparations in places already hit by water crises, and without proactive investment akin to what white suburbs received through housing segregation, Benton Harbor will not be the Great Lakes State’s last water crisis.

Thank you to Monica Lewis Patrick, Rev. Edward Pinkney, and Anna Clark for their generosity, support, wisdom, and tireless work on these issues.

All the Water in the World, and None of it to Drink

Written by EJ @ Stanford