Attitudes Toward Exploited Cities Helped Poison Flint

Miriam Axel-Lute

29 January 2016

From Rooflines, the Shelterforce blog:

"Flint is one of the extreme examples of how our country has allowed geographic divisions by race and income to result in reverse–Robin Hood exploitation of those with the least power.

We’ve used free trade agreements, race-to-the-bottom economic development poaching, and inconsistent union rules to allow corporations to make a fortune off of cities like Flint and then pack up and leave for cheaper workers.

We created segregated regions via redlining, mortgage discrimination, and racial violence, and then allowed local tax structures to function so that the region still relies on its urban core—for large institutions like hospitals and universities and historic theaters, for county and state government jobs, and to house and educate and provide social services to its low-wage workforce and those who fall out of it—but the residents of the rest of the region pay little to nothing for those benefits.

Despite this profoundly unfair set up, cities like Flint have long been regarded as at fault for their own problems and in need primarily of a stern dose of fiscal temperance (for example, shopping around for supposed basement bargains on crucial contracts like water supply). The headline of a Newsweek opinion column on the water crisis called Flint, “The Cheapskate City That Poisoned Its Children,” bizarrely letting the state off the hook though it was in control of the city at the time, and speaking of Flint as if it were a miser with gobs of cash lying around that it refused to spend."

Read this article in its entirety on Rooflines, the Shelterforce blog.