Safe and secure water is a cornerstone of modern life in the global North. This article critically examines a set of prevalent myths about household water in high-income countries, with a focus on Canada and the United States. Taking a relational approach, we argue that household water insecurity is a product of institutionalized structures and power, manifests unevenly through space and time, and is reproduced in places we tend to assume are the most water-secure in the world. We first briefly introduce "modern water" and the modern infrastructural ideal, a highly influential set of ideas that have shaped household water provision and infrastructure development over the past two centuries. Against this backdrop, we consolidate evidence to disrupt a set of narratives about water in high-income countries: the notion that water access is universal, clean, affordable, trustworthy, and uniformly or equitably governed. We identify five thematic areas of future research to delineate an agenda for advancing scholarship and actionincluding challenges of legal and regulatory regimes, the housing-water nexus, water affordability, and water quality and contamination. Data gaps underpin the experiences of household water insecurity. Taken together, our review of water security for households in high-income countries provides a conceptual map to direct critical research in this area for the coming years.

The Flint water crisis is one of the most significant environmental contamination events in recent American history. In April 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan, while under the control of an emergency manager appointed by the governor, switched its drinking water supply from Lake Huron water treated and distributed by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to the Flint River. Failure to treat the water properly at the Flint Water Treatment Plant led to a variety of problems with water quality and public health. Low chlorine in parts of the water system fostered bacterial growth and contributed to an historic outbreak of Legionnaires' disease in 2014-2015. High levels of trihalomethanes brought the city into violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act in late 2014. Finally, systemic lead contamination-revealed through a collaborative sampling effort by local activists and engineers in the summer of 2015resulted from corrosive water eating into lead pipes and other lead-bearing components of Flint's water infrastructure. In October 2015, after considerable public pressure, the city switched back to Lake Huron water. Efforts by federal, state, and local officials to respond to the crisis have focused on restoring water quality, repairing and replacing dangerous and damaged pipes, and addressing public health needs. At the popular level, residents and activists have continued to fight for accountability, reparations, and restoration. A variety of causal explanations for the crisis have been put forward, some focusing on water treatment, regulation, and infrastructure, others on the political context created by state takeover of the city, and others on historical factors like structural racism, deindustrialization, and depopulation.

Assumptions of trust in water systems are widespread in higher-income countries, often linked to expectations of “modern water.” The current literature on water and trust also tends to reinforce a technoscientific approach, emphasizing the importance of aligning water user perceptions with expert assessments. Although such approaches can be useful to document instances of distrust, they often fail to explain why patterns differ over time, and across contexts and populations. Addressing these shortcomings, we offer a relational approach focused on the trustworthiness of hydro-social systems to contextualize water-trust dynamics in relation to broader practices and contexts. In doing so, we investigate three high-profile water crises in North America where examples of distrust are prevalent: Flint, Michigan; Kashechewan First Nation; and the Navajo Nation. Through our theoretical and empirical examination, we offer insights on these dynamics and find that distrust may at times be a warranted and understandable response to experiences of water insecurity and injustice. We examine the interconnected experiences of marginality and inequity, ontological and epistemological injustice, unequal governance and politics, and histories of water insecurity and harm as potential contributors to untrustworthiness in hydro-social systems. We close with recommendations for future directions to better understand water-trust dynamics and address water insecurity.

We're just not the type of people that's used to being walked on.-Claire McClinton, "A Democracy Problem" Long before its water crisis turned it into an international symbol of environmental injustice, Flint, Michigan, was a battered and bruised city. Once a proud General Motors company town whose residents enjoyed the highest standard of living in the United States, by the turn of the twenty-first century, Flint had lost tens of thousands of jobs and half of its population to deindustrialization and white flight. Its rate of violent crime consistently placed it at or near the top of the list of the most dangerous cities in the country. A higher proportion of its houses stood vacant than in any other American city. 1 More than 40 percent of its residents lived below the poverty line. Its underperforming public schools struggled to retain students, an astonishing 68 percent of whom left the district between 2006 and 2015. 2 And with an ever-shrinking tax base, it teetered perpetually on the brink of fiscal crisis, barely able to sustain basic city services. When I moved with my wife and three-year-old son to Flint in the summer of 2015, I was well aware of the wounds the city had suffered and the uncertainty that lay in its future. But I saw another side to Flint as well. There were the thriving cultural institutions, propped up by the philanthropy of foundations started by former GM executives-an art museum, a performing arts center, a planetarium, a symphony orchestra. There was the reviving downtown, boasting a growing array of food, music, and entertainment offerings as well as one of the best farmers' markets in the state. There were the young families moving into my neighborhood-indeed, onto my streetwho lived in Flint not by necessity but by choice, and who had every

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