Rethinking Tiebout: The Contribution of Political Fragmentation and Racial/Economic Segregation to the Flint Water Crisis

Abstract

The water crisis that has embroiled Flint, Michigan, since 2014 is often explained via the proximate causes of government oversight and punitive emergency management. While these were critical elements in the decision to switch the city's water source, many other forces helped precipitate the crisis. One such force has been an enduring support for Charles Tiebout's model of interlocal competition, through which a region is presumed stronger when fragmented, independent municipalities compete for residents and investment. However, the Tiebout model fails to account for spillover effects, particularly regarding questions of social and regional equity. In this sense, the fragmentation of the Flint metropolitan region-supported through a variety of housing and land use policies over many decades-created the conditions through which suburbs were absolved of responsibility for Flint's decades-long economic crisis. Because of the Tiebout model's inability to address imbalances in population shifts arising from disparities in municipal services, Flint's more affluent suburbs continued to prosper, while Flint grew poorer and experienced infrastructure decline. Underlying this pattern of inequality has been a long history of racial segregation and massive deindustrialization, which concentrated the region's black population in the economically depressed central city. The Flint Water Crisis is thus a classic example of an environmental injustice, as policies were set in motion, which led to the creation of a politically separate and majority-black municipality with concentrated poverty, while nearby municipalities-most of them overwhelmingly white-accepted little responsibility for the legacy costs created by the region's starkly uneven patterns of metropolitan development.

Conceptions of Local Economic Development: Comparing Citizen and Local Official Attitudes

“…However, recovery for individuals is highly disparate as the state now ranks 11th in the nation in income inequality (Walsh, 2018). This conforms to general research on fiscal austerity and recent work focused on Michigan that suggests that the poor and minorities are most affected by economic downturns (Audirac, 2018; Ranganathan, 2016; Sadler & Highsmith, 2016). Overall, Michigan is a bellwether for economic distress, but this may cause citizens and local public officials to have different perceptions of barriers to economic development and the causes of fiscal distress than those in other states.…”

Geographies of insecure water access and the housing–water nexus in US cities

“…Unplumbed households are more likely to earn lower incomes, live in mobile homes, and pay a higher share of their gross income toward housing costs. While previous research has advanced incremental insights about insecure water access in specific US regions or housing sectors (19,25,26,39,42,42), our research nests these insights in the context of the country's largest metros.…”

Community Science as a Pathway for Resilience in Response to a Public Health Crisis in Flint, Michigan

“…In communities struggling with poverty and structural racism, a return to a situation before the crisis is often not desirable. In communities like Flint, the crisis that presents acute stressors to the community is rooted in these struggles explicitly (Masten et al 2016;Pulido 2016;Sadler and Highsmith 2016). Norris et al (2008) define resilience not as an outcome, but as the process through which a community is able to engage its resources to positively adapt to a stressor.…”