From Policy Failure to Urban Crisis: Making the Links in Flint, Michigan

• In Event: Urban Issues in Environmental Policy

Abstract

In January of 2016 Flint, Michigan made headlines when it was revealed that thousands of the city’s residents had been exposed to toxic levels of lead in their drinking water. The lead exposure has been linked to a rise in fetal deaths and infertility, learning problems for the city’s children, and heavy financial burdens on low-income households. Flint’s water crisis highlights the need for a better understanding of the stresses on water management in postindustrial cities. This paper draws on interviews with decision makers and stakeholders in Michigan, along with secondary data analysis, to argue that the environmental and public health crisis in Flint is the product of concurrent and overlapping policy failures: failed water quality regulation, failed industrial and economic policies, and the state’s failed response to municipal fiscal distress. Individually, these policy failures cannot explain Flint’s experience, but in combination they produced a crisis. This type of overlapping policy failure, and its consequences, is not well accounted for in the public policy literature, and has particular importance for the study of environmental justice. The paper examines the role that race plays in the production and intersection of these policy failures, and begins to explore the extent to which other Rust Belt cities are similarly vulnerable.

Author

• Sara Hughes, University of Toronto