Flint, 70 miles northwest of Detroit, was once a thriving city with the nation’s biggest General Motors plant. Today it has a median household income of $25,000, compared with $50,000 for the state, and a pervasive toxin still leaching into the lives of its residents.
Quincy Murphy is one of the 8,000 people told they could lose their homes if they don’t pay their water bills. Many of his neighbors have fled the city because their water is making them sick or they can’t pay their bills, he said. The neighborhood now looks like “a war zone.”
Downtown, a very different landscape is emerging as old buildings are demolished and developers snap up land on the cheap, posting glamorous visions of a new Flint. Trendy lofts and gated townhouse apartments rise alongside the expansions of the University of Michigan, Michigan State, and Kettering University.
For all the fear and failure, Flint is also the story of an embattled community coming together—or fighting back.
One of many examples is George Grundy, who heads the nonprofit Veterans for Now, which helps distribute water to residents whose pipes haven’t been replaced. For them, he said, picking up bottled water is “like a religion now.”
Another is Murphy himself, who says residents have lost trust in their elected officials and who has decided to stick it out and run for City Council. The current government is “constantly just focusing on the water. They forget that we have to run day-to-day operations,” he said.
Eric Mayes, a high-octane City Council member (“when they go low, I go lower”) who pushed Flint to declare a state of emergency, opposes gentrification and wants to bring industry back to Flint.
The water crisis has “created a media intoxication,” he said. “Some people just like to see themselves on the news.”
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