Cities 62 (2017) 23–27

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Why the Flint, Michigan, USA water crisis is an urban planning failure
Victoria Morckel
Department of Geography, Planning, & Environment, University of Michigan-Flint, 518 Murchie Science Building, 303 E. Kearsley Street, Flint, MI 48502-1950, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This paper argues that the Flint water crisis stems from the city's inability to address the consequences of large-
Received 29 November 2016 scale population loss, the Flint region's unwillingness to engage in regional planning, and a societal lack of care for
Accepted 10 December 2016 infrastructure and shrinking cities.
Available online xxxx
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Depopulation
Infrastructure
Legacy cities
Urban decline
Water quality

1. Introduction
In April 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan, USA switched its water
source from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (which gets
its water from Lake Huron) to the Flint River, while it awaited the com-
pletion of a new pipeline to Lake Huron that would allow the city to join
the Karengnondi Water Authority (KWA) (Kennedy, 2016; Lin et al.,
2016). Supposedly, making the change to the KWA would save the
Flint region $200 million over 25 years (Kennedy, 2016). However,
when the switch was made to the Flint River, corrosion control
chemicals were not added to the water, even though the river is more
acidic (has a lower pH) than Lake Huron (Torrice, 2016). As a result,
lead and other metals seeped from the city's aging pipes into the
water and into homes and businesses. But despite resident complaints
of murky, foul-tasting water soon after the switch was made (Bosman
et al., 2016), water tests conducted by an outside expert indicating a
high presence of lead in homes (Delaney & Lewis, 2016), and a
pediatrician's report of increased blood lead levels amongst children liv-
ing in the city (Gupta et al., 2016; Hanna-Attisha et al., 2016), the local
government did not acknowledge that a problem existed until October
2015, and the state government did not declare a state of emergency
in Genesee County (where Flint is centrally located) until January
2016 (Lin et al., 2016). Since the fall of 2015, the issues with the city's
water, particularly the presence of lead, have been known as “the Flint
water crisis,” which has attracted national and international attention
E-mail address: morckel@umflint.edu.
(LaFrance, 2016). As of this writing, the crisis has yet to be resolved; res-
idents remain fearful of the water, some households still have high
levels of lead in their water, and very few pipes have been replaced
(Dolan, 2016; Mahoney, 2016).
When the switch was made, Flint was under the control of a state-
appointed emergency manager due to the city's inability to remain fis-
cally solvent (Bosman & Davey, 2016). Some have speculated that if
the city had been under local rather than state control, decisions
would have been made with public health, rather than budgets, at the
forefront (Egan & Dolan, 2016). While this may be true, there has
been much finger-pointing beyond the emergency manager, with indi-
viduals and organizations at all levels of government (and beyond) re-
ceiving some blame [i.e. city personnel (Karimi, 2016; Bridge
Magazine, 2016), the county health department (Egan & Dolan, 2016),
the Michigan governor (Graham, 2016), the Michigan Department of
Environmental Quality (Graham, 2016), the Michigan Department of
Health and Human Services (Bridge Magazine, 2016), the United
States Environmental Protection Agency (Delaney & Lewis, 2016), and
even the Koch Brothers and DeVos family (Sharp, 2016)]. But despite
the efforts of residents and the media to find answers and assign
blame, there seems to be a lack of understanding that the Flint water cri-
sis was decades in the making, stemming from structural problems that
depopulating American cities face, as well as some cities in Europe.
Thus, the true origins of the Flint water crisis can be found in U.S. failures
to address the consequences of large-scale population loss, a general
lack of regional planning, and a lack of care for infrastructure and
shrinking cities—particularly in those older, industrial cities that have
experienced sustained job and population losses over decades

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2016.12.002
0264-2751/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
24 V. Morckel / Cities 62 (2017) 23–27
(Mallach & Brachman, 2013). The remainder of this paper will discuss
how these three, core issues manifested in Flint.
2. Population loss
Flint has experienced extreme population loss due to factors like the
closure of automobile production facilities and the movement of resi-
dents, particularly white, middle-class residents, to the surrounding
suburbs (Highsmith, 2015). At Flint's peak in the 1960s, the city was
home to nearly 200,000 people; it is now home to 98,000 (United
States Census Bureau, 2015a; Gillotti & Kildee, 2009). As a result, there
are fewer residents to pay property and income taxes, fewer people
available to frequent—and thus keep in business—revenue-generating
businesses that pay taxes, and more vacant structures that are blighted
and reduce property values, which further reduce tax revenues. This de-
crease in revenue has been coupled with an increased demand for ser-
vices, especially as the remaining Flint population becomes more
impoverished as those with means continue to leave (Dickson, 2016;
Mallach & Brachman, 2013). Consequently, rather than presume that
Flint's financial troubles are due to the gross incompetence of the city's
leaders—which tends to be the narrative locally, especially when race is
brought into the equation—there needs to be a greater understanding,
both locally and beyond, that Flint's budgetary issues have more to do
with outside forces (like globalization and suburban sprawl) and the
aforementioned structural issues than they do with the actions of any
one individual or administration.
Even though Flint's population has dropped by half, the city con-
tinues to (or more accurately, attempts to) maintain infrastructure
and services built for 200,000. It is not reasonable to believe that the
same level or quality of services can be provided when there are far
fewer people to pay for, and utilize, them. Further, as residents become
more geographically dispersed—as neighborhoods become less dense,
in Flint's case—services become less efficient and cost-effective. If Flint
had somehow managed to prevent population loss, the city's budgetary
situation would have been more stable, and the water crisis might not
have occurred. That said, it is not reasonable to believe that all cities
can or should be able to maintain stable population levels, let alone
grow. In the 1980s and 1990s, Flint and its benefactors spent millions
of dollars chasing silver-bullet redevelopment projects [e.g. an amuse-
ment park called “Auto World,” a Hyatt Regency hotel, Water Street
Pavilion (a public marketplace)] that ultimately failed (Highsmith,
2015). Perhaps city leaders wanted to look like they were “doing some-
thing big” about the city's problems, but again, these growth-oriented
approaches did not work. After decades of decline, Flint should have
pursued ways to better manage and address the consequences of popu-
lation loss (e.g. vacant land, concentrated poverty), rather than pursue
planning and policy strategies intended to attract newcomers. Thank-
fully, in the 2000s, Flint moved to a more grass-roots, neighborhood-
based approach to community and economic development largely
spearheaded by the Genesee County Land Bank (Griswold & Norris,
2007). But it is nonetheless staggering to think about all of the ways in
which the resources from the failed efforts of the past might have
been used to update city services and meet human needs.
When growth-based approaches fail, we (planners, researchers, and
policy makers) need to think more critically about right-sizing strate-
gies that address the consequences of population loss and help balance
municipal budgets. Schilling and Logan (2008) refer to right-sizing as
“…stabilizing dysfunctional markets and distressed neighborhoods by
more closely aligning a city's built environment with the needs of
existing and foreseeable future populations by adjusting the amount
of land available for development” (p. 453). Very little is known about
how to right-size a city, especially how to do so equitably without evok-
ing fears of urban renewal (in a U.S. context). Nor do we know what
kinds of services can be effectively right-sized, on what time-frame,
and how much money is saved by doing so. The lack of knowledge on
right-sizing likely stems from the lack of right-sizing in practice.
Politicians and city-officials in the U.S. tend not to embrace the concept,
given that residents do not want to hear that services will be reduced
and people potentially relocated. For example, Dave Bing, the former
mayor of Detroit, Michigan, USA tried to sell right-sizing concepts to
Detroiters back in 2010 and 2011, but the ideas were not well-
received (Connolly, 2010). Bing chose not to run for reelection in 2013
for this, and other, reasons (Helms, 2013). But despite the unpopularity
of right-sizing, it may well be time for planners and community leaders
to have serious conversations about right-sizing and put politics aside.
Otherwise, more cities may have crises attributable to a mismatch in
size of services and size of population. If the city of Flint had right-
sized, perhaps the cost of services would have been less, budgets
would have been more stable, and there would not have been a need
for an emergency manager or a change in water service provider.
3. Regional planning
If the notion of making the city smaller to fit its services (or vice
versa) is not palatable, another option is to make the city's budget
large enough to continue to maintain the existing level and quality of
services, despite population loss. But trying to do so by raising taxes
within the city limits will at some point become a futile effort. Taxes
cannot be continuously raised without driving out remaining busi-
nesses, nor can they be endlessly raised on a population, especially
one that is poor. Instead, a city must be able to tap the resources and
wealth of its surrounding communities if it is unable or unwilling to
right-size. If the city of Flint had been able to annex growing, adjacent
communities over time for example, it would have been able to capture
that tax-revenue, making its financial situation more stable. Alternative-
ly, if the city and its environs had a regional tax-sharing system (like the
one in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, USA), Flint once again would
have more resources at its disposal, due to its ability to capture a portion
of the tax revenues from businesses that located or relocated in the sur-
rounding suburbs and exurbs. In reference to the Minneapolis-St. Paul
system, a writer for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson (2015), notes that
“By spreading the wealth to its poorest neighborhoods, the metro area
provides more-equal services in low-income places, and keeps quality
of life high just about everywhere.”
Another (perhaps more fanciful) regional approach would have
been for the City of Flint or Genesee County to have enacted an urban
growth boundary decades ago to prevent, or at least discourage, resi-
dents from moving outward. A growth boundary would have likely re-
sulted in more renovations to existing homes in Flint, and more
demolitions of smaller or older homes with new ones built on the
same sites (Gennaio et al., 2009). Other policies and incentives designed
to encourage infill development may have also helped. The United
States Environmental Protection Agency (2015) has outlined 30 strate-
gies for attracting infill development in distressed communities in par-
ticular that the reader could refer to. The need to have reduced sprawl in
order to stabilize Flint is most evident when one examines its county's
demographic trends. While it is perhaps surprising that Flint's popula-
tion has declined so dramatically over the past fifty years, what is
more striking is how the county's population slightly increased over
the same period. In 1960, Genesee County was home to 374,000 people
(United States Census Bureau, 1995); in 2015, it was home to an esti-
mated 411,000 people (United States Census Bureau, 2015b). In other
words, the overall, metropolitan population is not much larger than it
was fifty-five years ago, but miles of farmland and forests have been de-
veloped anyway, at the expense of the city of Flint and the natural
environment—in a process well-known American urbanist, George
Galster (2012), calls “the housing disassembly line.” Additionally, the
fact that the county's population has not significantly changed helps
to debunk the myth that Flint's troubles were “inevitable” with deindus-
trialization. If more people had remained within the city's limits, the
city's decline would not have been so pronounced—not just in terms
of population, but also in terms of social and economic conditions.
 V. Morckel / Cities 62 (2017) 23–27
Notably, there was an effort in 1957 called “New Flint” to create a
consolidated government across most of Genesee County, but the mea-
sure failed miserably with white, suburban residents and their elected
representatives rejecting it [for more details on the New Flint failure,
see Highsmith (2015)]. If New Flint had succeeded, perhaps Flint
would not have its own water system primarily confined to its city-
limits; instead, maybe it could have been part of a more financially sta-
ble, metropolitan-wide system. As is, with only its own residents and
businesses to financially support it, Flint charges the highest water
rate in the United States,1 despite being located in a state with abundant
access to fresh water via the Great Lakes (Ridley, 2016). Further, resi-
dents are paying for water they are not even using. Given the age of
the system, there are likely minor cracks and leaks throughout. There
were 378 water main breaks in 2014, and 357 in 2015 alone (City of
Flint, 2016). The city of Flint's 2013 master plan notes that the system
only runs at 68% efficiency (Houseal Lavigne Associates, 2013).2 While
all of these infrastructure issues cost money, the bigger concern is the
potential health effects. Both system breaches and water sitting stag-
nant in pipes (due to there being fewer people using water, both be-
cause of population loss and now fear) makes it more likely that
bacterial contamination will occur, irrespective of the lead issue
(Fonger, 2014). This overcharging of Flint residents for poor quality ser-
vices also raises serious concerns about social and environmental jus-
tice, given that whiter, wealthier suburban communities tend not to
have these problems (Roelofs, 2016).
4. Lack of care
Americans take for granted the fact that they can travel just about
anywhere in the country, turn on a faucet, and access clean, safe drink-
ing water. Water system infrastructure tends to gets less attention than
other types like roads and schools because it is “out of sight, out
of mind” (Roelof & Shellenbarger, 2016; American Water Works
Association, 2011). An annual survey that has been conducted by
Michigan State University since 1995 showed that prior to 2015, infra-
structure was not a concern of Michigan residents; but after the Flint
water crisis, 32.5% of Michigan residents listed it as their number one
concern, above jobs and the economy (Abbey-Lambertz, 2016). But
rather than be reactive, Americans (and others living in declining cities
worldwide) need to be proactive in caring for aging infrastructure. Flint
planners, and other city officials, were well aware of the poor state of
the city's water system prior to the water crisis, but were unable to act
due to the aforementioned financial challenges. The city's master plan,
which was adopted before the crisis, states the following:
Much of the piping in the [water] system is over 70 years old, and a
significant amount of the 48" mains are prone to breaks and unable
to provide modern pressures and fire flows. According to a 2011
Water Reliability Study, the distribution and transmission system is
‘old and in serious need of replacement.’…The distribution system
includes over 7,200 valves. The City currently maintains valves as
needed… Also, there are currently 3905 hydrants in the water distri-
bution system, many of which are more than fifty years old.
(Houseal Lavigne Associates, 2013, p. 187)
Flint is not alone in having a water system that is in need of replace-
ment. Many European and older American cities have infrastructure
that is at or nearing the end of its lifespan (OECD, 2015); this is especial-
ly true in large U.S. cities in the Northeast and Midwest, where over 60%
of the water infrastructure was built prior to 1930 (American Water
Works Association, 2011). Therefore, instead of thinking of the Flint
1
At least it did until the state of Michigan credited residents' accounts for part of their
water usage from April 2014–May 2016. See Eggert and Householder (2016).
2
Meaning that only 68% of the water purchased by the city was recovered by user fees,
indicating that the city has significant leaks, inaccurate meters, and/or illegal connections
to the system (Houseal Lavigne Associates, 2015).
25
water crisis as one unfortunate event that was entirely preventable
with corrosion controls, we should think of it as a warning to other cities
in the U.S. and beyond that it is time to start planning for water infra-
structure replacement, or right-sizing, at a large scale. If the Flint system
had not been so vulnerable prior to the crisis, and if the city or residents
had found a way to replace lead service lines years ago, then perhaps the
crisis would not have occurred.
The Flint water crisis also reflects a general, societal lack care in
Western nations for small and moderately-sized shrinking cities.
While large cities like Detroit, Michigan receive quite a bit of attention,
even from international researchers and media outlets, how many peo-
ple really cared about Flint before the water crisis—let alone the hun-
dreds of other, small or moderately-sized shrinking cities that exist
worldwide (Oswalt, 2006; Pallagst et al., 2014)? Flint faces a number
of challenges that should have been alarming to the U.S. general public
prior to 2015. Flint is the second most impoverished city in the United
States (behind fellow shrinking city, Youngstown, Ohio) with 40.1% of
its population living in poverty as of 2015 (Johnson, 2015). Flint resi-
dents lack access to healthy foods, given that there is no major super-
market within the city limits (Dresden, 2015; Erbentraut, 2016).
The Flint school system is failing and in debt (Adams, 2015;
Smith-Randolph, 2014), and the city consistently has one of the highest
crime rates in the United States (Engel et al., 2016). But despite these
and other serious challenges, there was no outpouring of support for
the people of Flint until the possibility of thousands of lead-poisoned
children was picked up by the mainstream media. Granted, there is no
doubt that lead poisoning is very serious, but why is it acceptable for
these other conditions to exist in a city located in one of the wealthiest
nations in the world? Why is it suitable, for example, for police and fire
services to be cut to a bare minimum in a city with very high crime and
arson rates (Fonger, 2015; Longley, 2012)? The author suspects that this
lack of care stems from a belief that these issues are somehow the fault
of Flint residents, whereas the water crisis is not. However, to believe
that issues like poverty, lack of food access, poor education outcomes,
and crime are directly attributable to the residents is misguided (if not
racist) and ignores the aforementioned external and structural forces
that caused these conditions to spatially cluster in the first place.
As emphasized throughout this paper, it is foolhardy to believe that
cities like Flint have enough internal resources to address their chal-
lenges alone. There needs to be more support for shrinking cities across
a range of issues, if not regionally than at the state and federal levels. We
should care about shrinking cities for a number of reasons, including but
not limited to the fact that it took tremendous investment to build these
places, people still live there, and conditions in some neighborhoods in
shrinking cities are unacceptable in a developed nation (Legacy Cities
Partnership, 2016). As Flint's congressman, Dan Kildee, stated in an
aptly titled article, There Are No Throwaway Cities, “Cities can change,
but the very idea that we would decide consciously to create a throw-
away city is a morally bankrupt approach” (Young, 2016).
5. Looking forward
This paper has highlighted some of the ways in which the Flint water
crisis is an urban planning problem. Notably, many of the ideas pro-
posed in this paper are not popular or politically feasible in the U.S. at
this time. Some groups are fundamentally opposed to sharing resources
with others, as demonstrated by failures like New Flint (Highsmith,
2015). Although residents of the Flint suburbs have, up until now,
been able to avoid most of the costs associated with Flint's social and
economic challenges, they (and society) will eventually have to
pay—if not in tax dollars, then in the spreading of issues like blight
and crime to neighboring communities (Badger, 2015). Therefore, we
(as a profession) can either be proactive about the challenges facing
cities like Flint, or we can wait for crises to occur and spend tax dollars
cleaning up the aftermath, after irreparable damage to human lives
has occurred. The State of Michigan has already spent at least $22.6
26 V. Morckel / Cities 62 (2017) 23–27
million on the crisis (as of May 2016); it has allocated $63 million more;
and it is considering upwards of an additional $230 million to be
used for health care programs, educational initiatives, and pipe
replacements (Gerstein, 2016; Tribune News Services, 2016). The feder-
al government also committed $80 million to the State of Michigan in
early 2016, “…mostly to help repair Flint's water infrastructure and
make the drinking water safe” (Burke, 2016). Then there are the costs
associated with the numerous lawsuits that residents have filed against
the city, state, and federal governments that could total “hundreds of
millions of dollars in damages” (Dixon, 2016). Surely, it would have
been cheaper to have addressed Flint's financial and infrastructural
challenges through right-sizing or regional planning initiatives than it
will be for taxpayers and others to pay for the fallout of this crisis. Fur-
ther, trying to deal with the city's financial situation by making cuts to
everything possible (the basic premise of the emergency manager sys-
tem in Michigan) is not the answer. The more that services are cut,
the more likely it is that people will leave the city, further compounding
the existing problems. At some point, there becomes nothing left to cut
without raising serious concerns for public health and wellbeing.
Consequently, as planners, we need to emphasize how good plan-
ning, especially planning that acknowledges shrinking populations,
can help make our cities that are losing population more sustainable.
Planners can play a role by making the case that regional approaches
(e.g. annexation, shared services, consolidation, tax-sharing) are critical
to the survival of shrinking cities—and that the survival of these cities is
critical to the health of the metropolitan areas beyond these cities' limits
(Haughwout & Inman, 2002; Ihlanfeldt, 1995). We also need to draw at-
tention to the importance of investing in infrastructure that largely goes
unnoticed until something goes wrong. Much of this paper has focused
on how things could have been different for Flint if other choices had
been made. While it is impossible to go back in time, the hope is that
other cities and their planners will learn from Flint's example and
enact policies and plans that help them avoid tragedies like the water
crisis. This paper does not mean to suggest that there is no hope for
Flint, or that there is no place for planning in Flint going forward.
There are still opportunities to adopt right-sizing strategies and regional
approaches in the Flint metropolitan area, and there are certainly ways
in which local planners can contribute to the present crisis. For example,
planners can help to identify where pipe replacements should be prior-
itized and where the water system should be downscaled (i.e. where to
replace larger pipes with smaller ones to serve a smaller population).
Hummel and Lux (2007) and Moss (2008) provide examples from
East German shrinking cities that are right-sizing water infrastructure
and pairing infrastructure decisions with strategic demolition efforts
and land use planning.
Lastly, the author would like to emphasize that this paper is not
meant to be an indictment of Flint's current planning department
staff. When budgets are cut, planning tends to go by the wayside, at
least in the U.S. It is politically more feasible to cut the planning de-
partment than it is to cut what some feel are more essential services
like police and fire. As a result, from about the years 2000 to 2011,
the city did not have a single planner on staff (Kelly, 2016). Even
prior to 2000, the planning department was severely under-
resourced. The city went without updates to its master plan from
1960 to 2013 (Thorne, 2013). There was a master plan created in
1977, but it was never formally adopted due to lack of public partici-
pation (Houseal Lavigne Associates, 2013). The new planning staff
(post-2011)—which is primarily grant-funded—has made remarkable
progress. In 2013, a new master plan was unanimously approved by
the planning commission and city council (Adams, 2013; Thorne,
2013). The planning staff won a Michigan Association of Planning
award in 2014 for their community outreach and engagement efforts
when creating this plan (Nagl, 2015). Additionally, the planning de-
partment spearheaded the city's first combined capital improvements
plan in a number of [unknown] years, which was approved in January
2015 and includes basic plans for updating the city's water
infrastructure (Houseal Lavigne Associates, 2015; Lorenz, 2015). The
planning department has also worked diligently over the past several
years to implement the 2013 master plan (Maloney, 2015; Cooper,
2014). In the future, it would be ideal for the planning department
to build on this good work and advocate for regional planning in par-
ticular. However, it will take the cooperation of surrounding munici-
palities and their residents to make headway on this front, which
has historically been difficult. Perhaps it is time for the state or federal
governments to enact policies that strongly encourage, if not require,
communities to collaborate when providing essential services like
water to their residents.
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