In Flint, at least the children had access to water. In Detroit, they were being forced to steal it. The Motor City was under state emergency management and trying to dig its way out of the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. The search for revenue left no stone unturned, no crevice unsearched, no couch cushion unmolested. The slashing of pensions and health benefits for public employees. Cutbacks of overtime and holiday pay for cops. Firefighters doing double duty as EMTs. The selling off of toll tunnels and municipal parking lots.
The sheriff had also cometh, putting thousands of families on the streets for failing to pay their property taxes (or, more often, the slumlord failing to pay). People packed themselves into houses like rodents, neighbors and relatives and sometimes perfect strangers sharing apartments, rooms, closets, or even driveways, where old women slept unprotected in their vans. It was either that or squat. Thousands of people had broken into unoccupied homes and claimed them. Jump the power box for electricity, bypass the gas meter with a hacksaw and rubber tubing, and you’re cooking. At least until the cops show or the house blows.
But then the city took away the life source itself. It shut off water service to fifteen thousand households due to lack of payment, with tens of thousands more scheduled in the coming months. No one was spared who was sixty days in arrears—not the elderly, not the invalids, not the babies.
In an East Side neighborhood, a young black woman named Letishia was bathing her child in a plastic tub in her front yard, the water pilfered from an abandoned home next door that had tall grass and no windows but, ironically, still had water service. It was a sweltering afternoon, and I rinsed my head in the hose that was on perpetual flow. Word travels quickly, and people from the block who’d had their water cut came and went. Milk jugs. Gardening pails. Spackling buckets. Like a tribe of Bedouins to a well, except this tribe was too poor to afford camels to carry them away.
Downtown Detroit was a different story. Downtown was booming with investment made by billionaires who were given generous tax breaks and public subsidies. Downtown, white people were moving back. The lofts were at capacity. A white man had been elected mayor for the first time in forty years because he carried a sheen of competency. The Horace Dodge Fountain was full of coins. There were new restaurants and bars and art galleries, tennis-shoe shops and fashion boutiques, and too many T-shirts with slogans: “Detroit v Everybody,” “Detroit Hustles Harder,” “Imported from Detroit,” “Comeback City,” and so on.
Sandboxes and basketball courts and food trucks had sprung up to amuse the millennials who worked for Dan Gilbert, the Quicken Loans mortgage mogul who was buying up dozens of ghost buildings in the city’s core and moving his people and businesses into them. At the same time, his company was being sued by the Department of Justice for tens of millions of dollars, accused of pumping up borrowers’ income or credit scores and pushing appraisers to fudge the appraisals of homes in order to make underqualified applicants eligible for federal housing insurance.
Property tax revenue was being diverted from the bankrupt, crumbling Detroit public school system to subsidize a new professional hockey arena for the billionaire Ilitch family, who owned the Detroit Red Wings, the Detroit Tigers, the Little Caesars pizza chain, and the Motor City casino.
The Red Wings were late on their water bill too, but the city did nothing to them. Hey, you can’t have ice without water.
I watched from behind the rim of a three-dollar cup of premium coffee as adult hipsters at some sort of Quicken bonding seminar shrieked with delight as they ran among the sandboxes, pelting each other with water balloons. It was all a great laugh. It was the comeback story.
It was more precisely a tale of two cities. The small well-to-do white core sweeping in on the great broom of gentrification, blithely unaware of the great, heaving, Dickensian black outskirts swelling and breathless with discontent. It was like a ravenous man staring through the window, fogging the plate glass as another dug into his lamb ragù with root vegetables, farm fresh to table (actually a quite delicious and popular dish in one of the new high-end restaurants not a block from the skid row warming center). Scenes like this were common in the new Detroit.
What about us? Letishia asked back in the black, ramshackle neighborhood, echoing what Dee had said to me in the white ramshackle trailer park. We don’t got something as simple as water. You don’t got no water, you die. Is that what they want? My baby to die? Because we’re poor?
I had no answer except to say the poor could not afford to pay and the rich refused to pay. So imagine the hostilities from those in the middle, increasingly squeezed to take up the slack from the poles. Imagine when the great middle has had enough.
In the meantime, the ghetto was going to explode. I could feel it. The ghetto was going to blow first and the trailer park second. The ghetto always feels it first. Poverty, joblessness, disinvestment, incarceration. Abandoned and walled off, poor black people always catch hell first. That’s the totem of American life. Without water or hope in a sultry summer season, emotions in the poorest big city in America were on high boil. Something was going to give. And I would be proven right in just a few days. It’s just that I picked the wrong city. It wouldn’t be Detroit, but Ferguson, Missouri.