NOTES

*Please note some of the links referenced throughout this work may no longer be active.

PROLOGUE

0.   .  For the story of Joy Tabernacle and Civic Park: Sherman McCathern, phone interview with the author, January 2016; Gordon Young, Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Jennifer Kildee, “The Torch Has Passed: Flint’s Joy Tabernacle Church Moves into Community Presbyterian Church Building,” MLive—Flint Journal, October 30, 2009. Some of this material first appeared in an article for the website of the New Republic (“Flint Prepares to Be Left Behind Once More,” March 3, 2016).

0.   .  Technically, the first 133 houses in Civic Park were built by the city’s board of commerce, but it struggled in the wartime economy. DuPont (which was GM’s controlling shareholder) took on the development project. Over about nine months, 950 more houses were built. This history is recorded on the Michigan historical marker in Civic Park, erected in 1982 (Registered Site SO543). See also the writing of Civic Park native Gordon Young, especially his Flint Expatriates blog (www.flintexpats.com) and his book Teardown.

0.   .  And, McCathern added, those who didn’t get a chance to wear their high school colors have strict rules for the colors they wear on the street. Sherman McCathern, phone interview with the author, January 2016.

0.   .  The United Auto Workers (UAW) was chartered in Detroit by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1935. But the UAW first made its mark when the sit-down strike began in Flint the following year. It ran from December 30, 1936, through February 11, 1937, with workers occupying three plants. The strike’s victory won recognition of the union by the auto industry.

0.   .  S. W. Wiitala, K. E. Vanlier, and R. A. Krieger, Water Resources of the Flint Area Michigan. Geological Survey Water-Supply Paper 1499-E (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963), pp. E6–E7.

0.   .  Hubert Humphrey, “Remarks of Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, Flint, Michigan,” September 25, 1964. Typescript from the Hubert H. Humphrey papers at the Minnesota Historical Society. It is among a collection of speeches that is available as a pdf: http://www2.mnhs.org/library/findaids/00442/pdfa/00442-01363.pdf.

0.   .  The Parks Department has a marvelous collection of photographs that document the dedicated work of its Forestry Division, as well as its other activities that made Flint’s green spaces lively. The author thanks city planner Adam Marshall Moore for allowing me to peruse them.

0.   .  As late as 1978, more than eighty thousand people worked in the Flint-area auto plants. But over the next decade, hit by an oil crisis, industry restructuring, and automation, that fell to twenty-three thousand in 1990; eight thousand in 2006; and, in 2015, about seventy-two hundred at eight facilities. Eric Scorsone and Nicolette Bateson, “Long-Term Crisis and Systemic Failure: Taking the Fiscal Stress of America’s Older Cities Seriously. Case Study: City of Flint, Michigan” (Lansing: Michigan State University Extension, 2011); Melissa Burden and Michael Wayland, “GM to Invest $877M in Flint Truck Plant,” Detroit News, August 4, 2015; and Ryan Felton, “What General Motors Did to Flint,” Jalopnik, April 28, 2017.

0.   .  They took 20 percent of the downtown jobs with them, too. Stephen Henderson and Kristi Tanner, “Beyond Bad Water in Flint: Held Back by Jobs and Isolation,” Detroit Free Press, February 20, 2016, pp. 15A–16A. The analysis uses U.S. Census Bureau zip code patterns and Google maps as its sources.

0. .  It was in 2013 that Flint’s population measured at fewer than 100,000 people for the first time since 1920. On weekdays, commuters brought an additional 35,177 people into the city. According to the Michigan Municipal League, about 86 percent of all jobs in Flint were held by commuters, though their numbers were declining. In turn, 17,436 Flint residents commuted outside the city for work. Only 5,829 people both lived and worked in Flint. In addition, there was a healthy population of college students at the University of Michigan–Flint, Kettering University, Mott Community College, and Baker College. The main sources for these numbers: “Flint, Michigan Population: Census 2010 and 2000 Interactive Map, Demographics, Statistics, Quick Facts,” CensusViewer; and Leonidas Murembya and Eric Guthrie, “Demographic and Labor Market Profile: City of Flint,” State of Michigan, Department of Technology, Management, and Budget, April 2016.

0. .  Flint city population pattern, according to the U.S. Census: 1960: 196,960; 1970: 193,317; 1980: 159,611; 1990: 140,761; 2000: 124,963; 2010: 102,434. Genesee County population pattern: 1960: 374,313; 1970: 445,589; 1980: 450,449; 1990: 430,459; 2000: 436,143; 2010: 425,790. Of course, the Genesee County numbers are inclusive of Flint. “The suburbs” also includes northern Oakland County, from which many people who work in Flint commute. The area is about equidistant between Flint and Detroit, so it effectively serves as the suburbs of both cities, and naturally leans more toward the magnetism of the larger of the two. But for perspective, it might be worth looking at Oakland’s population trends as well: 1960: 690,259; 1970: 907,871; 1980: 1,011,793; 1990: 1,083,592; 2000: 1,194,156; 2010: 1,202,970. Unlike Genesee, Oakland County hasn’t seen even the slightest population decline since 1890.

0. .  There are two kinds of revenue sharing: constitutional and statutory. The latter dipped more or less in proportion to how much less the state was collecting, but the former went far beyond that. The Michigan Municipal League and Great Lakes Economic Consulting are great resources for what is, as they describe it, “the great revenue sharing heist.” “Michigan’s Great Disinvestment: How State Policies Have Forced Communities into Fiscal Crisis,” Great Lakes Economic Consulting, April 2016; Robert J. Kleine, “Rick Snyder Isn’t the Only Michigan Leader Who Abandoned Flint,” Washington Post, February 1, 2016; and Anthony Minghine, “The Great $6.2 Billion Revenue Sharing Heist,” Voice of Detroit, March 26, 2014 (reprint from MML’s March/April 2014 magazine); Anthony Minghine, interview with the author, Ann Arbor, Mich., May 20, 2016; and Robert Kleine, interview with the author, Lansing, Mich., May 19, 2016.

0. .  In addition to the 58 percent increase in fetal deaths, the research team looking into the reproductive consequences of the Flint water crisis found a 12 percent drop in fertility for Flint women and lower overall health at birth. David S. Grossman and David J. G. Slusky, “The Effect of an Increase in Lead in the Water System on Fertility and Birth Outcomes: The Case of Flint, Michigan,” Working Paper No. 17–25, West Virginia University Department of Economics Working Paper Series, August 7, 2017; George Diepenbrock, “Flint Water Crisis Led to Lower Fertility Rates, Higher Fetal Death Rates, Researchers Find,” KU News Service, University of Kansas, September 20, 2017; and referring to the history of lead as a way to control fertility, see “The Birth Control Pill: A History,” Planned Parenthood Federation of America, 2015, https://www.plannedparenthood.org/files/1514/3518/7100/Pill_History_FactSheet.pdf. It’s worth noting that this fertility study was disputed in a seven-page review done by Michigan State University’s Nigel Paneth, who essentially argues that the researchers erred by comparing Flint’s birth data to other cities in Michigan—failing to acknowledge how economically dissimilar Flint is from most other communities in the state. (His review appears in full at a link in this online article: Kate Wells, “MSU Researcher Finds Fault in Flint Fertility Study,” Michigan Radio, October 3, 2017.) At the time of this writing, the original study was under consideration for publication in a peer-reviewed economics journal, and the research team had communicated with Paneth about his feedback.

0. .  The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, The Kerner Report (1968; repr. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, May 2016), p. 2. This reissue is edited by Sam Wilentz and features an excellent introduction by Julian E. Zelizer. It is part of a series, the James Madison Library in American Politics. The citation for the original edition is as follows: Otto Kerner et al., Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), reprinted as Report (New York: Bantam Books, 1968).