Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit

By Josiah Rector

From the mid-nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, environmentally unregulated industrial capitalism produced outsized environmental risks for poor and working-class Detroiters, made all the worse for African Americans by housing and job discrimination. Then as the auto industry abandoned Detroit, the banking and real estate industries turned those risks into disasters with predatory loans to African American homebuyers, and to an increasingly indebted city government. Following years of cuts in welfare assistance to poor families and a devastating subprime mortgage meltdown, the state of Michigan used municipal debt to justify suspending democracy in majority-Black cities. In Detroit and Flint, austerity policies imposed under emergency financial management deprived hundreds of thousands of people of clean water, with lethal consequences that most recently exacerbated the spread of COVID-19.

Toxic Debt is not only a book about racism, capitalism, and the making of these environmental disasters. It is also a history of Detroit's environmental justice movement, which emerged from over a century of battles over public health in the city and involved radical auto workers, ecofeminists, and working-class women fighting for clean water. Linking the histories of urban political economy, the environment, and social movements, Toxic Debt lucidly narrates the story of debt, environmental disaster, and resistance in Detroit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Feb 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781469665771

Josiah Rector

Josiah Rector is assistant professor of history at the University of Houston.

Book preview

Cover: Toxic Debt, An Environmental Justice History of Detroit by Josiah Rector

Toxic Debt

Justice, Power, and Politics

COEDITORS

Heather Ann Thompson

Rhonda Y. Williams

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Peniel E. Joseph

Daryl Maeda

Barbara Ransby

Vicki L. Ruiz

Marc Stein

The Justice, Power, and Politics series publishes new works in history that explore the myriad struggles for justice, battles for power, and shifts in politics that have shaped the United States over time. Through the lenses of justice, power, and politics, the series seeks to broaden scholarly debates about America’s past as well as to inform public discussions about its future.

More information on the series, including a complete list of books published, is available at http://justicepowerandpolitics.com/.

Toxic Debt

An Environmental Justice History of Detroit

JOSIAH RECTOR

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Authors Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2022 Josiah Rector

All rights reserved

Set in Charis by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rector, Josiah, author.

Title: Toxic debt : an environmental justice history of Detroit / Josiah Rector.

Other titles: Justice, power, and politics.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2022. | Series: Justice, power, and politics | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021052606 | ISBN 9781469665757 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469665764 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469665771 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Environmental justice—Michigan—Detroit. | Environmental racism—Michigan—Detroit. | Racism—Michigan—Detroit—History. | Water quality—Michigan—Detroit. | Detroit (Mich.)—Economic conditions.

Classification: LCC GE235.M53 R43 2022 | DDC 363.7/052—dc23/eng/20211223

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021052606

Cover illustration: Protest march in downtown Detroit, July 18, 2014. Photo by James Fassinger.

In memory of Charity Hicks (1969–2014)

Contents

Introduction

Part I

The Making of the Motor City

1 The Inequality of the Burden

2 Bodies on the Line

Part II

Regulating Environmental Inequality

3 Detroit Reassembled

4 Shifting the Burden

5 I Do Mind Dying

6 Before Warren County

Part III

Toxic Debt

7 Up in Smoke

8 The Dehydration of Detroit

9 Detroit Futures

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Figures and Tables

Figures

1.1 Etching of the Detroit waterfront, 16

2.1 A crowd outside the burning Briggs Fire Manufacturing Company, 37

2.2 Water pollution from a Jefferson Avenue sewer, 1931, 46

2.3 Workers pouring molten metal at the River Rouge foundry in 1931, 53

5.1 Air pollution from the River Rouge plant in 1965, 109

5.2 Two Detroiters Take a Look at Chrysler, Changeover (December 1971), 121

7.1 Anti-incinerator protest march on Detroit’s East Side, c. 1989, 155

7.2 Members of WEAVE at the gates of the Detroit incinerator, June 1989, 157

7.3 Children playing at the Golightly Education Center, 2018, 165

8.1 Water debt and tax foreclosures, 2014, 182

8.2 Protest march against water shutoffs in downtown Detroit, July 18, 2014, 191

9.1 Ali Dirul in front of the Dirul Power Station, December 8th, 2017, 220

9.2 Water drop, April 2020, 220

E.1 Representative Rashida Tlaib at a rally outside the North American Auto Show, 2019, 224

E.2 Protesters in the Frontline Detroit March, July 30, 2019, 239

Tables

3.1 HOLC residential security map ratings and neighborhood characteristics, 66

8.1 U.S. metropolitan areas ranked by number of subprime foreclosures, 2005–2007, 181

Toxic Debt

Introduction

Access to water, access to means of survival is one of the tenets that democracy is built on. When you have a class of people that are denied the ability to live, that is a straight-up democratic fight.

—Maureen Taylor, Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, 2007

We’ve learned that living in polluted communities actually increases the rate of morbidity of COVID-19. And this is why indigenous, Black, Brown and impacted communities must be heard, prioritized, and invested in if we will successfully build a thriving democracy and society in the face of our climate, economic, and social crises.

—Jamesa Johnson-Greer, Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, 2020

Between 2014 and 2019, the City of Detroit shut off water for over 141,000 residential accounts, denying more than a quarter million people access to a basic survival necessity. Over this five-year period, members of the People’s Water Board Coalition and other activist groups were arrested for civil disobedience, filed lawsuits, lobbied for legislation at all levels of government, and even petitioned the United Nations, but the City of Detroit continued its policy of mass water shutoffs. It was only the arrival of the global COVID-19 pandemic in the late winter and early spring of 2020 that compelled the State of Michigan to order a temporary water shutoff moratorium. How could a city that one historian calls the capital of the twentieth century force hundreds of thousands of residents to live without running water in the twenty-first century? And how could such large-scale deprivation of water occur in a state surrounded by the Great Lakes? This book seeks to answer those questions—and a series of related ones about racism, capitalism, and unequal access to the means of human survival—by examining the history of Detroit since the late nineteenth century through the lens of environmental justice.¹

In 2019, the population of Detroit was 78.3 percent African American, 35 percent of residents lived below the federal poverty line, and per capita incomes were $18,621. Detroit’s water shutoffs were overwhelmingly concentrated among impoverished African Americans and disproportionately impacted the disabled, single mothers and their children, and elderly people living on fixed incomes. Water service disconnections forced the residents who were most likely to be unemployed, medically underserved, and lack a motor vehicle to live without running water for days, weeks, months, and in some cases years at a time. Although the Detroit case was extreme, this problem was far from unique to the city. In 2016, public water departments disconnected an estimated 5 percent of all households in the United States, forcing some 15 million Americans, urban as well as rural, to live without running water.²

For over fifteen years, Detroit water activists had called for progressive rate structures, which would ensure that water and sewer bills did not exceed 4.5 percent of median household income. In a city with poverty rates three times the national average, and where water rates had more than doubled since 2011, many residents were spending over 10 percent of their meager incomes on water. This forced families to make impossible choices. Marjorie Davis, a forty-six-year-old Detroit mother who owed roughly $1,000 in unpaid water bills, had been living without running water for nearly five years at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In an interview with the Guardian, Davis said of Detroit’s Water Residential Assistance Program (WRAP), I’ve tried to get help but the city’s plan doesn’t work. I can’t afford it. She added, This virus is killing people all over the world and we can’t flush the toilet or wash our hands regularly. It’s messing with my mind, I don’t know what to do. I’m so worried about myself and my children.³

By the end of April 2021, Detroit had confirmed 2,008 COVID-19 deaths and 133 probable deaths, along with over 46,000 cases. As in other states, the death toll from COVID-19 in Michigan reflected the egregious racial and economic inequalities that existed before the pandemic. Whereas African Americans made up 14 percent of Michigan’s population, they made up over 40 percent of COVID-19 deaths in the first six months of the pandemic. According to the Michigan Disease Surveillance System, between March and July 2020 African Americans in Michigan died of COVID-19 at 6.7 times the rate of whites, while Latinx Americans died at twice the rate of whites. Some commentators, such as the sociologist Sabrina Strings, have emphasized the long-term historical roots of Black-white disparities in COVID-19 deaths, attributing them to intergenerational patterns of racism and oppression dating back to slavery. As Strings wrote in a New York Times op-ed, these disparities are rooted in a shameful era of American history that took place hundreds of years before this pandemic.⁴

As this book demonstrates in the case of Detroit, the origins of these disparities were historically multilayered, and in important respects were directly connected to the legacies of racial slavery and segregation in both the North and the South. However, such transhistorical analyses can also falsely imply that they have changed little over the centuries while obscuring more recent culprits and potential solutions. In Toxic Debt, I demonstrate that race, class, and gender inequalities in exposure to environmental hazards in Detroit (including microbes, industrial air and water pollutants, and toxic lead paint) have risen and fallen in different historical periods as a result of changes in political economy and public policy. For instance, racial disparities in tuberculosis deaths in Detroit rose dramatically in the 1920s, gradually declined in the 1930s and 1940s, and then increased again in the 1950s and 1960s even as overall tuberculosis deaths fell sharply. Lead poisoning disparities declined in the late twentieth century and then increased again in the twenty-first. Perhaps most strikingly, water shutoffs in Detroit occurred only sporadically between 1934 and 2002 and then escalated to crisis proportions, widening racial disparities in vulnerability to infectious disease. These fluctuations cannot be explained transhistorically.⁵

Over the past century, I argue, efforts by white segregationists to exclude African Americans from desirable neighborhoods and jobs, and by capitalists in heavy industry, finance, and real estate to externalize environmental costs onto workers and communities, have been the dominant causes of environmental injustice in Detroit. In metropolitan Detroit, as in other areas of the United States, racial segregation and what ecological economists call environmental load displacement (or the ability of the rich and powerful to shift environmental costs onto others) have been mutually reinforcing strategies. They have served to boost property values in segregated white neighborhoods and to maximize profits in polluting industries. However, these strategies have also changed over time in relation to social movement pressure, laws and regulations, and the transformation of the urban political economy.⁶

In addition to the unsanitary conditions created by water deprivation, industrial pollution and dilapidated public infrastructure contributed to underlying health conditions that exacerbated the risks of COVID-19 in Detroit. According to a 2017 study by Community Action to Promote Healthy Environments, a research partnership sponsored by the University of Michigan School of Public Health, air pollution caused an average of 690 excess deaths, 1,800 hospitalizations, and 3,400 asthma-related doctor’s visits in Detroit every year. Indeed, the study estimated that ambient air pollution represents 7 percent of deaths in the city, more than all the lives lost to homicide. Industrial facilities and motor vehicles spewing fine particulate matter, ozone, sulfur dioxide, and other air contaminants killed more Detroiters annually than the perpetrators of gun violence. In 2015 Detroit had the highest rate of childhood asthma of the nation’s eighteen largest cities, making the Black Lives Matter protest chant I can’t breathe an all-too-relevant descriptor of daily experience for the city’s children.⁷

Moreover, early twenty-first-century Detroit was experiencing a lead poisoning epidemic even worse than the more widely publicized case of Flint, Michigan. Between 2006 and 2013, industrial lead emissions in southeast Michigan became increasingly concentrated in majority African American neighborhoods in southwest Detroit, River Rouge, and Ecorse, and majority Arab American neighborhoods in Dearborn. Governor Rick Snyder’s policies of environmental deregulation, including the weakening of air pollution permit conditions, contributed directly to the problem. So too did the elimination of Detroit’s lead abatement program in 2012, partly due to Governor Snyder’s cuts in state revenue sharing, and a recklessly executed municipal blight removal program that blanketed Detroit neighborhoods with lead dust from demolition debris. As a result, rates of child lead poisoning in Detroit increased from 6.9 percent to 8.8 percent between 2015 and 2016, a rate over twice as high as in Flint in the aftermath of that city’s water disaster. These toxic and unsanitary conditions in too many Detroit neighborhoods made residents more vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic.⁸

For anyone familiar with the environmental justice movement and the interdisciplinary field of research it has inspired over the past three decades, the concentration of industrial pollutants and other health hazards in poor communities of color will come as no surprise. Toxic Debt pushes beyond some of the limits of the field, however. Most early environmental justice studies focused on contemporary manifestations of race and class inequalities in spatial proximity to toxic waste dumps and air pollution sources such as refineries, factories, and trash incinerators. With increasing sophistication, scholars have analyzed what sociologist David N. Pellow calls processes of environmental inequality formation over time.⁹ We now have a burgeoning historical literature on the making of urban environmental inequalities in every region of the United States.¹⁰

Nevertheless, the standard narratives of environmental justice studies, including historical studies of urban environmental inequality, cannot fully explain the human-engineered public health disasters in twenty-first-century Detroit and Flint. While most environmental justice studies examine communities on the fence line of billowing smokestacks and toxic waste dumps, finance and real estate have been no less historically implicated in racialized environmental injustice than heavy industry. Those who have profited from municipal bonds, mortgage loans, and land speculation have played a critical role in the unequal distribution of environmental health hazards, from Detroit’s first phase of nineteenth-century industrialization to twentieth-century redlining and the subprime meltdown in the twenty-first century. Over the past forty years, I argue, debt and the politics of austerity have become increasingly central to the struggle for environmental justice in the city. Banks, bond rating agencies, and state-appointed emergency finance managers have imposed austerity policies that turned environmental risks into humanitarian disasters in Detroit, Flint, and other Black-majority cities in Michigan. I use the concept of toxic debt to theorize this trend of environmental load displacement by financial capitalists and the state onto urban communities of color, as exemplified by Flint’s poisoned water and Detroit’s mass water shutoffs.¹¹

In recent decades, scholars in African American studies as well as history, sociology, and other disciplines have produced a vast literature on the relationship between racism, capitalism, and metropolitan development in the United States since the nineteenth century.¹² Some of the most pathbreaking work on these topics has focused on Detroit.¹³ For the most part, however, these studies have neglected the environmental dimensions of inequality. More recently, social scientists have started to examine the role of real estate developers in green gentrification and of financial institutions and urban austerity policies in perpetuating environmental injustice. Adding a historical perspective to these debates, Toxic Debt seeks to expand conventional definitions of environmental justice and to challenge received wisdom about the movement’s origins in the 1970s and 1980s.¹⁴

The concepts of racial capitalism and social reproduction, which radical intellectuals in the anti-apartheid and feminist movements first developed in the 1970s and 1980s, also provide valuable tools for theorizing environmental inequality.¹⁵ Most scholars who employ these concepts do not engage with environmental justice studies, although a small but growing number of social scientists have started to make these connections. Indeed, some excellent recent works in this vein have focused on Detroit or Flint.¹⁶ However, despite the extensive historiography on Detroit, only a handful of published books and articles have examined the city’s environmental history.¹⁷ As a result, most discussions of environmental inequality in Detroit are insufficiently historicized, and only tell a very partial and recent story about the environmental justice movement in the city. As this book shows, a longer-term perspective not only provides a fuller explanation for Detroit’s twenty-first-century environmental health disasters but is also critical for understanding the origins of the environmental justice movement in the city and to some extent even in the United States as a whole.

In Toxic Debt, I bring environmental justice studies together with urban history and political economy to tell these interlinked stories of segregation, environmental load displacement, and struggles over air, water, and land. In doing so, I have taken inspiration from the environmental scientist and historian Sylvia Hood Washington’s concept of environmental justice history, or history that is both informed by and seeks to contribute to the environmental justice movement. Women’s and gender studies scholar Traci Brynne Voyles has called this approach history undertaken with an eye toward building environmentally and socially just futures.¹⁸

I also draw on historian Peter James Hudson’s argument that racial capitalism suggests both the simultaneous historical emergence of racism and capitalism in the modern world and their mutual dependence. These inextricably connected processes—the accumulation of capital through the economic exploitation of workers and communities, and the robbery, murder, and oppression of human beings on the basis of reified racial categories—have always required spatial arrangements of environmental inequality.¹⁹ By examining these arrangements in Detroit from the nineteenth through the twentieth century, this book provides a longue durée perspective on racism, capitalism, and environmental inequality formation in a major U.S. city.

The gendered division of labor within families further shapes the distribution of environmental burdens, from the unpaid care work of mothers with lead-poisoned and asthmatic children to the health risks facing workers on the front lines of exposure to viruses and toxic chemicals. These observations are hardly new. As the environmental justice scholar Kishi Animashaun Ducre has explained, Black feminists have long recognized that injustice is multi-scalar and linked to complex and overlapping oppressions. They have developed a spatial imagination that not only maps these injustices, but envisions a liberated society in the process of wresting control and self-determination of physical bodies. Writing about Black women in communities overburdened by environmental risks, she observes that their liberation from oppression and rights to clean air and water would ensure that all others have access to the same.²⁰

My analysis is also influenced by philosopher Nancy Fraser’s synthesis of social reproduction theory with the French regulationist school. Building on the work of economists such as Michel Aglietta and Alain Lipietz, Fraser argues that capitalism’s history can be understood as a path-dependent sequence of accumulation regimes in which an earlier form runs up against difficulties or limits, which its successor overcomes or circumvents, until it, too, encounters an impasse and is superseded in turn. The capitalist drive to endless accumulation produces crisis tendencies which assume a different and distinctive guise in every historically specific form of capitalist society—for example, in the liberal competitive capitalism of the nineteenth century, in the state-managed monopoly capitalism of the postwar era, and in the financialized neoliberal capitalism of the present time. However, the crises that beset every historical regime of accumulation are multidimensional. They originate not only within class struggles at the point of production but also in boundary struggles over the gendered division of paid and unpaid labor in families and communities, the relationship between humans and the rest of nature, and the role of the state in the economy.²¹

While Fraser’s formulation is helpful for understanding the relationship between social reproduction and accumulation regimes, it fails to describe the differential racialization of the working class. As political scientist Michael C. Dawson has noted, Fraser emphasizes the centrality of free labor markets in capitalism, which obscures the fact that processes of racialized expropriation are as critical to understanding historical and contemporary capitalist societies as the analysis of reproduction, ecology, or politics. In the case of African Americans, these processes do not only include centuries of unpaid labor under slavery, but also persistent forms of racialized undercompensation, devaluation, and predatory financial practices. Dawson specifically identifies new modes of state expropriation that seek to recover revenue for capitalists and the state by violating the most basic of human rights such as the shutting off of water to poor families in Detroit as well as extractive fiscal policies linked to aggressive policing and tax foreclosures. However, Dawson casts these phenomena as separate from issues of ecology and social reproduction. As this book shows, ecological and social reproduction crises are inextricably linked to processes of expropriation imposed through toxic debt.²²

In the pages that follow, I unpack these arguments in a historical narrative that extends from the nineteenth century to the present. Toxic Debt consists of three parts, each focusing on what I call an environmental inequality regime, or a spatial order of environmental risk embedded in the urban political economy. Part I (chapters 1–2) focuses on the regime of liberal industrial capitalism, lasting from the late nineteenth century until the Great Depression, and is characterized by rapidly growing wealth and income inequality, factory-based mass production without labor or financial regulations, reform efforts at the municipal level, and increasing racial segregation in the context of the Great Migration. During this period, Detroit’s white male business elite dominated environmental and public health reform. Chapters 1 and 2 demonstrate that the fiscal constraints of municipal government and opposition from business elites left Detroit’s leaders unable to resolve the environmental crises caused by industrialization and rapid population growth in an increasingly segregated city.

Part II (chapters 3–6) focuses on the second regime of regulated Fordist capitalism, lasting from roughly 1933 to 1978. This period was characterized by large-scale federal government investments in water, sewer, energy, and transportation infrastructure; banking regulations that stabilized the financial system while subsidizing mass suburbanization on a racially segregated basis; the rise of industrial labor unions and a modest welfare state; more progressive taxation; and the metropolitanization of racial segregation, with an increasingly Black city surrounded by an expanding ring of virtually all-white suburbs. Public health improved in Detroit, and both Black and white Detroiters experienced upward economic mobility. Blacks suffered more from pollution, unemployment, and substandard housing than whites, however, because of housing and job discrimination, reinforced by police and white vigilante violence. However, working-class whites living in the Downriver suburbs also suffered from some of the worst industrial pollution in the region. Both Black and white women protested industrial polluters and negligent slumlords, who endangered the health of their families. Race, class, and gender inequalities in exposure to environmental hazards contributed to popular rebellions that shook Detroit’s neighborhoods and factories between 1967 and 1973.

From an environmental perspective, the era of regulated Fordist capitalism remained virtually unregulated, as federal law placed few restrictions on industrial pollution until the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was only in this period, at the end of Detroit’s postwar boom, that activists succeeded in winning fair housing, affirmative action, and environmental and workplace safety laws at the federal level. However, when the Big Three automobile manufacturers were finally subject to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, and Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations, they only accelerated the flight of capital out of Detroit that had been occurring since World War II. In response, activists in the United Auto Workers and other unions, civil rights, and environmental groups demanded full employment policies that would ensure environmental and economic justice and jobs in the mid-1970s. The defeat of their social democratic agenda, coupled with deindustrialization and metropolitan segregation, caused these coalition efforts to collapse by the 1980s. I thus situate the origins of the environmental justice movement in the political and economic transformation of both the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt in 1976–1982.

Part III (chapters 7–9) focuses on the environmental inequality regime of neoliberal post-Fordist capitalism, corresponding to the period from the late 1970s to the present. This regime was characterized by rapidly growing wealth and income inequality; policies of trade liberalization, financial deregulation, and austerity that increased unemployment, poverty, home foreclosures, and municipal debt; an increasingly regressive tax code that starved public infrastructure; and disinvestment in the welfare state alongside hyperinvestment in the carceral state, both of which disproportionately harmed Black Detroiters. Racial segregation persisted but became more complex, as some inner-ring suburbs diversified and some inner-city neighborhoods gentrified. The deregulation of industrial polluters and predatory mortgage lenders, alongside the evisceration of welfare and public health programs, led directly to environmental health disasters for poor and working-class African Americans, especially women and children.

In the final chapter, I examine the relationship between Detroit’s environmental justice movement and the redevelopment agendas promoted by multinational corporations, elite real estate developers, and private foundations. In the early twenty-first century, working-class women in Detroit’s welfare rights movement played a leading role in the struggle for water and environmental justice in the city. At the same time, Detroit’s environmental justice movement extended well beyond water rights, including organizations focusing on food systems, energy justice, air pollution, public transit, and waste disposal. In the epilogue, I examine debates about the Green New Deal in light of the history of environmental inequality in Detroit and evaluate contending visions for the city’s future.

Part I The Making of the Motor City

1 The Inequality of the Burden

If it is right for the city, for the sake of a better civilization, to furnish free schools, free libraries, free parks, it is right for the city to furnish free water for the promotion of cleanliness, comfort, and self-respect in the homes of its citizens.

—Hazen S. Pingree, Detroit: A Municipal Study, The Outlook, January 2, 1897, 441

In a January 1894 speech to the Detroit Common Council, Mayor Hazen Pingree made an outrageous declaration. The fifty-three-year-old Yankee shoe manufacturer called for making water free for all Detroit residents, abolishing the Detroit Water Board, and replacing municipal water rates with a general tax. Detroit’s location enabled it to deliver water more cheaply than most cities, he observed. New York City had to build the forty-one-mile Croton Aqueduct to supply water to nearly 3 million people; even Chicago, located on Lake Michigan, had to reverse the flow of the Chicago River to secure a supply of pure water for its residents. In comparison, the Detroit River conveniently flowed to the southwest, delivering freshwater from Lake Huron and Lake St. Claire en route to Lake Erie. Given this prodigality of nature, Pingree told the Common Council, water ought to be here of all places, next to the air we breathe—free.¹

Over the past year, the Panic of 1893 had led to mass layoffs in Detroit factories, leaving a quarter of Detroit’s working-class men—predominantly immigrants from central, southern, and eastern Europe but also African Americans and native-born whites—unemployed. In the context of a deepening crisis of social reproduction in working-class families, Pingree argued that levying fees for water at the point of use was regressive. Low-volume, low-income users paid higher rates than high-volume, high-income users, both per gallon and as a percentage of their incomes. He asked why the poor widow who rents one room paid higher water rates than his luxurious friends on Woodward and Jefferson avenue. This contrast revealed the inequality of the burden—the injustice of the assessment of cost. For similar reasons, Pingree proposed free food for the poor by opening vacant lots for cultivation, putting the unemployed to work digging ditches and paving roads, and battling streetcar and utility companies to reduce the costs of transportation, lighting, and home heating. While historians have extensively documented Pingree’s potato patches and utility battles, they have almost completely ignored his campaign for free water. However, free water was perhaps Pingree’s boldest proposal to de-commodify the means of survival and to expand the range of public goods available to urban residents as a right.²

Pingree’s free water campaign was part of a larger elite response to the environmental and economic inequalities of Gilded Age Detroit. Between the Great Fire of 1805 and the Panic of 1893, Detroit expanded from a small, fortified colonial trading post where Euro-American settlers enslaved Indigenous and African American people to a smoky industrial city with a largely foreign-born working class. As Detroit industrialized, the gap in living and working conditions between the business elite and the middle class, dominated by native-born white Protestants, and the immigrant and Black working class widened. Increasing water and air pollution contributed to recurrent cholera and typhoid epidemics, particularly in the crowded and unsanitary neighborhoods of the Near East Side. The financial panics and depressions of the post–American Civil War decades radicalized many industrial workers and increased fears of social unrest among native-born white elites.³

Beginning in the 1890s, a coalition of reform-minded capitalists and middle-class professionals, led by Mayor Pingree, sought to ameliorate the appalling filth and inequities of the Gilded Age city. Although Pingree’s reforms benefited working-class immigrants and, to a lesser extent, African Americans, conditions for many improved little in this era. Financial panics and depressions added to the ranks of the urban poor, and unsanitary shack dwellings proliferated in Detroit’s alleyways. The fiscal constraints of municipal government in an era of strict state-imposed bond debt limits and the use of street-level special assessments slowed the build-out of sanitary infrastructure beyond Detroit’s silk stocking wards. After Pingree left office, the Detroit Health Department demolished the shacks of the urban poor but made no effort to find them new housing. Detroit’s leading industrialists succeeded in keeping labor unions out of most factories and opposed even weak environmental regulations. Gilded Age Detroit was thus a site of grand dreams for economic and environmental transformation, and of well-organized elites who succeeded in entrenching inequality.

Water in the City of the Straits

From the beginning, Detroit was in a better position than most cities to provide clean water for its residents. The city stood near the center of the world’s largest freshwater system, containing an almost unfathomable 6 quadrillion gallons of freshwater. Of this vast natural supply, geologists estimate that 99 percent was glacial meltwater left by the retreating Laurentide ice sheet between 18,000 and 8,000 years ago. Traditionally, the Huron-Wyandot people called the flat expanse of beech and sugar maple forest, wet prairie, and bogs between two of these Great Lakes—Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair—Karantouan, meaning coast of the straits. The Anishnaabe called it Waweatonong, meaning crooked way. With similar matter-of-factness, French settlers labeled the area Le Dé troit, meaning the strait." During the French (1701–1760) and British (1760–1787) colonial periods, the Detroit River was the primary source of water for residents of Fort Detroit. The water that did collect on land immediately beyond the stockade walls was not substantial, and early wells ran dry during droughts. It was only after the Great Fire of 1805, which destroyed all of Detroit’s wooden structures, that the Common Council ordered the digging of public wells. Citizens could access public well water for a fee of $10 per year.⁴

Since the era of French colonization, Detroit residents had dumped refuse and raw sewage in the streams and creeks that drained the northern bank of the Detroit River. By the early nineteenth century, Detroit’s Savoyard Creek had become a large uncovered sewer filled with stagnant water and choked with refuse and raw waste.⁵ Detroit’s Anglo-American merchant elite relegated menial and unpleasant tasks, including the dirty work of waste disposal, to white servants and enslaved people of African and Indigenous descent. As historian Tiya Miles notes, municipal authorities fined merchant-slaveholder James May twenty-five cents in 1802 because his young Negro boy was carrying filth out of the S.W. Gate of the town. Anglo-American business owners, including May and other wealthy slaveholders, including John Askin, George Meldrum, and Elijah Brush, committed numerous fire safety code violations in the years leading up to Great Fire of 1805. Early Detroit historian Clarence M. Burton blamed the disaster on a careless laborer employed by baker John Harvey, the servant Peter Chartrand, but Detroit’s slaveholding elite had been careless about fire hazards for years.⁶

Well water could provide for the needs of a fur trading post, but it could not effectively supply a small town, let alone an industrial city (figure 1.1). Anxious to meet these needs, municipal leaders launched an experiment in private water delivery shortly after the opening of the Erie Canal. In 1829, the Detroit Common Council granted the Detroit Hydraulic Company, a company formed by the New Yorker Bethuel Farrand and his business partner Rufus Wells, exclusive rights to supply water for the City of Detroit. By 1831, the Detroit Hydraulic Company had constructed two reservoirs, with a capacity of over 20,870 gallons, and laid wooden water pipes from the Detroit River to Jefferson Avenue. Within only a few years, however, the Detroit Hydraulic Company was facing public outrage over poor water quality.⁷

FIGURE 1.1 Etching of the Detroit waterfront by William J. Bennett, based on a sketch by Frederick K. Grain, published in 1837. Detroit News Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.

Demands for municipal ownership of water in Detroit grew louder after a series of deadly cholera epidemics. In Jacksonian Detroit, cholera wreaked havoc against a backdrop of genocidal warfare against Indigenous people and violent repression of African Americans resisting slavery. In July 1832, cholera reached Detroit aboard USS Henry Clay, whose 370 soldiers were en route to Chicago to crush the Sauk leader Black Hawk and his forces. By the end of the summer 219 of these soldiers had died of cholera, along with 50–100 people in Detroit. In the summer of 1834, cholera returned to kill 320 Detroit residents, a plurality of whom were poor Irish and German immigrants. A report commissioned by the mayor found that over 39 percent of the victims were noncitizens, although only 7.7 percent of Detroit’s population were noncitizens. Those classified as colored persons were 2.76 percent of the population but only 2.5 percent of the victims. During the so-called Blackburn Riots the year before, Black Detroiters freed Ruth and Thornton Blackburn from jail to prevent their capture by Kentucky slave hunters. The enforcement of Michigan’s territorial Black Codes, including a 9:00 P.M. curfew for African Americans and a prohibition on their landing vessels on the Detroit River, led many to flee the city before the epidemic of 1834. Thus, the larger context of settler colonialism, slavery, and abolitionism shaped the timing and death toll of cholera in Detroit.⁸

The businessman and early Detroit historian Friend Palmer wrote that Detroiters were alarmed by the death toll that year. He lamented that the deaths were not merely among the laboring, the dissipated, the filthy and reckless portion of the community, but … among the most temperate, the most cleanly and apparently the most calm and courageous.⁹ The 1834 epidemic claimed numerous Detroiters of Palmer’s class, including General George B. Porter (former governor of the Territory of Michigan), General Charles Larned, former Wayne County sheriff Thomas Knapp, the hardware store owner Francis P. Browning, the writer Ebenezer Canning, and Mary Witherell, the wife of the prominent judge Benjamin Witherell. Contaminated water and the absence of sewage treatment made even elite residents vulnerable, and the medical treatment available to them, such as bleeding and mercury laxatives, likely did more harm than good. This may explain why, contrary to Palmer’s claims, alcohol was a popular folk remedy with the rich, who numbed themselves with port wine, as well as the poor, who drank cheap beer and liquor.¹⁰

In the aftermath of the 1834 epidemic, critics accused the Detroit Hydraulic Company of contributing to the death toll. The Detroit Common Council and Mayor C. C. Trowbridge, a wealthy banker and land speculator, soon turned against the firm. In April 1836, an investigative committee appointed by the Common Council concluded that the Detroit Hydraulic Company had violated the terms of its charter, which required it to supply Detroit with pure, clean, and wholesome water, from the channel of the Detroit River. The committee found that the irregular supply furnished has been far from being pure and wholesome; that it has endangered the health of our citizens; and that, from the present condition of the works, their location and circumstances, it is utterly impracticable for the Company to furnish pure and wholesome water. For these reasons, all rights and privileges thereby granted have become null and void and were reverted to the City of Detroit. The Common Council voted to revoke the charter on May 18 and bought out the private waterworks for $25,500, ending Detroit’s first failed experiment in water privatization.¹¹

As the city’s water system became more extensive, public officials saw the need for a municipal water department. In 1852 the Common Council appointed a board of trustees for Detroit’s waterworks, and the following year the Michigan legislature passed a bill creating the Detroit Board of Water Commissioners. The state legislature authorized the Board of Water Commissioners to collect rates from water users and to manage the expansion and maintenance of Detroit’s water system, financed through municipal bonds. Despite the advantages of public ownership, providing clean water for all residents would remain a daunting challenge. By the eve of the American Civil War, the population of Detroit had increased to 45,619, with an average daily water distribution of 2,142,774 gallons. The city’s water system had expanded to 84 miles of pipes, including 39 miles of iron pipes and 45 miles of older wooden pipes. Differences in water access and quality between the center and the periphery and between the East Side and the West Side had grown. By 1892, of the 44,772 feet of wooden pipes in Detroit, 78 percent were on the East Side, with the bulk concentrated on the Near East Side. The West Side received 24 percent more underground sewers per acre than the East Side between 2 and 3.5 miles of city hall, while East Side residents were more likely to rely on ditches and outhouses with vault cesspools.¹²

The southern portion of Hamtramck Township, bordering Detroit’s Near East Side, remained unpaved throughout the nineteenth century and was crisscrossed with open sewers and ditches. Detroit newspapers reported rumors that the Bloody Run ditch, which ran along McDougall Street between Canfield and the Detroit River, was a dumping ground for sewage, agricultural and industrial waste, and even human carcasses. In June 1882, First Ward alderman August Lemmer described Bloody Run as a sluggish stream, foul with the drainage of privy vaults, stables, hog-pens and kitchens on the adjacent banks, here and there ponded in stagnant pools in dry weather, putrescent in the summer sun, exhaling odors offensive and poisonous. That October, the Free Press reported that Bloody Run was in the region of which most of the cases of diphtheria and scarlet fever have thus far been reported.¹³

Historically populated by German immigrants, this neighborhood became the southern boundary of Detroit’s rapidly growing Polish American settlement between 1890 and 1910. Detroit’s Polish population increased from 22,000 in 1885 to 48,000 in 1900. By contrast, Detroit’s African American population increased from 2,821 in 1880 to 4,111 in 1900. Poles were concentrated on the upper part of the Near East Side between Joseph Campau and Hastings, Grand Boulevard and McDougall. The northern portion of Hamtramck Township would incorporate as a village in 1901 and later as a city in 1922.¹⁴

In the second half