The effects of the water crisis on population dynamics in the City of Flint, Michigan

ABSTRACT

Since 2014, residents of Flint, Michigan have dealt with the effects of lead in their municipal system in a series of events known as the Flint water crisis. While several studies have examined the health effects of the crisis and changes in water lead levels over time, no study has considered whether the crisis has resulted or could result in residents leaving the city. To explore this question, we surveyed 405 Flint residents and used quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as exploratory spatial data analysis, to test five hypotheses about the water crisis and population dynamics. We found that population loss has not yet accelerated, but nearly half of residents are considering leaving. This consideration was true regardless of residents’ demographics or where they lived in the city. We also discovered that perceptions of the water’s safety and its health effects, more than actual water lead levels, predicted whether one is considering leaving. Overall, our results suggest that as water infrastructure quality deteriorates, population loss could accelerate, resulting in a recursive relationship whereby the city’s population and its infrastructure continue to decline.

KEYWORDS:

• Abandonment
• disaster planning
• infrastructure
• right-sizing
• shrinking cities
• GIS

View addendum:

City Know-how

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For brevity’s sake, the events that culminated in the Flint water crisis have been simplified. For a more detailed account, see CNN Library (2016).

2. All vacancy calculations include no-stat addresses. The USPS classifies houses that are abandoned and not livable as no-stat (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development 2016).

3. We did not include data prior to 2012 for we did not want to capture the effects of the housing crisis and recovery.

4. We did not keep the responses ordinal because they were not normally distributed.

5. The variable was based on 20,495 water test records from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality from September 2015 to April 2016.

6. For example, if we had five respondents who lived within the same block group, and person one scored a 4 (strongly agree on the survey item), person two scored a 3 (agree), person three scored a 1 (disagree), person four scored a 1 (disagree), and person five scored a 4 (strongly agree) on the question about considering leaving, the mean for that block group would be 2.6, which was compared to the means for all the other block groups. We used this method because otherwise the analysis would have detected a physical clustering of points (i.e. survey respondents) rather than a clustering of high and low responses (i.e. scores).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Victoria Morckel

Victoria Morckel holds a PhD in City and Regional Planning from The Ohio State University. She is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) and is currently an Associate Professor of Urban Planning in the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus. Dr. Morckel’s research considers ways to improve quality of life for people living in shrinking, deindustrialized cities in the Midwestern United States. She is especially interested in the causes and consequences of population loss, including issues of vacancy, blight, and neighborhood change. Dr. Morckel has two other articles on the Flint water crisis: “Why the Flint, Michigan, USA water crisis is an urban planning failure” which appeared in Cities in 2017, and “Legacy city residents’ lack of trust in the governments: An examination of Flint, Michigan residents’ trust at the height of the water crisis” forthcoming in Journal of Urban Affairs.

Greg Rybarczyk

Greg Rybarczyk received his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with a focus on Transportation Geography and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan-Flint, Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment, where he has been helping lead campus-wide GIS efforts since 2010. Dr. Rybarczyk has over a decade of experience utilizing GIS to analyze transportation, urban, and environmental systems within government, non-profit, private, and academic sectors. His current research spans topics within the fields of GIS, transportation, and urban health; where he relies on GIS, spatial statistics, and inferential methodologies. His most recent research foci includes: travel-demand modeling, human mobilities, Big Data, public health, food systems, and urban planning.