Stephen Henderson

Detroit Free Press Editorial Page Editor

If you look at what has been happening in Flint, long before children were drinking foul water from the faucets in their homes, you’d not be surprised that any measure of wicked reality was headed the city’s way.

Just since 2000, the city has been on a painful, arduous slide — losing 25% of its revenue from income and property taxes, 32% of the revenue sharing it gets from the state, 21% of its population and a staggering number of businesses and economic activity.

The assessed value of all property in Flint dropped by 43% over that time, and its tax base — the foundation for generating local revenue — is just more than $6,000 per resident. By contrast, Lincoln Park, another troubled city that just resolved a financial emergency but still has a shaky financial outlook, has a tax base of more than $14,000 per resident.

And that decline followed the brutal years Flint spent watching General Motors pack its bags and walk away, leaving a jobless, isolated population to survive in a landscape bereft of economic stability or opportunity.

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What did we think was going to happen?

Everyone is focused on the city now, because it’s the site of a gargantuan public health crisis.

But if we’re really concerned about fixing Flint, beyond the instant attention to the crisis, we need to be focused on far more than the water.

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This is about cities themselves, and how Michigan’s system of governance permits and even incentivizes the creation of poor, isolated urban centers that don’t have enough population or resources to deliver services. This is about race and class, and the historic emphasis of suburban development on moving away from black and poor communities, stripping them of the tax base and other resources they need to survive.

This is about broad policy questions we seem unable to even ask in earnest in the conversation about tax structure and cities.

And it’s about the frustrating ineffectiveness of our politics, on both sides of the aisle, in leading any kind of re-think on urban policy. Gov. Rick Snyder’s Republican administration fouled up the water situation in Flint, all while he has insisted that emergency management is the only tool he needs to fix the state’s cities. He has told me, consistently since his election in 2010, that a big re-think of municipal finance is unnecessary.

But former Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s eight years in Lansing saw much of the most recent decline unfold in Flint and other cities around the state. She used a weaker emergency manager law to address symptomatic financial emergencies in five cities. But at bottom, her idea of the big pivot on urban policy didn’t stretch much beyond the well-intentioned but vacuous “Cool Cities” campaign.

Governors John Engler and Jim Blanchard stood witness to the deterioration in Flint and enacted minor fixes without ever reaching to the core of the problem. Remember AutoWorld? Yeah, I've tried to forget, too.

That cities are even willing to take chances by trying to save money on something as important as clean water is the culmination of a systematic disinvestment, over a dispiritingly long period of time. It’s a confluence of so many things that it's near impossible, at this point, for cities that used to be much larger and wealthier to make ends meet.

One important way to understand the difficulty that a place like Flint is experiencing is to look at what’s going on around it — in wealthier communities just a stone’s throw away that have no economic tie to the urban center nearby.

Grand Blanc, for instance, has nearly three times the average household income as Flint, and has seen its assessed property valuation rise about 6% since 2000. (That 6% growth would have been more than tripled if not for the recession.) It’s at about $132,000 per capita — more than six times what Flint has. Grand Blanc isn’t losing population, and its income and property tax hauls are growing again.

Flushing is another, wealthier, enclave near Flint. It has a stable population, a growing tax base, and a median household income much higher than the city.

These communities have gotten stronger as Flint has gotten smaller and weaker — and because Michigan permits hyper-local governance, the separation among these communities, just miles apart, helps cement the poverty and isolation that have taken hold in Flint. Grand Blanc and Flushing, and the many other communities surrounding Flint, don’t share tax bases, school districts, parks systems or even water systems with the city.

In many other states, Flushing and Grand Blanc might be mere neighborhoods under a government that oversaw the region; the relative wealth that keeps those communities stable would not be walled off from Flint.

In some other states, the structure for creation and finance of local government would do more to incentivize individual investment in the urban center, or would balance the economic inequities more aggressively than Michigan does.

If we were to confront this kind of question in Michigan, it would require staring down the most uncomfortable parts of our history. Race and economics, and the way they have been deeply woven into the drive to maintain hyper-local, separate governance structures. Investment and equality, and the way we have allowed the two concepts to be cleaved in our state.

Most of all, it would require us all to acknowledge the role our beloved state, in our names, has played in creating the extreme inequalities that play out every day in cities like Flint.

If the tragedy in Flint isn't enough to spark reconsideration, on a large scale, I'm not sure what will be.

But I'm also frightened that we'll "fix" Flint's water issues, and forget about the larger context that helped create them.