The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy. By Anna Clark. Metropolitan Books; 320 pages; $30.

What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance and Hope in an American City. By Mona Hanna-Attisha. One World; 384 pages; $28.

“YOU really do not want to miss this,” says J.D. Winegarden, a third-generation Flintonian, as he conducts a tour of the nicest bits of his city. From the sylvan grave of Jacob Smith, a fur-trader who founded the town in 1819, he whizzes past Factory One, the birthplace of General Motors, to the Flint Institute of Arts, with its surprisingly snazzy glass collection, and the adjacent planetarium. Beyond blocks of boarded-up houses, many of them still beautiful, Mr Winegarden shows off University Avenue, which connects two of Flint’s five colleges. The tour ends in a posh neighbourhood near downtown, where in the 1920s GM executives built mansions that rival each other in elegance.

Flintonians are proud of their home town and resent its status as an emblem of urban decay. “It is so important to come and see,” implores Karen Weaver, the mayor, regretting the damage inflicted by the water scandal on Flint’s already grim reputation. As well as ranking among America’s poorest and most violent cities, Flint is now known as a place where the government poisons its citizens with brown, foul-smelling water—and then lies about it until the evidence is irrefutable.

How did one of America’s most prosperous places sink so low? Like Detroit, 60 miles to the south, Flint was once a hub of industry. In its heyday GM employed 75,000 workers there; the main drag features statues of Louis Chevrolet and David Buick. As recently as 1980, the self-proclaimed “Vehicle City” had the highest median income for American workers under 35. But Flint was over-reliant on one company and was hit hard by the downturn in carmaking. These days GM employs fewer than 7,000 in the city.

Unemployment led to white flight, followed by middle-class black flight, which in turn led to a shrinking tax base and a predominantly African-American population falling into poverty. Today Navy SEAL medics reputedly train in Flint because it offers the country’s closest approximation to a metropolis blighted by years of war.

Nor any drop to drink

Seven years ago Rick Snyder, Michigan’s Republican governor, declared Flint to be in a state of financial emergency. He appointed an emergency manager with broad powers to run the struggling city’s affairs—and cut costs wherever possible. This is the backdrop to the public-health disaster chronicled in “The Poisoned City” by Anna Clark, and “What the Eyes Don’t See” by Mona Hanna-Attisha. Ms Clark is a Detroit-based journalist; Ms Hanna-Attisha is a paediatrician who helped to expose the contamination of Flint’s water supply.

Ed Kurtz, the original emergency manager, faced a tough job. How do you cut costs in a city where 40% of the population lives below the federal poverty line? He and his successor, Darnell Earley, reduced municipal services to a bare minimum. Notwithstanding the crime rate, the police department shrank; in a place with a propensity to arson, firefighters were laid off. A fateful decision was made in April 2014. To reduce the high water bills, the municipal water source would be switched from Lake Huron to the local Flint river. “Everyone from Flint knows the river is highly toxic,” says Mr Winegarden, because of the industrial sludge that poured into it. Local lore says the river has caught fire twice.

Had the dirty river water been treated with the right chemicals, thousands of people would not have been poisoned by lead and bacteria, including one that causes Legionnaires’ disease. But to save more cash, the city declined to add anti-corrosion agents that would have stopped the water eating away at the lining of the pipes, thus preventing lead from leaching out. That might have cost around $100 a day—peanuts compared with the hundreds of millions that the state and federal governments are now forking out to repair some of the damage.

These two books both show how an austerity drive with racial undertones led to the mass poisoning of mostly poor and black residents, and how officials tried to cover it up, attempting to discredit anyone who came up with proof that the water was tainted. But they are complementary. Ms Clark is more analytical. “Lead is one toxic legacy in American cities,” she writes. Others include segregation, redlining and the practice of well-heeled neighbourhoods splitting off to form their own municipalities. “This is the art and craft of exclusion. We built it into the bones of our cities as surely as we laid lead pipes.”

Ms Hanna-Attisha is more personal and emotional. She vividly describes the effects of lead-poisoning on her young patients. Even at low levels, the damage is irreversible, she says. For an infant, exposure to lead can result in developmental delays, a drop in IQ, aggressive behaviour and mood swings. “As lead-poisoned kids reach their teens,” she writes, “they have a much harder time at school and are more likely to drop out.” In their 20s they may be more likely to commit violent crime. Lead may even alter a child’s DNA, so the effects cascade down the generations.

She is at her best when recounting the detective work she undertook after a tip-off about lead levels from a friend who had worked for the Environmental Protection Agency. Her aim was to show that the spike she noticed in lead in her patients’ blood could be traced to the moment Flint changed its water supply. Extracting the relevant data on other residents from unwilling bureaucrats was hard, but eventually Ms Hanna-Attisha got the figures that proved the correlation. On September 24th 2015 she went public with her findings.

Return to Vehicle City

The blowback was immediate. A spokesman for the state’s environment agency said Ms Hanna-Attisha’s conclusions were irresponsible and insisted that Flint’s drinking water was safe. But her evidence was too persuasive to ignore. The scandal ultimately led to criminal prosecutions of numerous officials involved in the key decisions—as well as a switch back to water from Lake Huron in October 2015.

Both books linger on the aftermath. Ms Clark describes a host of lawsuits intended to hold those responsible to account. In a surprisingly big and early victory, in April 2017, the state agreed to pay up to $87m to replace pipes, and to provide filters and bottled water and conduct water-testing. For her own part, she says in person, Ms Hanna-Attisha is focusing on mitigating the effects on children. Flint has two new child-care centres serving 500 young patients, she notes. She is raising money for a children’s-health charity (it already has $20m in the kitty) and runs the Flint Registry, a project funded by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, which identifies and helps victims of lead-poisoning.

“Flint will not be defined by this crisis,” vows Ms Hanna-Attisha. It brought out the locals’ fighting spirit, she says, and drew attention to their needs. The most important long-term solution, reckons Mayor Weaver, is “jobs, jobs, jobs”. For the first time in more than 30 years, a company is building a factory in town. In October Lear, a maker of car seats, broke ground on a site formerly known as Buick City.