Dirty Water

Flint has a water problem. A while ago the city of Detroit, who supplied Flint with water, put the water bills up several times. The city of Flint paid the increase for a while before deciding they could not pay to get Detroit out of its financial difficulties – after all, it has its own. Flint has its own river and city officials decided water could be sourced from there to save money. The river is dirty and so a high level of chemicals had to be used. The end result was increased levels of the byproduct trihalomethane as well as odor and discolouration in the water. Water rates remained one of the top three monthly outgoings for most households.

My friend, a resident of Flint, recently received a letter reassuring her that the $100 she pays for she pays a month for water was giving her water that was safe to drink, a problem that most of the town worries about regularly. That is, it is safe as long as she isn’t pregnant or suffering from a weakened immune system. The problem is that many of the city of Flint actually do have serious health problems due to a variety of complex factors, most down to poverty. My friend has a special filter on the tap to ensure the water is safe to drink, it costs around $30 and others rely on bottled water, but for many of the people of Flint both these options are way out of reach. Actually, quite a few of the people of Flint can’t even afford to pay for their water full-stop, dirty or not. Asking around water rates are regularly around $100-150 a month. It is not unusual for those who are unemployed to get cut off, depending on neighbours in the street for water. Meanwhile in Detroit the city is $15 million dollars worse off as a result of Flint going to its own resources and local protests continue.

Illiteracy

The car manufacturer GM was born in Flint and employed 80000 people who moved to the town with their families and invested millions of dollars in buildings, shops and museums, many of which now lie abandoned. GM employs 7500 today. Such massive decline has lead to more than simply widespread unemployment. Those that could moved out of the city in the 70s, 80s and 90s, a movement often called the 'white flight'. The population has gone from 300,000 to under 100,000 today. Yet this move was less about race and more about education and opportunity. Those that could get a job elsewhere did, those that couldn't stayed behind.

Today we visited a project called Christ Enrichment Centre which is part of St Paul's Episcopal Church Flint (the church we attended yesterday). The centre was once an Episcopal church but as folks moved out congregants dwindled and this church was closed. Today it supports those people who have been left behind because they can't get a job elsewhere. For many of these people, they, like a third of the city's adults, are illiterate.

Part of the reason for this widespread illiteracy is that factory jobs that existed previously did not demand many of the workers to read and write. These people - black and white - cannot now work anywhere else.

Christ Enrichment Centre focuses on literacy amongst families and training people learn how to read and write. They are supported by St Paul's and other local churches, by the Episcopal church centrally and they also receive some government funding. They also have an onsite foodbank, work to support young mothers and run a summer camp for children. Today we met a 73 year old gentleman in the centre learning to write for the first time.

8 Mile

Eminem reminded us that those closest to the city are often the worse off. In his film Eight Mile, the title refers to Eminem’s story of growing up only 8 miles from downtown Detroit, an area of high unemployment, depopulation, abandoned buildings, crime and fragmented families. James has already mentioned that as we drove from Detroit out to Flint, we saw that by each ‘mile road’ the houses got bigger, the abandoned buildings got fewer, graffiti lessened, cars increased, restaurants increased, grocery stores and gyms appeared. The problems that effect the city centres are not problems that many of the people who live further out in the suburbs have to live with. Many of these people drive in daily to run the governing systems and work in the offices. Both Flint and Detroit are big cities, too big in size to be supported financially in their infrastructure, and so a lot of the money stays in the suburbs. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

It challenges me to think about how we challenge the injustices that are not quite on our doorstep as well as the ones that are. In fact, how hard do we try to move our doorsteps further away from poverty and chaos altogether? There are plenty of churches in Flint and Detroit with people in doing great things, but are equally plenty of derelict churches. James 1:27 reminds us of our duty to look after those who can’t look after themselves, but also to keep ourselves “unstained” by the world. Do we think of keeping ourselves “unstained” by moving away from dirt, squalor and poverty, or by walking into it?

Urban Decay

This is way too much this video, and the music is pretty bad, but watch a few seconds, it does highlight some of the needs and the area in which we are staying.

Woodward Avenue

So we have been in the USA for less than 24 hours and completed 219 miles in the car which feels particularly appropriate in Michigan, in Detroit and Flint - areas built mostly by the car industry.

One of the main thoroughfares in to Detroit is called Woodward Avenue which is an 8 lane major road that has the high rise city buildings on the horizon. It is 27 miles into the centre along its length. It is intersected by lots of different roads as it leads into the centre of Detroit; Woodward is marked in particular by mile roads, which progressively count down to the centre of Detroit. Fun Fact: for those interested 8 Mile (the film) about the life of Eminen is set around 8 mile this is where Eminen was born and raised. It was very interesting to watch how the city changes as you drive from 21 – 1. From 21 – 14/13 there is wealth; this is on a par with the West End of London (Richmond/Twickenham) pockets of deprivation but a presentation of wealth, shops, cars and service based industries. As you continue from miles 13 – 4, it changes considerably, one thing you notice is, there are more people – people crossing the 8 lane road, people standing around and cyclists. The buildings drastically changes, there are a lot of derelict house, factories and shops, larger open spaces of demolished factories and housing. Between 8 – 4 there seemed to be a lot of churches – I’m currently not sure why, I may come back to this!

Miles 4 – 0 is much more like the centre of a large city, anywhere in the world (certainly from the outside) large glass skyscrapers, restaurants and shops which eventually leads to the river. We left the centre from a different road and quickly entered (within 2 miles) to more ‘rundown’ areas.

More to come….

Welcome to Flint

Over the next week we are in the town of Flint, 60 miles northwest of Detroit. You might have heard of the city from Michael Moore (from Flint himself) in his film Roger and Me. These postcards are a little reminder that in the 40s and 50s the city was booming. In the 80s the city sank into severe economic depression after years of deindustrialization. In the 2000s became known for high crime rates and ranked as amongst the most dangerous in the United States. Michigan placed the city it in a state of financial emergency in 2011. This kind of reputation never helps a city. One of the city's biggest problems seems to be not what you do see (e.g the media's urban porn style photography shoots ) but what you don't. That is the families and professionals that have left. The 'white flight' is a term used to describe large-scale migrations of white peoples from racially mixed urban inner city areas to racially homogeneous suburban or ex-urban areas. Those with money and jobs essentially have often left the city behind. Driving from Detroit airport out to Flint its clear that many of these people are still surviving and thriving, they just aren’t doing so inside the city gates.

Originally Londoners (one of us adopted into London life from Norfolk), we have spent 18 months in Cambridge. Laura has been training for ordination in the Church of England and James has been doing this http://concreteyouthwork.co.uk/

In the next month we will be travelling round three US Cities (and then some) armed with a two year old and reflecting on church, youth and poverty across the pond. First we fly to Detroit, to explore the city and its neighbour Flint, making links with friends and our episcopal neighbours - hope you can join us!