Society & Culture - Posted by Andy Henion-Michigan State on Wednesday, December 28, 2011 10:45 - 6 Comments 
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(4 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5) Loading ...Do minorities get ‘hosed’ on water bill?
"People of color have the fewest opportunities to leave urban centers and are left to pay for the crumbling legacy of a bygone economic era," says sociologist Stephen Gasteyer. (Credit: iStockphoto)
MICHIGAN STATE (US) — White flight from urban centers often means minority residents are left to pay to maintain aging water and sewer systems, a new study finds.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
This “structural inequality” is not necessarily a product of racism, but does mean that racial minorities pay systematically more than white people for basic municipal services.
“This study demonstrates a disturbing racial effect to the cost of basic services,” says Stephen Gasteyer, assistant professor of sociology at Michigan State University. “People of color have the fewest opportunities to leave urban centers and are left to pay for the crumbling legacy of a bygone economic era.”
Straight from the Source
For the study, reported in the journal Environmental Practice, researchers analyzed Census data on self-reported water and sewer costs in Michigan and found that urban residents actually pay more than rural residents, a finding that refutes conventional wisdom.
Perhaps more importantly, water and sewer services cost more in areas with greater proportions of racial minorities.
Detroit is the “poster child” for this problem, Gasteyer says. The city has lost more than 60 percent of its population since 1950, and the water and sewer infrastructure is as much as a century old in some areas. Billions of gallons of water are lost through leaks in the aging lines every year, and the entire system has been under federal oversight since 1977 for wastewater violations.
“A fair proportion of Detroit’s large low-income population cannot afford the burden of rate increases meant to offset infrastructure repairs, leading to tens of thousands of customers getting their water turned off every year,” Gasteyer says.
Water and sewer lines are aging throughout the country. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, hundreds of billions of dollars will be needed to repair deteriorating systems over the next 20 years.
Paying for those upgrades likely will be a major issue in shrinking cities such as Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Birmingham, Ala., Gasteyer says.
“Everything is wearing out, and we are going to have to grapple with how we pay for these so-called liquid assets that need to be upgraded. At the same time, we need to be cognizant of who may be paying an unsustainable burden as those rates go up.”
More news from Michigan State University: http://news.msu.edu/
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6 Comments
mrHomesteader
As editor of Futurity, I’m concerned about the tone of recent comments to this story. I have removed a string of comments that contained overtly racist and hateful speech. We invite readers to share ideas and raise concerns, but we ask that they do so in a respectful way. Thank you / Jenny Leonard.
mrHomesteader
Detroit”s sad and desperate state can be attributed to Greedy unions and politicians, mismanagement, suburban sprawl, corrupt mayors, crime and drugs, break downs in the family units and in the end a tax base fleeing an oppressive, overburdened and untrustworthy government. The biggest factors that led to Detroit’s downfall were the effects of “Free Trade”, the mass exodus of the manufacturing base, along with Detroit’s corrupted and entrenched government and it’s refusal to put the city and it’s citizens future ahead of their own. The last of those (hopefully) was Kwame Kilpatrick and his gang of thieves.
More to the point of this piece, more than whites fled from Detroit, everyone who could -left- whether by choice or need. It would have seemed reasonable to state the ethnicity of the generations who built and paid for the infrastructure since the ethnicity / economic position of those left behind to try and pickup the pieces seems the overriding point of this whole post. That in itself seems terribly suspect.
In the end we all must except the vast majority of responsibility for our own lives and what we do with it and where we end up. No, we don’t all start from the same place, but that has always been true and always will be true. No matter our combined efforts, Some will always have a step up that others don’t.
B Chandler
+1 Mr Homesteader.
Poverty in America is a choice. Not some kind of iron clad circumstance.
Andrew Smith
This is a piece on failing infrastructure and the systemic minority inner city demographic. It is a statement of facts, not an opinion piece. Angry retorts and perceived slights to “whitey” can be quite illustrative only of the mind of the person making such an association.
mrHomesteader
Andrew, although you are right that “This is a piece on failing infrastructure and the systemic minority inner city demographic.”
However it was framed in a cloud of implied direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious racism.
“This “structural inequality” is not necessarily a product of racism”….. This statement at the beginning of this piece says it all…………….. at least to those who understand the meaning of and the intent of “not necessarily”
Your very short and flawed analysis lacks any attempt at truth telling as to why and how Detroit has gotten to it’s end days. As someone with some personal knowledge of Detroit’s decline and more than 2 brain cells to rub together your “blame whitey” delusions are insulting and totally devoid of any real logic. For gods sake get some perspective………… or continue to just be a tool.