Tainted Tap: Flint’s Journey from Crisis to Recovery by Katrinell M. Davis (review)

Reviewed by: Tainted Tap: Flint's Journey from Crisis to Recovery by Katrinell M. Davis Benjamin Pauli Katrinell M. Davis. Tainted Tap: Flint's Journey from Crisis to Recovery. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 266. Images. Index. Notes. Paperback: 24. 95. As one of the most significant water contamination events in recent American history, the Flint water crisis has inspired no shortage of analysis and commentary. Much of it, however, has come from people with little or no personal connection to Flint itself. Dr. Katrinell M. Davis's book Tainted Tap: Flint's Journey from Crisis to Recovery is an exception. Although Davis was not living in Flint during the crisis years, her familiarity with the city and its people as a Flint native gives her chronicle of the crisis and its aftermath special authority. Indeed, the book's central focus, "the factors that undermine community access to quality essential services"—and residents' efforts to manage the consequences of "benign neglect" (xii) —emerged out of reflections on her own experience of watching the fabric of her neighborhood erode on Flint's northwest side, leaving residents increasingly exposed to elemental social ills like crime, blight, poverty, and, not least of all, environmental contamination. Davis argues that Flint and other cities like it have passed the tipping point from being "minimal" cities trimmed down by neoliberal reforms to "discarded" cities, their basic services emaciated to the point of outright dysfunction. One of the merits of Tainted Tap is the way it traces the history of this breakdown, with the help of extensive archival research, into the failed urban renewal policies of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, when persistent racial discrimination and middle-class cooptation of anti-poverty initiatives like the Model Cities program thwarted efforts to breathe life into neighborhoods reeling from deindustrialization, white flight, and disinvestment. Of special interest is Chapter 2, "The Ecology of Dreams Deferred, " which profiles the variety of environmental issues that arose during the decades leading up to the water crisis and the decline of anti-pollution efforts at both the city and state levels. What the record shows us, Davis argues, is that "problems in poor areas"—environmental and otherwise—were "overwhelmingly ignored, " while attention and investment were concentrated on Flint's "historic" and "business-oriented" areas (78). More generally, Flint's "minimalist approach to providing essential services" became "institutionalized and increasingly apathetic and detrimental to the population's health" (79), especially low-income residents and residents of color. End Page 91 Davis is not only interested in the failures of public service provision, however, but the ways in which residents cope with these failures and struggle to make their voices heard in the face of the "malign neglect" (125) of skeptical or indifferent officials. In this respect, there is some overlap between Tainted Tap and my account of Flint water activists in Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis. But the story of popular struggle in Flint is much larger than any one book can relate, and Davis's telling is suffused with its own unique array of enlightening details, absorbed from hundreds of hours of city council meetings and reams of documents requested through the Freedom of Information Act, as well as interviews with Flint residents. Davis also continually weaves connective threads by toggling between resident advocacy and the broader context in which it took place, from the maneuvering of bureaucrats and lawyers to either thwart or advance resident demands, to national issues of infrastructure, regulation, and environmental contamination. While Tainted Tap does not shy away from addressing internecine conflict between various stakeholders in Flint, which Davis argues has "greatly undermined the pace and scope of the policy implementation necessary to help Flint get beyond its water crisis" (179), it ultimately emphasizes how heavily the odds are stacked against any community dealing with both the benign neglect of systemic service collapse and the malign neglect of official inaction and obstruction. In her assessment, the latter phenomenon continued deep into the recovery effort, as state and federal agencies sought excuses to withdraw from Flint: The rewards of water justice advocacy were undermined by. . .