Pipe Dreams: The Politics of Lead Pipe Crises

• In Event: Building Cities through Crises: Resilience, Resources, and Infrastructure

Abstract

The Flint, Michigan water crisis has led to a wealth of scholarship in the social sciences, as scholars of several fields and subfields have examined its impact on topics like race, environmental justice, and municipal takeovers. Referenced in almost any piece of relevant legislation regarding lead pipes over the last ten years, Flint has become synonymous with lead and the literature on water and lead.

Yet, the notoriety of Flint presents several interesting questions about its dominance of the literature on U.S. water politics and lead. In terms of lead levels, Flint was not the worst crisis a U.S. city has seen. In terms of length of time exceeding Federal action levels for lead, Flint's was relatively short compared to the lead pipe crises of cities like Washington D.C. and Portland.

While Flint was perhaps the worst political crisis of any lead catastrophe, Flint's experience is not the only experience that U.S. cities face, and I argue that examining the politics, processes, and institutions that other cities face adds new insight to the current state of urban affairs in the United States, and new depth to the dominant history that water infrastructure has played in U.S. urban development. American cities sank or swam based on how adeptly they could facilitate water, and examining lead pipes shows that they still do.

Lead pipe infrastructure is at a crossroads in United States politics. While the Federal government has implemented funding initiatives through major pieces of legislation during the Biden administration, and several states have implemented mandatory pipe replacement programs, studying the politics of the crises themselves offers unique insights into the classical debates on how cities respond to times of crises. This study asks, what are the politics of water infrastructure crises in the United States? This project compares several qualitative case studies that have experienced lead pipe crises in the last 20 years in U.S. cities: including Portland, Benton Harbor, Michigan; Pittsburgh, PA; Newark, NJ; and Jackson, MS.

Author

• Douglas M. Cantor, Rutgers University