Eight years after its water crisis, Flint doesn’t just need policy reform: It needs a PR boost

Eight years ago this spring, unelected bureaucrats in Flint, Mich., switched the city’s municipal water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River. The sting of the decision persists to this day. Not just because of the evidence that the water contamination resulting from the switch led to greatly increased levels of lead in the city’s children or a surge in skin rashes, hair loss, and intestinal issues in the broader resident population. And not just because Flint residents, years after the water has been declared safe, are still vigorously opposed to drinking it.

What also persists is a domino effect of negative press and public perception sparked by the water crisis. Predominant views that Flint still has contaminated water has fueled an exodus of residents — some 15,000 (roughly 15 percent of the population) having left since the crisis began — and scared-off potential transplants and investors. Research by our team and others shows the collective impact: torpedoed property values and stunted tourism, hospitality, and foodservice industries across Flint — and a stigmatized population.

Recovery policy rarely considers the role of public perception in the recovery.

Since 2016, federal, state, and local governments have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into recovery efforts in Flint, focusing mostly on replacing antiquated water delivery infrastructure in the city and providing residents with short-term, largely Band-Aid fixes like bottled water and water filters. On top of this, a new $626 million civil settlement is currently in the works. What you won’t find in these packages are resources to address the titanic impact of bad press, much of it undue, that the city has experienced since the water crisis began — and indeed well before it began — and that continues to make Flint and its people pariahs in the national mind.

As part of recovery packages, lawmakers must allocate greater resources for the promotion of cities’ strengths and cultural assets. How many Americans know that Flint was instrumental in FDR’s “Arsenal of Democracy” during World War II, galvanized the modern unionization movement, and several generations ago built a model for middle-class prosperity that corporations and cities follow to this day? Or that it’s currently home to a burgeoning world-class art scene and athletics programs? Eight years after a crisis that rocked a city, its strengths should be on full display if true recovery is to occur.

Likewise, officials can better support financial incentives for traveling to and buying and repairing homes in disaster-struck areas like Flint. This was done in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, where officials focused not just on rebuilding the city’s crippled levees and using creative marketing to remind people of the city’s vast cultural and culinary riches, but also offering subsidies and low-interest loans for people willing to make the city their home. Measures like these can be healing and help reinforce a political commitment to changing not only experiences with a city, but perceptions.

Media treatments ensure that the casual observer sees a place like Flint as in perpetual decline or — slightly better — perpetually recovering from decline, and balks at the idea of traveling there or otherwise supporting the city.

During its heyday in the 1950s when it had roughly 200,000 residents, Flint set the standard for industrialization through its all-encompassing courtship with General Motors. This, and the global perception of Flint’s excellence, all changed towards the new millennium as the automobile colossus that once employed over half of Flint adults began to lay-off workers in droves. A PR disaster — one the city has struggled to shake now going on 40 years — followed Flint’s economic disaster.

Here’s one example of a media view that radiates in public perceptions today: when reviewing Michael Moore’s macabre Oscar-winning 1989 documentary, “Roger and Me,” which chronicled General Motor’s stunning retreat from Flint, a Washington Post film critic called Flint “desolate, rat-infested, a city with teeming jails, a soaring crime rate and plummeting expectation — a postindustrial American wasteland that Money magazine proclaimed the worst place to live in the country.”

Today, it’s virtually impossible for us to look at Flint, or cities like it, without first thinking about its seemingly characteristic flaws.

We all need to put more thought into how we reflexively create these associations.

In describing Flint and the water crisis, many of us are fixed to de jour terms for vulnerability and helplessness. Read any given article on Flint pre- or post-water crisis and you will find terms like “poor,” “impoverished,” “disadvantaged,” “disenfranchised,” “oppressed,” and “marginalized” firmly planted in the headlines or first paragraphs, conveying utter hopelessness and irremediability. If you were asked to describe a city like Flint without using these expressions, could you?

Like all cities — and like all people — Flint is more than its weaknesses. Choosing to focus on Flint’s weaknesses, the water crisis being just its latest, is more a reflection of us than it is the city or its people.

Jerel Ezell is an assistant professor at Cornell University at the Africana Studies and Research Center and director of the Cornell Center for Cultural Humility. He is a Fulbright scholar. His research focuses on social and health outcomes in post-industrial communities in the United States.