The Next Flint | Emergency Preparedness | Forums

When will TPTB wake up and start investing in our infrastructure, sadly the people affected the most don't have the means to improve their situation.

When Rohan Hepkins, the mayor of Yeadon, Pennsylvania, heard about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, he sensed a pang he’s known for a while. “I just felt like, here we go again. That’s what happens to the disenfranchised.”

It’s also what could happen to older communities with aging infrastructure and declining tax revenues. No community can avoid the fact that America’s water infrastructure could require an investment of $1 trillion or more over the next 25 years. Some places, however, are more susceptible to crisis than others. An unholy brew of circumstances created the tragedy in Michigan—in which a money-saving decision to switch water supplies corroded the coating in Flint’s aging pipes, contaminating the supply with lead—yet similar circumstances afflict marginalized municipalities populated by marginalized people across the nation. Some of the most vulnerable communities are small post-industrial cities, like Flint. But the next infrastructure crisis is just as likely to occur in an aging, inner-ring, mostly black or Latino suburb.

“The post–World War II suburbs are starting to sag, because they were not meant to last this long,” says Myron Orfield, director of the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School. “The housing is rotten, the infrastructure is rotten. But it is the nonwhite suburbs that are the poorest places in metro America, with the smallest tax bases. There are thousands of them, and they are all going to have Flint problems all over the country.”

more http://www.slate.com.....uburb.html