I am Justin Schott and I am executive director of EcoWorks (This interview was conducted on April 4, 2019; since April 2020, Justin is Project Manager – Detroit Climate Strategy at EcoWorks.) We are a Detroit nonprofit. We’ve been around since 1981 and working at the intersection of sustainability and community development and social justice.
Interviewer: Okay. We’re going to be talking a little bit about water security and water security means a lot of broad issues for a lot of people. Could you tell us what it means for you?
Justin: Yes, it means having consistent and affordable access to it. It’s not something that most Americans think about on a daily basis because it’s just there. It’s like flipping a light switch, which is another thing that not everybody has access to but you walk on, you turn on the tap and you assume you have safe drinking water right there. That’s just been a kind safe for like having air to breathe is and something that’s very easy to take for granted. I think for many people that have traveled overseas that gives you another perspective on, “Oh, right. My water may not be safe, or the tap mainly run for a few hours a day when I have access where I don’t have to go far to get it.”
All these things that make you spend your time your energy your resources trying to get it, thinking about whether you have to conserve it on a regular basis. Those are all parts and then there’s this psychological security of do I have water? If you’ve lost water and think about when can I go fill up a bucket from a neighbor or how’s my supply of bottled water doing or where’s my next bath or shower going to come from? That’s a tremendous part of security as well.
Water Security—Urban Systems
Interviewer: When a lot of environmental research or work that looks of water tends to look at contamination issues in rivers or the ocean of course and not a lot of people tend to think about urban water systems and urban issues. Can you tell us a little bit about how you are seeing water security really impact urban systems?
Justin: Yes. Well, there’s the water safety issue which is becoming a big part and that’s not limited to communities of color or lower income communities. We’re seeing this pop up with ethos all over the state. We know lead in drinking water happens in high-income areas and schools, any place that’s got aging infrastructure. In some ways, if it’s not already happening now, it’s something that will be a universal experience for people, concerns about the safety of our drinking water with various contaminants.
In terms of the scope of the shutoffs, in particular, that’s something when you talk about hundred thousand households losing access to their taps in their homes over, I forget seven- or eight-year period over the 2010s, that’s touching. Everybody knows somebody who’s been affected or seen a contractor coming down the street ready to turn off somebody’s water and so it’s just a scale. I know there’s shut off happening in the suburbs too, but these are really on the margins, they are infrequent and it’s just the systemic nature of it which is so dramatic here and we see spillover effects from this too.
There’s the immediate impact of not having water but then we have an emerging public health crisis from people not having good access to proper hygiene from water and their connections to legionnaires to other diseases that people can get. We see this around the globe too like an emergence of cholera following the cyclone that struck Southeastern Africa. We’ve got those kinds of concerns that haven’t been around for a while that can be re-emerging here as it– so there’s the public health side and then on the financial side, we have connections to property taxes.
If you don’t pay your water what happens with that delinquent bill let’s say if it gets added to your taxes and then there’s this question of how many homes have been foreclosed? Then it may be the most gut-wrenching human level. There’s this risk of losing your children because providing water is something that the state determines as necessary and people can lose children as a result of that or have their children taken away because their homes are not fit. All kinds of tendrils really from the single loss of water and to think about tens of thousands of people at any given time facing that. It’s really a crisis.
Interviewer: I really appreciate how well you use the word tendrils and that makes sense because you were tying up all these different issues together, which not a lot of people tend to identify readily. You talk about the scope of the shutoffs and the shut offs and mutual aid especially became really prominent starting around 2014 or so United Nations came in. Can I ask you to recall or reflect a little bit about as all of this unfolded around you, what were your thoughts or what were your feelings really when all of this was happening around you?
Justin: Yes. In 2014 that was the first time there was major attention to this and certainly, pressure from creditors and bankruptcy was a big part of this crackdown to try to get people to pay their delinquent bills. For me, I remember a lot of demonstrations and the activists showing up and then having somebody from the UN, the UN special rapporteur for human rights coming to Detroit to address this that just struck me as something inconceivable really.
Not just the US, that the city in particular was doing something so egregious in depriving people of water who had no means of paying for that water and who pay much, much higher rates than suburban residents because of this bad agreement that we have with the 83% of costs being borne by the city and the suburbs getting water at these wholesale rates. Yes, that was really dramatic and then I think soon led to the Hallmark nine that decided enough is enough and Charity Hicks saying, “I’m not going to take this”, and then them barring the trucks from leaving the Hallmark plant to go out and do their shut offs one morning. The full extent of that trial too, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with how that’s gone down. Have you followed this or spoken with the Wily Kellerman or–?
Yes, so following that piece of it too and Bill Wiley Kellerman has said this was the only vestige of justice remaining was to go to the courts and to get a jury trial there and a trial of their peers. That’s a remarkable piece of this to us. All of this was happening under emergency management and it’s not surprising that when you look at Flint, when you look at Detroit there’s water catastrophes that are put upon the people– happen during emergency management, so the state comes in because people supposedly can’t manage things and then the outcomes are so much worse for regular Detroiters.
Interviewer: Were you with EcoWorks when all of that was happening, the emergency management?
Justin: I was. Yes.
Interviewer: Can you reflect a little bit about that experience of basically being managed by someone else, the emergency management situation?
Justin: Yes. Well, it didn’t feel that we were being managed directly by somebody else during emergency management. Although I will say we were running our youth energy squad program in Detroit public schools. We had a new emergency manager every year and I used to go to some of those public hearings and it was a different direction every year and for all the things that were done to save money somehow deficits managed to grow and so I was always very, very skeptical of that. Then for a long time, we were given here’s a ten-point plan under– which was still coming out of the water department but was very sympathetic to the emergency manager at the time.
Yes, and so it was clear that the interests of the people facing shutoffs or who couldn’t pay their bills were the secondary consideration. I remember hearing well, “I don’t know how to give anybody free water. Nobody’s asking for free water.” This is a continued refrain coming out of DWSD and out of the city, like this was this crazy thing that people were asking for an affordability rate. I’m still getting to this point. This is five years, later, now, for reasons why we can’t have an affordability plan in their state legislation governing this. Yet nobody’s tried to do it.
Nobody has said, “Here’s an affordability plan, if there is a business group that’s so against subsidizing rates at some level, they’ll sue us and then we’ll be a court ordered to stop.” That’s never happened. We’re always told by city legal counsel that the threat of this is enough to say, “We can’t do it.” We’ve had a blue-ribbon panel. We’ve had Roger Colton, who’s a national affordability expert come in and talk about this.
We’ve had every kind of research on plans, analysis of– If we took out the– Last I checked it was 12 million that had been spent on shutoffs. It may have been more just contracts to Hamrick and others. If we put that into affordability rates, if we put the money that’s spent on collections and turning people on and turning people off. This is going to be close to a wash that we’re talking about to keep everybody with access to water. Then the political will has struck me as tremendously lacking to fix this.
Justin’s Journey as An Environmentalist
Interviewer: What has been your journey as an environmentalist, as an activist, as an organizer? How do you see yourself?
Justin: I grew up in suburban New York. I didn’t have much connection to nature early on. Then I went to summer camp up in the Adirondacks and got really into hiking and wanted to go work for the Forest Service and do trail work and spend as much time in the mountains as I could. I did that in my teens and then through college and got into outdoor education and leading students in conservation work. I did two years of AmeriCorps service out at Alternative Environmental High School in Eugene, Oregon. Kids spent half their time outside doing field science, doing conservation projects. I really loved that work; I was having a great time.
I had a mentor who said, “Well, this is easy for you. You do this work well. You’re in your zone, but what would it be like for you to do this in an urban area or someplace that’s not as easy?” I thought about it and my mom was a guidance counselor in the Bronx. I spent time in New York City. I thought, “That’s interesting.” While I was in grad school at U of M in the School of Natural Resources and Environment, that was always on my mind of what about that advice and connecting to some urban place more. I had this thought one day of just weatherizing my own windows and getting ready for winter, “What would that be like to train high school students to do this?”
Then I thought, “Well, we shouldn’t be training high school students urban. We should be doing it in Detroit,” even though I didn’t really have connections to Detroit at that time. That was my thought. I connected with a small environmental nonprofit called Voices for Justice. They do environmental work from an interfaith perspective, so very much thinking about the earth, and holistic care, and connections to people’s faith.
We ran a couple of small programs at the youth energy squad there. Then connected with some staff at EcoWorks, which was then warm training center background in 2009, 2010. In fact, that organization was a really good home. I’ve been in Michigan since 2004 and then now feels like close to home. There are still parts of the Midwest that haven’t fully integrated themselves.
EcoWorks—Goals and Mission
Interviewer: Tell us a little about EcoWorks. What its goal is and how water basically becomes a part of its goal?
Justin: We got started in 1981 with the goal of helping to form and support worker-owned co-ops that would be bringing more energy efficient and more green building practices. We formed a few co-ops and continue to evolve, to advocate for more green building practices through the ’80s and the ’90 and then got into working with residents and initially started that on the energy side. Working with people facing unaffordable bills and recognizing a lot of people are spending upwards of 50% of all of their income just to pay for their energy.
We did a lot of education around that, a lot of teaching people low and no cost things that they can do to save energy and have continued to expand by bringing in appliance replacement program. We see a lot of people with furnaces that are out or people with a refrigerator from the ’70s or the ’80s. We do upgrades there, and all this is with the goal of getting people to a level that’s affordable and self-sufficient with energy.
Broadly, I’d say that’s a big part of our goal is making sustainability something that’s affordable, something that’s accessible, and something that’s relevant to people’s lives. Whether that’s creating a job pathway by working with high school students and introducing them to green careers, working with neighborhoods on neighborhood development plans and thinking about what pieces of those connect to sustainability, working with cities on energy management in Southeast Michigan, that’s all part of. It is how does this make individual alliance, or neighborhoods, or communities better? How does that help us to progress toward a more just world?
Interviewer: In Detroit, what are some of the neighborhoods that you work in or neighbors’ specific programs or tools that you have?
Justin: We’ve got a program called Eco-D, which is something that’s been adopted out of the National Eco-Districts model. We’re working in four neighborhoods now, Southwest Detroit, Hope Village near Focus Hope, West Village, and Yorkshire Woods on the east side. Each of those neighborhoods has a strong desire to see sustainability be part of their future development. We work with them on they’re planning on facilitating green teams or sustainability committees there, and then on specific projects, so trying to concentrate resources to do demonstrations. This is a place when we’re running water education workshops. We’ll try to make sure that Eco-D neighborhoods all have access to that.
Detroit Water Stories Interview with Justin Schott, Part-2
EcoWorks Deroit and Water Education
Interviewer: Great. In terms of water education workshops, tell us a little bit about that.
Justin: We were part of a number of conversations and this blue-ribbon panel that I mentioned that was advocating for affordability. These were a number of activists in that 2014, 2015 timeframe. Now, we’re working on this and we were at the table listening, and we knew there was going to be something coming down, some larger program of support. This happened after the Great Lakes Water Authority was formed. There was four and a half million a year set aside for the water residential assistance program.
We teamed up with the community action agencies in the area. Primarily, Wayne Metro and put together a proposal that was– either works with leading the conservation piece of this. That was combining home education, water audits, fixture upgrades, and any plumbing repair that people needed. Over the course of two and a half years, starting in summer 2016, we saw about 2200 people with that, all of them receiving those in-home services. The results of that, these were high users but we’re about 20% water savings for each of them, about a $400 a year savings on their bill.
Interviewer: Did you mass produce or create any source of information kits, or tools, or things like that?
Justin: Yes. We’ve got a water-smart curriculum, and then we would do some workshops with that. We had spaces with larger audiences, but a lot of it really needed to happen in homes. We had water educators that were out doing three or four visits a day. They were able to fix over half the plumbing repairs on their own. Just getting good at that, but then we had a plumber who was contracted and would go out and do the bigger repairs from there.
Interviewer: How do you see your role, as an organization focused on water education, how do you see your role in this broader spectrum of deep affordable structural systemic inequality, but also some really important resources and assets that aren’t very much available? How do you see your role?
Justin: It’s an interesting space because we’re not– We’re the people and taking a strong public advocacy standpoint very much. We have a lot of this direct personal knowledge from the work that we’ve done with individual residents. That informs a lot of the ideas that we have and a lot of the solutions. We do our own pre and post bill analysis. We have some data that we can contribute when thinking about if you were to set here a few different affordability options, what are the costs and benefits? We have numbers to work with. I think that’s really valuable and puts us in a place to advocate within the city of Detroit for affordability.
Then, I think continuing to elevate the issue in whatever way we can. We had a Master’s (student) team from the University of Michigan and supported their work doing surveys of about 400 people who weren’t necessarily facing water shutoffs, they just needed general social assistance or were coming to a community action agency for some program. We’re asking about their experience with water shut offs. Getting data there, confirming perceptions that people have that nobody’s asking for free water.
For instance, people were saying, on average they were willing to spend something like 5% of their income on water. The typical rate we hear for affordable is 3%. People are actually willing to pay a little bit above that. I think being able to impose some of those narratives or to undo some of the myths that are out there with evidence is an important role for eco works.
Interviewer: I know you were partners with Dr.Rim’sfactories on that particular project, can you tell us a little bit about, what were the major takeaways from that project, from that study, for your work in your understanding?
Justin: I know it was more than half. I don’t remember the number of offhand, but one thing we saw was the majority of people were switching between paying your energy bill and their water bill on a month to month basis. Meaning they were always too expensive and maybe once a year, there was a cycle of getting an assistance payment that would pay down one of those bills. Until that happened, they can never keep up with both at the same time.
We have other information about other bills that they would switch back and forth. Whether that’s prescription medicine or whatever, people were unable to keep up with. I think that the finding that nobody was asking for free water and specifically we had, I think, different tiers of what people could be paying. It was something like 2%, like a handful out of those 400 people that said water should be free. That’s just not a reality. Even people that can’t keep up with two bills or however many bills they have are not suggesting that they shouldn’t pay their part or pay what they’re capable of paying. I think that’s a really big takeaway from it.
Water Affordability in Detroit
Interviewer: That’s a takeaway that I think flies in the face of a lot of criticism about the affordability.
Justin: If we demonize people as being, grabbing for free water and that’s the narrative. I think that was in large part, the narrative between the suburbs and the city going back to the ’50s, and the ’60s, right? There were all these undertones of racism that were there and that led, I think, in part to the court decision and the different rates that we have now and Detroiters being responsible for this aging infrastructure that runs hundreds of miles outside the city. Yes, I think we really need to change the narrative and the more we have evidence and not just speculation behind that, the better.
Interviewer: I really appreciate your role as being one that works with many of these events, organizations, and groups simultaneously. At the same time, I wonder how you’re able to prevent yourself from being drawn into one camp or controversy or another.
Justin: I think it can create challenges on both sides. Right? I think we work directly with the city and the Office of Sustainability in giving information to the WUSD and I think there’s some potential concern about, are we activists? Are we trying to undermine their work? Are we really loyal allies? Then from the activists, we can hear the same thing of, “Why don’t you just stand and be a loud voice for what you know to be true?” I think it’s just; we have this position where we can bridge both of those two and it’s not an easy position to occupy. It’s a rare space, I think, where we’re able to try to push decision makers in one direction and also feed information that will be valuable to the other.
In some way, we’re the mediator or resource which maybe doesn’t sound the greatest, but that’s how I see it. I think we can work with activists to say, “This is what’s necessary.” Then to work with the city and say, “This is what’s possible.”
Interviewer: No, it’s a necessary role, I think. I’m sure that the people that you work with, for instance, realize that you push them to know each other. I really appreciated how I reached out to you initially, where your first thought was, “Are you working with these groups on the ground?” That was important to check on that. I did appreciate that. Can you tell us a little bit about– You mentioned some of your various programs, your tools, and your initiatives? What seems to be working well for you on the ground? Where do you see yourself perhaps changing or tweaking moving forward?
Justin: I think none of this work is super easy or super convenient. Those are the barriers that we run into if people had all kinds of times to do their own energy audits or their own water audits and calculate that, “Hey, I could be saving this much if I upgraded to an efficient furnace and here’s where I can get a low cost or no cost loan to do that.” There’s just a lot of technical expertise, that would take a lot of time for people to acquire. Even city governments don’t have somebody on staff who is dedicated to sustainability or energy management, particularly some of the smaller suburbs.
I think being able to offer that as a trusted partner is really valuable and understanding that it takes people a while, I think to gain their own capacity to run sustainability programs or just to live sustainably. We can’t pull out before people have gotten to that point. Working with cities, we’ve worked with them for several now going on four years, and they’re still getting to that point of just hiring an Energy Manager and formalizing some of the structures that will enable them to keep going. Yes, I think making sure the relationships are deep and lasting.
We see with students. Still we work with students on a weekly basis and their green teams, and then high school students can get summer jobs with us and then come back for a second year. Really recognizing that there’s this long pathway to adopting sustainability is a big piece of things that work.
Interviewer: We’ve been seeing some interesting and I hope promising use out of Lansing in the past couple of months actually, with the reorganization of the queue. Actually, some more funding or emphasis placed on water securities and the whole bunch of new bills which will probably not get passed, but they are on the big table again. What are your thoughts about the movement, I guess, on the other states?
Justin: I would certainly expect to see more change. I don’t know all of the inner dynamics of what can be handled from a regulatory or an executive perspective and what still needs to get passed by the state house and the state senate. I think we actually had a really great suite of bills that Stephanie Chang and some others had worked to put together in response to Flint. She had a community meeting and there was like 27 bills that were up to address a lot of the issues, from affordability to water quality, to who’s accountable when something happens and criminal penalties for that. I would hope to see some of that.
Again, getting back to the universal need for water infrastructure equipment’s, is likely to at least increase investment here. I think that could go a long way to address these issues, that’s certainly part of the cost burden here in Detroit is having fewer and fewer people on this aging overbill infrastructure that was envisioning the city would be at 5 million people and now when it was at 2 million and that said it’s gone the other way.
Interviewer: What are some of the feedback or the pushback perhaps as you’re getting, when you’re engaging groups outside the city onto this issue lead to access contamination, affordability and so on and so forth?
Justin: On the affordability side, I’ve had personal conversations with people, and I don’t think they had a sense for how much less they pay in many instances, and that suburbs are getting wholesale rates and passing that along in many cases directly to their customers. I think that is probably the number one myth that needs to get corrected. I think if people understood Detroiters are spending $900 or $1000 a year on average on water and how much more that is proportionately for households here, I think there could be some more compassion. That seems like a really important starting point that people just to understand the facts and the history of how we got to these different rates.
I guess what I hear often is, “Yes, we shouldn’t be turning off water but–” Right there’s a– I’m not sure what we should do about it because are we just going to provide free water? I think a lot of those damaging narratives have sunken in, or that’s what people understand from the clips they get in the media is that Detroiters are being shut off but they’re also not paying their bills.
There’s a wide spectrum there too. I think you hear things from time to time about, “Well, if they didn’t have so many big screen TVs or didn’t have so many children–” You hear a lot of these awful judgmental statements which go hand-in-hand with racism too. There’s that on the extreme, but I think there’re people in the middle that if they knew what was happening, they would feel very differently about how water costs should be paid.
Interviewer: Coming back to engaging audiences and residents within the city especially on issues like Rain Garden’s infrastructure in general, do you ever encounter reactions like, “This seems somewhat elitist and not really relevant to I do get water in front of my tap, what is planting a rain garden going to do for me?”
Justin: We’ve heard it more from organizations. I think that the church that’s got a large parking lot that somebody has a $700 a month and a drainage bill they didn’t use to have this or will have this shortly. I think there’s certainly pushback there and I think rightly so. I think there’s been tons of energy and a lot of grant dollars put in infrastructure.
When you look at well, what are a hundred rain gardens going to do where all of the volume of water like when you think back to the 2014 floods and we got 5 inches of rain in two hours, is that really going to reduce, combine sewer overflows in the Detroit river, or sewage coming out from people’s basements in Jefferson-Chalmers? Probably not. This is an engineering problem.
If we’re talking about this huge volume of water in whatever– how many millions of gallons are falling, then a few pockets of 1,000-gallon gardens around are not going to dump that. I think it started out as a good place of goodwill and education and get people behind this, but I think they’ve reached a stage now where if we’re trying to actually change water quality and what’s going into the river, then we need much bigger solutions than we’re talking about.
I think it’s like when you hear how we make vehicles more efficient and people say, “Well, keep your tires inflated.” That will help a mile or two per gallon, but that’s not dramatically changing the scene.
Community Engagement
Interviewer: How do you engage local community members especially people who are probably stuck in these cycles of need and not having enough as is? How do you encourage and inspire them to come out and saying, “This rain garden or this GSI, is something that I’m going to work on and help on and it’s going to help me.”
Justin: We don’t do a whole lot of that on the actual rain gardening side. We just some education and more around A, this is an aesthetic benefit eventually that some people learned through the way, lots of Detroiters are just into gardening, right? Also, from the economic side that yes, there are credits from doing this and that, maybe motivation to do it.
Coming back to the last question I did want to say we did a survey of about 7,000 Detroiters or maybe we got 5500 survey responses back. This is for the sustainability action agenda; the sustainability plan that Detroit is developing now. The number one concern that people raised there out of about 50, housing affordability was actually utility affordability. I think 38% of people said that was their top concern of general living concerns in the city. I don’t think we need to really go out to get people’s attention to this, that’s something that’s top of mind for many people.
Then I think when they take the initiative to seek help, they’re often turning to some kind of human service agency, and they face all kinds of barriers when they get there. Like a caseworker deals with too many people, to sometimes just standing, and sometimes there’s a long waiting list. It’s unclear, having to sign up for every different program individually. I think people get stuck in that system or tired of that system whatever it is, they’ve been let down by something in the past.
We have a lot of people that have home repair issues or health and safety issues, and they may be on the waiting list for plumbing repairs for instance, and it turns out they haven’t spread hazard in the home, and after waiting for six months they get denied services. That’s repair that they were waiting for, for a long time. There’re lots of gaps just in the system, and I think there’s also this perception it’s the US, you can go get help for something, right?
You just have to go out and ask. That’s usually not the case where people think on the energy side. People can go get signed up for weatherization, and they don’t realize well, we’re talking about less than 200 households. I think last year, that got their weatherization funds. A lot of this is really not all that available on these people on this situation of, “What do I do? Am I supposed to figure this out on my own?”
That’s where the education piece is really valuable. It’s not the endgame, but it’s an important stuff if you’re in this situation. We want to help you get the structural upgrades that you need into your home, to be efficient and to be affordable, but in the meantime, here’s how you can weather the situation that you’re in.
Interviewer: From my understanding of what you do in EcoWorks is you span so many different boundaries, and boundaries of working with community organizations, community organizers, government officials, and engineers, for instance, who are working on the infrastructure at stake. What is one key misperception that each group has about the other?
Justin: It’s a great question. I do like that framing of EcoWorks spanning these many layers. I will certainly say I think in trying to reestablish trust with the city’s sustainability efforts, that I think can be really hard to undo past experiences that people had in particular, the Detroit works project still weighs heavily with people. I’m not sure how familiar you are with that effort, but this was the right sizing Detroit plan. They talked about moving people out of the less densely populated neighborhoods to downtown, and midtown, and there were details on how that would happen.
They just put that out there as an idea and it’s was like, “Are we going to get a home somewhere, or who’s paying, or do I have to move? Are my city services going to get cut?” It was just all kinds of speculation. Then the meetings were not well facilitated. There was a voice of God that was responding to questions, and nobody actually upfront who could be addressed. Anyway, that did not go over well-
Interviewer: Shocker.
Justin: – it left a bad taste. For the Planning Department, for any city agency really that’s trying authentically I would say to get community input and buy-in, that can be really hard to overcome those perceptions of how things have run in the past. I don’t know that it’s a misperception, but keeping an open mind about what’s possible, how government could change I think is a challenge for individual residents. I’m not sure the city or government appreciates, but I was just talking about Winchester scarcity of availability of programs or how many gaps there are and how many barriers there are.
You’ll hear a Community in Action Agency say, “Oh, yes, we do authorization,” and there’s no question of what was the scale, how many people is this actually reaching? They don’t know that 75% of people get denied because of a home, health and safety issue. I think this is where we get the idea that there’s accessibility to support and financial assistance. People just need to tap into it. That’s not really the case and unfortunately, I think you have to be pretty in the weeds like EcoWorks to really understand where these issues are, and why they don’t work as fully or as comprehensively as they’re intended to.
I think there’s a lot of Education to happen there, and we’re just starting to see that come around. We had been working with the City’s Office of Sustainability, Bloomberg Associates has been doing pro bono consulting for them, and finally mapped out the landscape of utility assistance and how challenging it is. I think that was really idle thing for the city to say, “Oh wow, we really need to pump more resources into this because this isn’t working well for a lot of people or it’s not universally available.” That’s a big learning curve and I think it’s very easy to say, “Well, here’s what we have or didn’t DWST come up with this 10-point plan for affordability?”
Yes, but it turns out if you couldn’t pay your first payment, then they were saying, “Well, you’re going to double your next payment and pay it in two months. If you can’t pay that then we’ll quadruple, it.” It was like, “Ratcheting this up is not a plan, [chuckles] it’s just getting to an inevitability,” which is that people’s incomes don’t support the bills that they’re facing, rent et cetera. Unfortunately, I think it means really confronting a lot of the intricacies of this landscape both of assistance programs and utilities.
Interviewer: When you look at the landscape of really what’s happening on water security, where do you see this moving to?
Justin: I was just talking about the weeds of water affordability and everything that’s happening there with access to programs. I think the city, and I guess us as a community we have a choice to make too and saying, “We are committed to there being no more water shutoffs.” I think that commitment makes a number of solutions possible, but if we’re going to look at it from the same frame of why aren’t people paying their bills? How do we collect what they owe us, then we’re going to get a different outcome? I think a lot of it is about the vision, and what we value upfront will drive how a lot of this unfolds.
If we continue to say, “Legally we can do this,” then I think the best we’re going to get is an extension of the current programs, which is limited access to home water audits and plumbing repairs, and I think that’s not going to keep up with people facing shutoffs. We’ll be in the same situation with very incremental reductions in that pressure that people face and then shutoffs. My hope is we say, “No more shutoffs and then let’s figure out how to do it,” because I think if we say, “Well, what can we do to make water more affordable?” We won’t get anywhere close.
Interviewer: Take a stand.
Justin: I think it’s absolutely critical particularly for leadership and city to do that.
Interviewer: Is there anything that gives you hope that we might move in that direction?
Justin: Yes, you might think riding some of the tide that comes from broader concern about water, and it’s ironic and unfortunate, I think. When it takes something raising concern in higher income communities or wider communities, that leads to more of this global or statewide concern or reform, I can see that happening. I heard something similar with the incinerator closing that it took development in the town, and new white residents to make the closure happen. That’s going to be bittersweet if that’s what it takes, but I think that’s possible.
My sources of hope are I think gradually in terms of humanitarian issues whether you’re talking about trafficking, or equal rights to voting, universal access to marriage, whatever it is we continue to slowly come around to those. I think there’s more enlightenment particularly among younger people, and my hope is that water just becomes accepted as a human right, and then we’ve had to have this question of what’s affordable, what’s not? I’m hopeful by cities like Philadelphia that are taking the lead and have active affordability plans, and I think the more of those that we get, the more there’s cover for us to pass our own legislation here or implement something along those lines too. I see movement. I don’t know that that’s much consolation for people that have been through it already and are still struggling.
Water Security: Priority Issues
Interviewer: What is your number one priority related to water security going forward?
Justin: I think we need to get to zero, I don’t think–
Interviewer: No, I mean in terms of what is your number one priority as an organization, as EcoWorks in terms of all the particular programs or issues that you are going to focus on?
Justin: I think continuing to work on pushing for water affordability, whatever that looks like, and some of that may be research-based or here’s even the economic case if we’re thinking about what’s the cost of a public health outbreak that we’re potentially facing. Advocating on that side, we would certainly like to get back to be doing more in-home implementation and programming, but whatever way we can help to make the case or affordability. I think that’s a priority for Ecoworks.
Interviewer: You do work a fair amount of data in terms of usage and things like that. Do you have data on how much water is used by households in Detroit compared to other households? Is that more or less?
Justin: Yes. It tends to be less although I’m not sure how much of that. The data that I have seen may include people that have faced shutoffs. I’m a little hesitant to say and for people that have significant leaks, those leaks are 50% or more of their usage so we have that counterbalancing too. I would say many Detroit residents conserve water or use it more frequently than others.
Interviewer: I guess that’s also part of the narrative, right where the water which was so high because they’re using so much water.
Justin: Yes. I don’t think it’s because everybody in Detroit is taking two-hour showers, watering their lawn for six hours a day in the summer, right?
Interviewer: What role do we I guess as residents more urban as urban have in context, what role can we play in terms of managing or protecting our access to water?
Justin: Yes. I think we have protests and demonstrations at the level we had in 2014 today. Given that, I think there’s been a little bit of softening about what’s possible. I think that could really change things. I think certainly having suburban allies in that is critical including whether those are commissioners on the Great Lakes water authority or county commissioners. Yes, I think it can’t just be this fringe activist voice there. It needs to be elevated in a more mainstream way. Yes. I don’t know. I would love to see the mayor live without water for a week and come back and report if shutting water off is a good idea.
It doesn’t take much, I’ll tell you. I had a pipe burst in January during the polar vortex and it was whatever, a day and a half, right? It was not so much but gosh, it still makes me think about how terrible this must be to not have it, right?
Interviewer: Yes. I was talking with someone who was on the east side of Detroit when there was a water advisory down in downtown Detroit and residents in downtown were notified of the water advisory but there was no such notification for people on the east side. When she called DWST she was told, “Oh, you must live in downtown.” “No, I live in the east side.” “Oh, well, there’s a water advisory.” “Oh, gosh, no one told me about that.” When you think about how the movement has– how the crisis has unfolded, how people are working, also actively working to address the situation, as well as the people, that are impacted by it, the clients they should work with. Are there instances or stories that you can recount that move you or inspire you, or motivate you?
Justin: We’ve heard from people on both the energy and the water side. I don’t have their full stories but people– I know we had at least five people in the last month on the energy side that didn’t have heat for four or five years and running until they were part of a furnace replacement program that we did. We had similar stories; elderly people that would go cut the water knowing they had a leak in the basement every time. Anytime they wanted water upstairs, were making the trip down the stairs to turn on the water main because that’s where the leak was, use it, come back down the stairs.
All of this is physically difficult for them too and they lived alone, and that was their only solution because they couldn’t pay for the plumbing repair which would have been $1,000 or something like that. Yes. Then there are other issues that we walked away from that motivate me too, right? Issues with sewage leaks or people stack pipes not being connected properly and that’s not part of this program. It can feel pretty ridiculous to be in a home and do this one little thing that you’re supposed to focus on and yet there’s a hole in the roof, but we’re here to fix the pipes. The stuff needs to be better coordinated.
We’re actually looking at that too now with Highland Park and thinking if we can develop a comprehensive program that’s dealing with home repairs, that’s dealing with energy and water retrofits, all in one package. Something ideally, I think, we need social impact investing behind this or government to recognize their major health benefits to this. Their financial benefits when you think about what it means for community when people move out, right? That’s what happens when people don’t have utilities is eventually, they move out or the home gets foreclosed and you end up with this huge liability, right? Which is a house that’s stripped, and we know what this looks like.
What is the public cost of that? This is how you designate a neighborhood as you allow this to happen. I think we need to be thinking about investing in the places that could go either way. I think we have a lot of those homes now that are good health inside. They do need a bunch of investment and repair. This is going to keep people healthy. It’s going to keep their bills affordable, but we need to find a way to pay this.
Interviewer: Almost shifting the frame from thinking about this affordability as part of the systems to investments.
Justin: Yes. I think assistance is definitely the frame that we need to leave behind at its place, but we’ve got better ways to think of this.
Interviewer: Well, thank you so much for your time and are there– As we wind down, is there something that we have not covered so far that you think is relevant to this issue?
Justin: Yes. I guess I will just lift up the role of citizen scientists as well in this and thinking about the tremendous work that they did Flint and then the water crisis here in Detroit. Residents have become experts to deal with their own issues and I think there’s tremendous power in that. I think potential for collaboration too particularly with universities, right? There’s a lot where those two groups can really gain a lot and coming back to this idea of gathering data, right? What’s really happening, how many homes in this very particular shower diverter that’s needed can we buy in bulk to do that? I think people can really contribute a lot to the solutions there.
Interviewer: Thank you.
Detroit Water Stories 