🌊 Inside America’s Forgotten City

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We recently brought you the story of Dion, a Flint, Michigan man who says he was wrongly imprisoned for 25 years. Today, we bring you the story of his city.  

By Max Frost

Flint, Michigan

“I used to live in that house over there.”

The 17-year-old girl pointed to a house across the street. It had collapsed in on itself.

“It took me years to accept that this is how my childhood is now. It’s almost gone.”

I thought she was speaking metaphorically about her childhood. She wasn’t: “Like the whole street's almost gone.”

Her words hung in the hot summer air of the mostly abandoned street. 

Flint was a boomtown. In 1900, it was home to William Durant, the United States’ largest horse-drawn carriage manufacturer. In 1904, Durant purchased a car company, Buick Motor; four years later, he formed a holding company – General Motors – that went on to acquire Chevrolet, Cadillac, Pontiac, and Oldsmobile. For the next 77 years, until 2008, GM was the United States’ leading automobile producer.

Much of the power and work associated with that was in Flint, which housed GM’s headquarters until the 1920s; GM’s first factory; and thousands of GM workers. Flint boomed with GM, reaching a population of nearly 200,000 by 1960. At the peak, some 80,000 Flint residents were employed by GM. Then, it all came crashing down.

We exited the highway into Flint. 

Houses were overtaken by vegetation and falling in on themselves; prostitutes were working the corner; drug addicts were walking down an empty street, screaming. This was not the worst neighborhood in Flint, and we didn’t seek it out. We just pulled off a highway stop a few miles north of downtown. 

As we drove down a mostly vacant street, we encountered a man taking out the trash. A woman and child came outside as we spoke. 

“What possessed you to come off of that highway down into here…” the lady said, trailing off. “You are in the ghetto right now…This is Hell on Earth.”

“It used to be booming when I was a kid. This was the boomingest place on Earth. There was stuff to do. There was stuff to take your kids to go do. There wasn't so many killings and shootings and all these dope heads and drug heads and all that,” she said.

“Flint used to be jumping,” the man – who had no teeth – added. “There were jobs here. Now, you look at it: It’s nothing.”

It’s hard to overstate the conditions in which these people lived. Crackheads and prostitutes were walking up the neighboring street; the houses were abandoned, burned down, and falling in on themselves. It felt apocalyptic; godforsaken.

“This is Hell on Earth here,” the lady said. “You can drive down through here: Prostitutes, Johns, Pimps, you name it”

One thing was keeping the lady there: “I'm waiting on my water settlement. I'm out of here. I'm leaving with Flint's money.”

Her and everyone else. 

The seeds for the water crisis were sewn in the 1960s, when high oil prices, bad corporate culture, foreign competition, and labor issues led the US auto industry to stutter. Between 1960 and 1970, Flint’s population shrank for the first time, by 1.8%. This drip would soon become a flood. 

By 2010, Flint had lost 50% of its population. The city was a ghost town with a murder rate higher than any other American city. Call the cops, and they just wouldn’t come. The government had no money – not for police, and not for water. 

In 2011, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder oversaw a plan that would save $5M over two years by switching Flint’s water source from Detroit’s system to the Flint River. The change took effect on April 25, 2014, and residents immediately began complaining about the water’s taste, color, and smell. That summer, a boil water advisory was enacted after unhealthy bacteria were detected in it. Still, Flint’s water kept coming from the Flint River. Officials repeated that it was safe to drink.

But the complaints kept coming: In late 2014, GM stopped using Flint water after finding that it corroded car parts. The Flint library stopped using it, and people began protesting as they experienced itchy skin, rashes, and hair loss. Then in 2015, a study by Virginia Tech researchers found the problem: Over 40% of Flint water samples had significant levels of lead. Subsequent studies found that children had up to triple the usual levels of lead in their blood.

Flint River water was highly corrosive, and officials had failed to install a system to treat it. As it ran through Flint’s aging pipes, their lead was released into the water. As this happened, authorities first put too little chlorine into the system – hence an outbreak of the bacteria that causes Legionnaires' Disease – then put too much, leading to elevated levels of a cancer-causing chemical.

By 2020, Flint’s population had declined by another 20%. From 200,000 in 1960, it was now just 81,000. 

Today, the authorities say Flint’s water is safe to drink, but locals don’t buy that. 

“They didn't fix nothing,” said the woman who was waiting on a check. “The water smells like chlorine. It smells like you're fixing to be at a swimming pool.”

The 17-year-old we mentioned earlier grew up drinking Flint water but said she didn’t suffer from it. Not true of her brother, though: She recalls a childhood spent with nurses in and out of the house to treat his lead poisoning. Sometimes, his treatments were interrupted by gunfire. 

“I watched someone get shot at the corner,” she said. “We're so fucking used to it. All we got to do is say, ‘Hit the floor!’”

“When you live over here, you kind of learn to start dropping very quick. I had to learn that at a young age because when we lived in that white house over there” – she pointed at the abandoned one – “there was a shooting on this street, and me and my sister were in the house.”

And if you survived the gunfire, you then had to survive the drugs. “There's kids that are younger than me that are dropping dead because they want to experiment at such a young age,” she said. 

She blamed parents: “And most parents feel like they can't do this…They don't try to steer their kids away from it. They don't care what their kids do.”

She said her uncle, a drug addict, had just moved in with them in an effort to get clean. No help was coming if it wasn’t from family.

That was in East Flint. On the South Side, a family whose members looked all kinds of beat up recounted their plight to us. They reiterated much of what we had already heard: Rampant violence, prostitution, and drug use; fentanyl deaths; lead damage.

“My mother ended up with cancer because of the water,” one of the group said. “And I lost my mom to three different cancers…I think I've lost three babies to that water crisis,” she added. “I've had three miscarriages, and I think that has something to do with it.”

To survive in Flint, the group said, you have to live with a community. The group had taken over most of the houses on one side of the block, believing there was strength in numbers. If someone went out alone, they’d be at risk of getting robbed or shot. There was no point in calling the cops – they’d take six hours to arrive – so people have to stick together. 

One of the women gave the ethnic makeup of the street: Everyone in her house was white, “next to me is the Mexican,” then her daughter and granddaughter (white), then “all the way down it’s black on both sides.” Opposite them were immigrants from an unspecified country. “Normally, one, two, three o’clock in the morning they’re home from work…I call them turban heads…they’re pretty cool.”

“But like I said, we're all one family. You mess with one…”

I asked if they felt forgotten by the government.

The oldest of the group didn’t pause: “No. I'm 64 years old. I've taken care of myself. The government can suck my white-Indian [Native American] ass…For us and our street, we try to stick together as a family.”

That was South Flint, where they told us the worst part of Flint was North Flint. That’s where we met Freddie T.

Freddie had a charm from the moment he started talking. He started our conversation by listing the number of professional athletes who grew up in Flint.

Why so many?

“The water,” he said. “Gotta be the water.”

Freddie – whose parents, like most adults in North Flint, once worked at GM – said he too could have gone pro, but he was too much of a “knucklehead.” But he was nothing like the kids today. 

“We fought growing up. We were never thinking about shooting somebody,” he said. Today, “You talk [bad] about one of these little guys now, it's a death penalty.”

Freddie knows that firsthand.

“I lost my cousin; they killed him dead last year right here,” he said, gesturing at the street corner. “And my nephew, his son. Right here on the street, just over talking.”

“[And] they killed my brother. And I was standing right here and watched him do it. I couldn't get down that fast. I ran down there and didn't even have my gun with me…You see these little 13-year-olds walking with backpacks. ‘Hey, Little Fella!’ Little fella got a gun.”

“Babies killing babies. And the mamas at work, ain't no daddies in the home,” Freddie said. “Ain't nobody saying nothing…These boys don't have good guidance. They got women tendencies…They think carrying a gun is tough, man.”

As Freddie T kept going, he started to tear up.

“They ain't got no mentors. If I could, they wouldn't even have to pay me…You know, everybody got powers…every human on this earth got some kind of power. 80% of people die without ever figuring out what their special gift is.”

But Freddie knew his power: “Make peace with people, the gift of God, the gift to bring peace out. He started to cry: “I done saved ten lives…My power was to make people listen…I done seen these guys with guns that are here, and I talk to them. They stop. That's my gift.”

Fighting back tears, he continued: “My gift is to save lives. I'm a street doctor. You can't get that degree unless you're from the streets. Can't go to college and get that. I just need these motherfuckers to listen. Because they're killing each other.”

Freddie T had suffered enough.

“I'm leading my son in another direction,” he said. “Football, football practice. He's in camps. You know, he don't have time to fuck around…He's just going into the 10th grade. He done been to Michigan State. He done been to Western Michigan.”

“I told him, ‘But first you got to get your grades.’ So that's the first goal, get your grades. Then football – secondary is what it is.”

He had seen enough of the streets: “I'm finished. I live and wait. Because they fuck around and kill my only son…”

Back to that first 17-year-old we spoke to: The constant trauma of her childhood had left her with both a remarkably positive attitude and a belief that no one could fix Flint’s plight but the people who live there. 

“I don't believe in this government shit,” she said. “There's a lot of people struggling, and when you go to the state for help, you get no help. You get a couple dollars from them. That's it. You can't get nothing, really, anymore.”

Her message to them: “We don't need you. We already do everything on our own anyway.”

Editor’s Note

Thanks for reading today’s story. We hope you enjoyed it. Please send in your thoughts here — we’d especially love to hear from our readers in Flint.

And if you haven’t read them yet, check out our past five stories below:

That’s all, see you tomorrow.
—Max and Max