Turn On the Water

For years, Detroit and Johannesburg have withheld water from Black residents who can’t pay.

Gospel music filled the room inside a midcentury church on Detroit’s west side on a bleak February morning. But people didn’t come here for worship. They came for water. The former sanctuary is now Brightmoor Connection Food Pantry, a food distribution center that also doubles as a de facto water station. Located in Brightmoor, a Black community, it’s where scores of women have, for years, come daily for cases of bottled water.

Brightmoor is one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by the city’s decision to shut off water to some 140,000 residents who can no longer pay their utilities. The mass shutoffs began in 2014 but paused at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Unprecedented in modern American history, the shutoffs put families at risk of dehydration, contagious diseases, and water-borne illness.

The Rev. Roslyn Bouier, the pantry’s director, greets each person individually as they arrive. Bouier feels it is her duty to provide water if the city won’t.

“It’s about dignity,” she said, before welcoming the next person in line.

One of the women who relies on this pantry is Akiva, a young single mother with hazel eyes and waist-length braids who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her family’s privacy. One day in October 2019, she woke up to get her daughter ready for school, and her faucet ran dry. For an entire brutal Midwestern winter, Akiva and her young daughter and son lived without running water.

She took things day by day, but her daughter’s desperation got to her.

“My baby girl used to always ask me,” Akiva recalled. “’Mommy, are we ever going to get a new house? Is this always going to be this way?’”

Her frustration grew into depression, which she hid from friends and family except for her grandmother, whom she credits as a source of strength.

Determined to improve her situation, Akiva found part-time work as an assistant to a hairdresser, shampooing and braiding hair. Now with pandemic closures and quarantines, part-time work is all but gone. But the bills keep coming.

When she was able to procure water, there was the problem of prioritization: Would her family drink it, bathe with it, or cook with it?

For years, Detroit’s city government cut water to thousands of homes, pressuring residents to pay past-due water bills. The hardest hit have been Black households, where 60 percent of homes with children under the age of 18 are run by single Black women.

Weeks into the pandemic, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan reluctantly suspended the controversial water shutoffs and offered a temporary discounted water rate. But it hasn’t been simple to turn the water back on. As the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department began to restore service to homes whose water had been shut off for months, and in many cases, years, the city ran into an unexpected cascade of overdue repairs for meters that froze during the winter, leaky plumbing heads, and sewage in the basements.