Abstract
In 2014, city and state officials channeled toxic water into Flint, Michigan and its unevenly distributed and corroding lead service lines (LSLs). The resulting Flint water crisis is a tragic example of environmental racism against a majority Black city and enduring racial and spatial disparities in environmental lead exposures in the United States. Important questions remain about how race intersected with other established environmental health vulnerabilities of gender and single-parent family structure to create unequal toxic exposures within Flint. We address this question with (1) an “intercategorical ecology” framework that extends the “racial ecology” lens into the complex spatial and demographic dimensions of environmental health vulnerabilities and (2) a multivariate analysis using block-level data from the 2010 U.S. decennial census and a key dataset estimating the LSL connections for 56,038 land parcels in Flint. We found that blocks exposed to LSLs had, on average, higher concentrations of single-parent white, Black, and Latinx families. However, logistic regression results indicate that the likelihood of block exposure to LSLs was most consistently and positively associated with the percentage of single-father Black and single-mother Latina families, net of other racialized and gendered single-parent family structures, socioeconomic status, and the spatial concentration of LSL exposure.
Highlights
IntroductionLead pipes are among the primary contemporary sources of lead exposure in the United States [2,3,4]
We examine the intersection of gendered householders with race and family structure to consider whether particular intersections are at especially high risk of exposure to lead service lines (LSLs)
Based on the prior literature and the Flint case context that we reviewed above, we hypothesize that higher concentrations of single-mother Black and Latina families, as well as single-father Black families, in census blocks will be associated with increased likelihood of exposure to LSL-connected parcels
Summary
Lead pipes are among the primary contemporary sources of lead exposure in the United States [2,3,4]. They have been an important component of U.S cities’ drinking water distribution systems for at least 150 years despite wide recognition of the dangers they pose to human health [5]. Exposures to harmful lead levels are disproportionately experienced among inner-city Black and/or Latinx children who live in substandard housing in the United States [4]. Case studies of Detroit, Michigan [6], and Chicago, Illinois [7], demonstrate that the “racial ecology” (i.e., the racial and spatial patterning) of lead exposure manifests differently across cities
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