Jackson, Mississippi, a city of 150,000, is without safe drinking water except to the extent that residents purchase it in bottles. The city’s water system has been failing for years. Now, it is failing epically.
The proximate cause of the current failure appears to be heavy rains. However, the real problem is a broken water system.
Meanwhile, the city of Baltimore’s water supply has become contaminated. Officials found E. coli bacteria in the system.
The proximate cause of the current problem has yet to be determined, but the underlying issue is said to be neglect of the city’s water system for decades.
Why is the water system failing in both cities? I assume that incompetent management has played a role. But the underlying problem is lack of revenue due to a shrinking tax base.
Why the shrinking tax base? Because businesses and middle class taxpayers have left town. In Jackson, the white population is down to around 25,000, from more than 100,000 in 1980.
But it’s not just whites who are fleeing Jackson. The black population has been declining since 2010.
And why not? Blacks are no more inclined to live in a decaying, crime-ridden city with terrible schools than whites are.
Make no mistake. Crime plays is a significant role in driving middle class blacks out of Jackson.
Even the Washington Post acknowledges this reality:
Since moving to Clinton [a more prosperous town near Jackson] five years ago from Michigan, Nick Lewis hasn’t had any water problems.
Lewis, 26, a Black software engineer, said he and his wife, a registered nurse and Jackson native, are expecting their first child but chose not to live in Jackson even though she still has family there.
“Jackson’s got a bunch of issues: water, the roads, but also crime” and schools, he said Saturday as he cut the lush lawn surrounding his red brick home.
And, from a related article:
The water crisis is just one of many facing Jackson, Josephine Hartwell[who is black] said. She says very aspect of the city’s infrastructure needs to be addressed. She often has to take her car for repairs because of potholes. During the recent floods, she almost lost her car driving to work on a flooded bridge.
She also says the city has to get crime under control. A few months ago, she was the victim of a carjacking.
Ms. Hartwell is lucky to have survived the carjacking. Jackson is suffering from a murder epidemic. At the halfway point of this year, the city was on pace to match its record-setting homicide total of 153 total of 2021. Measured on a per capita basis, Jackson has the highest murder rate of any city in the country.
Jackson’s rate of violent crime is comparable to lawless Chicago’s. Its rate of property crime is more than 50 percent higher.
Jackson hasn’t “defunded” its police department. The department exists. However, it has only eight homicide detectives.
The FBI says a homicide detective should oversee five cases a year. This means the Jackson Police Department has only enough detectives properly to handle 40 murder investigations — about one-quarter of last year's homicides.
No wonder a former police officer with a quarter century of service couldn’t get his telephone calls returned by the police after the murder of his daughter. No wonder officers tell parents to solve the murders of their children themselves.
As for Baltimore, its homicide problem is no secret. See here and here, for example.
As long as they remain this unsafe, cities like Jackson and Baltimore can’t expect even to maintain the diminished taxpayer base they now have. And a similarly unhappy future might well face more prosperous jurisdictions.
Washington, D.C. is moving towards creating low-income housing on a significant scale in some of the wealthier parts of the city. An alliance of activists and developers is behind this drive.
Will well-off taxpayers in these areas remain in D.C. as the influx of low-income residents leads to a spike in violent crime? Many won’t, I predict.
The left, though, has an answer to the vicious cycle I’ve been discussing The answer is “regionalism” — a scheme under which federal grant money is conditioned on the creation and/or use of “regional” bodies, as opposed to standard governmental units like cities, towns, and counties. These bodies will push for regional “revenue sharing,” consolidation of school districts, and other measures designed to halt the expansion of suburbs and eventually push people back into the cities (if they aren’t driven much further into the countryside). Stanley Kurtz has been writing about this and other aspects of the war on suburbs for years.
The better answer, of course, is to abandon the leftist policies that have ruined cities. Start with proactive policing, the kind that helped bring down violent urban crime so dramatically during the 1990s and thereby sparked the revival of cities like New York. Provide a more friendly environment for enterprises doing, or thinking about doing, business in cities.
And crucially, improve the schools. Encourage and support charter schools. (The KIPP school across the Mississippi River in West Helena, Arkansas has a great record of preparing students for college.) Promote classroom discipline and ignore complaints that its imposition is racist. Teach the basics. Forget the woke.
Don’t expect any of this to occur. Leftists much prefer ordering people around to solving problems. When the problems persist, they can always blame “racism.”
Adam Smith said that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” Certainly, in a nation as great as ours, it takes an enormous amount of bad policy to get to the point where schools are failing, homicide is rampant, and water isn’t fit to drink.
But Jackson, Mississippi has reached that point. Other cities seem close behind.