In Jackson, Mississippi, a water crisis of unparalleled scale | Hacker News Reader

In Jackson, Mississippi, a water crisis of unparalleled scale

washingtonpost.com

121 pointslisper189 comments

Where I reside..what you’ll call a third-world country (Nigeria), everyone who builds a home digs their personal water borehole and sewage system because our government is too incompetent to maintain city-wide infrastructure.

I’ve always thought it would be much better if we can get centralized systems for these things as they do in developed countries, but I’m pretty sure this is the type of thing we would see regularly due to government incompetence and carelessness.

Needless to say, I didn’t expect this kind of situation from the US, a country with many characteristics I admire…come on, you guys are too rich for this to happen!

You’d be surprised how much the quality of infrastructure can vary between cities and states across the United States.

Public infrastructure needs quite a lot of work to make it work and care about it. You need a constant stream of engineers, technicians, materials, money, etc. And quite a lot of coordination.

So even a first world country can fuck it all up and you wouldn't need a spectacular failure, just a bit of time, and a bit of willingness/resources shortage too.

You can build a more, say, resilient infrastructure, but I don't think anyone builds infrastructure like The Romans did today.

Part of the problem is that engineers have all moved out of these cities.

Having better local sources of water and treatment may turn out to he a better idea than centralized water treatment.

Here in the US, water is pumped (often uphill) and purified to drinking water standards, only for 70% of residential water used for watering green lawns. Those lawns are usually grown in a way where soil microbes are killed off, water retention capability are reduced (so it needs more water), and the lawn is excessively cut and fertilized in order preserve an aesthetic. Being able to waste land and water resources like that is a typical signal of wealth. Personally for me, signaling wealth by wasting resources is not a characteristic that is admirable for me.

Better water management can include multiple rounds of circulating greywater to support food-bearing perennials, and on-site or perhaps, neighborhood level treatment of water.

So it may turn out that, if you look beyond the modern West as if it is the pinnacle of civilization, you can skip the mistakes and develop something better for your country and your local community.

EDIT: this 10 min video shows the basic principles for onsite greywater and blackwater harvesting: https://youtu.be/f-sRcVkZ9yg

>Personally for me, signaling wealth by wasting resources is not a characteristic that is admirable for me.

Hmmm, if only we could have some laws and regulations preventing resource waste and focus on saving the environment. Like an agency focused on ... environmental protection.

In Irvine, California, homes are plumbed with two water lines: potable, and greywater. So even in the middle of a drought, everything is green.

More waste: now there is an extra water system to maintain and repair.

Define “extra”

Do you consider hot/cold plumbing to be two systems?

Yes, I do. One is connected to the mains water, while the other goes through a series of pipes to the boiler.

Yup, that’s a great start. There’s a lot more that can be done. For example, there are better ways to treat blackwater than dumping it into a septic tank and a leach field. Incorporating and cycling blackwater through plants that evolved to drink and process blackwater can help clean it faster. I would not want to cycle it immediately back to onsite drinking water, but in a situation like Jackson, MS, I know I am not contributing sewage to my neighbor’s bathwater.

This video goes through the design principles for onsite greywater and blackwater harvesting: https://youtu.be/f-sRcVkZ9yg

For those unfamilar with the California scene: there is an agricultural water shortage, not a residential one.

You could reduce residential usage of water in California to zero and it would barely make a dent in the water shortage. California can relatively easily desalinate its way out of residential water shortage.

On the other hand, shutting down the agribusinesses in the Central Valley completely fixes California's water shortage for everybody.

It sounds easy to say “shut down agribusiness,” but then you have a food problem.

I don’t know to what extent, but I can’t take “cut off ag” solutions seriously unless they can articulate the impact of the cut-off on food supplies and present alternatives for more efficient crops.

Cutting off alfalfa being exported won't hurt "food supplies" in the US one bit. Almonds, similarly, are hardly necessary for maintaining our "food supply". There are other, more staple, crops that use a lot less water but the agribusinesses choose not to grow them because they don't make as much profit.

One of the perennial problems in California is that the agribusinesses don't pay anywhere close to what they should for water. This creates gigantic misincentives to suck up the water and leave somebody else holding the bag. If the water rates were higher, the agribusinesses would grow a very different mix of crops. Of course, since the agribusinesses also throw around lots of money, politicians won't touch the issue.

The coastal cities finally decided that they need to build enough desalinization plants to cover their needs so they can simply ignore the ongoing Central Valley fiasco.

You can get that in some places in North Carolina too, but it costs thousands to get the non sewered line installed, so most homeowners don’t do it

I would be very glad if grass lawns were made unlawful in the US. It is a terrible waste of time, money, and natural resources for something so useless. I don't have any idea why this silly concept became so common in this country.

I get how you would come to believe that if you didn't have one.

Let's ban avocados, too! They're an incredible waste of water and resources. (I can't stand how they taste, so this wouldn't affect me.)

I happen to be forced by the city to maintain a green lawn. That's why I came to believe this.

There’s a authoritarian law you don’t like, so you hope to seize power and pass the opposite authoritarian law.

How about trying for a truce instead?

American politics in a nutshell.

Apply to be a federally protected wildlife habitat. My daughter did that in a city in Indiana. Ripped out her 'lawn' and replanted with native grasses and things to promote butterfly and bee habitats. The city hates that they can't fine her anymore.

https://www.nwf.org/garden-for-wildlife/certify

Well, lawns are the worst culprit in the “urban water use” category, so the true comparison is “let’s ban beef cattle” and that will become an increasingly less crazy-sounding idea in the coming years (especially in the US West)

Avocados use an order of magnitude less water than beef.

I grew up in suburban America, and live within a major metropolitan area. I have had lawns. Over the years with what I have learned, I came to the conclusion that lawns as they are generally developed are a big waste, and there are better ways to achieve what I can get out of a lawn.

And yes, avacados use up a lot of water, as do nuts. Our food system is built on top of shipping food far away to where it is consumed rather than growing locally. And yes, growing locally means giving up some things, being more attuned to seasonality, and growing and consuming alternate varieties and foods with equivalent nutrition.

It sounds absurd to say, get rid of all the avacados, but to me, it is absurd we are cloning avacados and wrecking a lot of ecologies in order to ship them far away to people. And I like avacados and giving them up has an effect on me.

Shipping food from where water is to where it isn't is fine.

Dunno why farmers here sell undried, oh sorry, "fresh" corn for a premium when it saves them drying + storage costs.

Shipped food are bred for monocropping and transport. Tomatoes in grocery stores, for example, are chosen for its uniform shape and ability to be stored and transported. They are not bread for taste or nutritional value. That is also leaving aside having to depend on the global supply chain and cheap transport for food. Which is more costly and fragile than developing local food sources and food sovereignty.

Still depends on the food. Even local tomatoes and other “fresh” crops will be the same mono-cropping garbage unless you hunt down niche stuff at a farmer’s market (or in my case, grow your own!)

Yes, the most local food are the ones that are grown at home. When you add seed-saving, there is an opportunity to breed landraces specific to your environment, taste, and nutritional density.

No transport on refrigerated trucks needed. Onsite compost complements the whole setup. Then you add greywater for the perennial food forest.

Growing avocados where your lawn used to be would be a good change. At least you can eat those, it isn't just a decoration

Not necessarily avocados, however, cultivating a perennial food forest in the yard or on municipal land is a thing.

Even growing ornamental native grasses or meadows instead of fescue help the native ecology.

Almonds too. They are a terrible use of water and can literally kill people.

Which is nuts (no pun intended), because there are nut trees that can grow well in arid and semi-arid conditions.

The thing is, in order to maximize commercial yields for shipping almonds far away, we end up with agricultural practiced that deplete soil and water resources.

Grass lawns are a red herring.

The water shortages are almost all brought about by big agribusiness usage of water in places where we shouldn't be doing big agribusinesses.

> Being able to waste land and water resources like that is a typical signal of wealth.

The people with lawns that I know and grew up knowing didn't take care of them to "signal wealth". Many would never care to own a luxury car or Rolex. Rather, they enjoyed gardening, the aesthetics, and having their kids play in the lawn. They barbequed every weekend and enjoyed time outdoors at home.

> Those lawns are usually grown in a way where soil microbes are killed off, water retention capability are reduced (so it needs more water)

This land will never be used for farming again. It's residential and will remain so for centuries or longer.

Many of these perceptions are from assumption or projection. Not actually living these lives or being familiar enough with the people making these decisions.

My wife tells me the same things about wanting a lawn for the kids to play with. It’s only recently that she has opened up to alternatives — from having native grasses and ground cover, to shaping the terrain.

I live in suburban US in a major metropolitan area, and I grew up here. When I talk to people around me maintaining lawns, they don’t think they are signaling wealth either. But some look at me like I am crazy for developing a front yard with native plants. I am not assuming nor am I projecting.

That signal for wealth is largely unconscious. Used to be, those lawns were maintained by sheep. It was a sign of wealth when you can have a lawn that was not pasture. Then people got their own patch of lawns, didn’t have sheep.

If you were to propose to people to get rid of their lawn, there is usually an unconscious resistance coming from wanting that aesthetic. But rarely are those aesthetics and why it is pleasing ever examined. Instead, there are nebulous notions about property value, or about how a trim, neat lawn reflects the work ethics, or caring about one’s property. It’s stuff that has been conditioned.

Furthermore, I was responding to someone from Nigeria. From the perspective of someone whose community have to dig for their own water or sewage, running water is a huge deal. I recall a Netflix documentary of one Indian woman’s fight with the local government to get flushing toilets for a school.

Those people who are not consciously signaling wealth are instead taking the wealth for granted, not even knowing the history of lawns. The point still stands: 70% of residential water purified to drinking water standards are used to water a lawn. From the perspective of communities where you have to fight tooth and nail to get purified drinking water at all, that’s not so admirable.

We're staring at this dilemma right now. Not for the signaling at all. Our lawn basically died in close to drought-like conditions. We didn't want to waste the water or time, but now what?

What do we replace it with that a) doesn't provide a haven for pests or harmful critters, and b) actually is safe for kiddo and other neighborhood kids, and c) doesn't destroy property values for the neighborhood?

There are some resources I can suggest:

- r/nolawns have great ideas on what is possible. It does not have to be ugly or unkempt - the local city, library, or university may have programs for growing native front yards. These are adapted to the local conditions. There are landscape designers who can work that

As an example, it is possible to grow perennial flowers in such a way that _something_ is blooming for much of the year. (Kinda depends on where you live).

The trick with (c) is to design something that looks like it is maintained. So one pattern some folks do is to put a clear boundary on areas left as meadows, and other areas that look like it is clearly mowed.

You can also get it certified as a wildlife refuge from the World Wildlife Foundation, and get an official looking sign. A sign that educates people about it also reframes how the yard is seen and experienced.

There are other green ground covers than grass that require less water, less chemical treatment, etc. It wasn’t until the 1960s or 70s and a big advertising push from Scott’s Lawn and similar companies that the all-grass, perfectly manicured lawn became a thing in middle-class America. Prior to that, mixed grass+clover+weed lawns were the norm.

The fact that people continue to grow grass lawns in places like Arizona is baffling. There are other choices.

FWIW, I mixed clover into my lawn 5 years ago. I no longer have to water it at all through the summer. Mowing is half as frequent. And it doesn’t brown as much over winter. No idea what anybody would do anything different, except for not knowing any better. I’ll never do an all-grass lawn again.

> No idea what anybody would do anything different, except for not knowing any better

Or because clover handles hot climates poorly and is prone to leaving splotchy dead areas, because turf is better able to handle the abuse of yard sports, .... Nothing against most of what you're saying, I just want to highlight that however complicated we think the world is, it's almost certainly more than expected.

In Lagos (capital) there were public toilets, and public water taps, and mobile cisterns with drinkable water even in slums. Goverment is not going to risk outbreak of cholera!

I live in Central Europe, private wells and septics are pretty common here in smaller villages.

Even in the US, private wells and septic systems are common outside of cities and smaller towns.

My parents have their own in a village of around 3000 people, but they're on the border and people closer to the center are on a municipal system.

The levels of government, in order from largest to smallest, are roughly as follows:

Federal

State

County

Municipality (city, township, or unincorporated) (names for these vary by state).

If you live in an unincorporated area (basically, rural space between cities or suburbs) or a town, you will need your own well and septic system.

Just a slight correction. Abuja is the capital, not Lagos.

And I’ve been to Lagos several times, and gosh, do I hate that overcrowded state with stretched-out infrastructure.

Majority black town in the poorest state in the union, which is also a Republican state.

That's no coincidence. EDIT: as in the town is being intentionally poorly maintained by the rest of the state.

I'd like explanations from each and every person who downvoted this. Nobody apparently had the courage to try to refute the argument, and even a cursory examination of the facts will reveal that this commenter has the facts right.

Mississippi's Republican governor and Republican legislature have repeatedly denied proper funding to Jackson to address this issue in the past. It takes about 45 seconds to look this up.

> repeatedly denied proper funding to Jackson

"Proper" as defined by the people who are asking for the money.

The fact that they're regularly asking for more money is causally independent of essentially anything else.

An alternative theory, which seems to have a lot of supporting evidence, is that the Jackson government habitually mismanages resources.

I didn't downvote but I don't buy the city/state political divide as a significant cause. For one, accidents happen. For two, a water system needs to be financially sustainable. If its finances were in shambles, as the EPA assessment below found, then that will lead to the other problems listed.

Having spent the 45 seconds the parent comment did not share, the story I see is one where the state was willing to match more funds but the city had other priorities. This isn't written as criticism of the city's decision but acknowledgement that different people see things differently. If some other disaster had happened that decision might have been vindicated.

[Dated April 28, 2022, MS Gov] Reeves said the state was willing to match Jackson’s water and sewer infrastructure spending, and criticized the city only putting up $25 million of the $42 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds it received for such work.

https://mississippitoday.org/2022/04/28/tate-reeves-veto-jac...

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assessment team flagged numerous system problems in a July 2022 report, one month before the system failed. The problems highlighted in the report include:

  - Poor administration, lack of staff
  - Finances are in shambles
  - Customer complaints
  - Lack of routine monitoring and maintenance
  - Water in storage tanks isn’t cycled
  - Frequent line breaks

https://www.wjtv.com/news/jacksons-water-crisis/jacksons-wat...

Does the "rest of the state" have jurisdiction to run the town?

If the largest town and also capital of your state didn't have water for a while, would you not expect your state government to intervene well before such a failure? The responsibility for such a serious issue doesn't simply stop at the narrowest jurisdiction, it expands until it is addressed. Not to mention I bet the town's budget is very much affected by state politics.

A bit more than 1 in 10 Americans don't get their water from a communal source; most of them have their own wells. And about 1 in 5 American households have septic tanks instead of connections to sewers.

This is mostly due to people living in rural areas. Even with all the money in the world, why would you lay a 10 mile sewer line for half a dozen people instead of digging some septic tanks?

Perhaps if the infrastructure were better in some areas, there would be more businesses and people living there

It is similar to my native punjab, but after several years the borewells are all dried up.

The US has been described as 50 small countries inside a big one. There is, for lack of a better term, a lot of diversity between them.

Like, 50 states?

This is actually quite common in New England, where many homes have both their own spring & sewage - even when public systems are available

Far more resilient design in the event of extreme weather events, which most rural homes must endure

Centralizes has benefits, but so does decentralization!

The tradeoff is efficiency vs. redundancy.

Accidents happen. My own neighborhood had a boil notice for the better part of a week after a line break that flooded a freeway. [1]

an issue at the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Facility that was caused by the Pearl River flooding this past weekend. [0]

Wealth is a lagging indicator for competence. Many systems can coast along even as problems pile up and don't seem to be problems even though the system cannot withstand an accident.

  - Poor administration, lack of staff
  - Finances are in shambles
  - Customer complaints
  - Lack of routine monitoring and maintenance
  - Water in storage tanks isn’t cycled
  - Frequent line breaks

0. https://www.wjtv.com/news/jacksons-water-crisis/jacksons-wat...

1. https://abc7.com/houston-water-main-break-city-of-flooding-o...

By all measures, this is due to the kind of neglect and mismanagement one would expect to see in an underdeveloped or war-torn country, not in a city inside a state that is part of the most powerful country on earth. And Jackson is the state's largest city and as well as its capital!

It must be so embarrassing for the politicians who have been running Mississippi. They've done a truly terrible, horrible job on this.

You would think that, but history tells us that in Mississippi nothing will change.

except climate

> not in a city inside a state that is part of the most powerful country on earth

Why not? There are plenty of ecological catastrophes in China and were in the Soviet Union when it existed. I suspect “powerful” isn’t exactly the variable you’re trying to describe, and you actually mean something like “most developed”. But stories like this prove that the US indeed isn’t the most developed country in the world.

The Richest Third World Country In The World?

Whenever there is a heavy rain in one of China's cities (e.g. Beijing or Wuhan), the whole city simply floods...like up to your head. It took a country like Japan to dig huge drainage tunnels to figure out how to avoid that problem in that region (so I would conclude, Japan is the most powerful country if judged solely by infrastructure quality).

Us Southerners love to shoot ourselves in the foot. We do it every single election cycle and then make disparaging remarks about states like California.

California does certain things better, but we also manage to burn down half the state every summer.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/california-wildfires-grow-...

Today we're in the middle of a power shortage, to the extent that EV owners are asked not to charge their cars.

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/california-electric-vehic...

Some small towns have literally run out of water.

https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2021/06/california-...

I'm not trying to excuse the negligent mismanagement of Jackson's public water system, just pointing out that there are serious infrastructure problems nationwide. The bill is coming due.

I am not arguing that California does anything better, but it’s odd hearing Southerners complaining about California whilst also reaping the rewards of California’s success. We receive a great deal of money from California and we don’t use that money responsibly. And then we disparage California. It’s so strange.

As a Californian, I've been pretty disappointed by the efficiency of our government and the amount of corruption here. Infrastructure is collapsing. It is not a good idea to not criticize your own local and state government, I really don't give a shit what people of Alabama think about California. We need to get our collective heads out of the blue vs red game and just look at the facts of how governments are running. Used to be that local newspapers were popular, not anymore. No one is watching.

For the amount of taxes I pay, I expect way more from our governments. California should have cities that look like Zurich, not SF and LA.

> but we also manage to burn down half the state every summer.

That's an exaggeration, and the drought has been really bad for the last few years.

> Today we're in the middle of a power shortage, to the extent that EV owners are asked not to charge their cars[*].

[*] Between 4 and 9PM.

People are voluntarily asked to reduce power consumption between 4 and 9pm on the hottest days of the year. We're out of power!

California has a lot of problems, but the state government at the moment is actually operating quite effectively at trying to solve them. Including the issues with the electrical grid (for example our one nuclear plant getting emergency funding to stay online to help meet our environment goals while the grid is transitioning).

They could easily handle this with some smart metering, so people could just dry their clothes or charge their EVs in the morning or at night.

Smart metering is installed and rates vary with the time of day. Some people can afford to not care about that so asking people not to charge their cars might help.

Just absolutely restrict 240V during peak times then.

From the perspective of your electrical meter, there is no difference between running 2 120V appliances on separate busses vs running a single 240V appliance assuming they consume the same overall wattage. So this would be a very difficult thing to enforce.

That’s what a meter with more intelligence is used (and ya, it would need tighter coupling with the panel where 240V circuits are formed).

240V are what run electric stoves. I guess no cooking either. Why don't we just have a functioning grid like civilized society?

Jackson, Mississippi is 83% black. About 90% of black voters vote Democrat. Mississippi is a Republican state.

So, not really, the people affected vote for change, and the rest of the state decides to give them the shaft.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K7fgB0m_y2I

Phil Ochs - Here's to the State of Mississippi (1965)

As much as we like to blame government, and politicians - at the end of the day, ll... We are the government. We are the politicians. We are the inept, lazy society who has let it come to this. We are the ones fighting amongst ourselves, unable to converse and work with opposing viewpoints.

Not necessarily. Jackson is a typical blue city in a red state. Even before all the gerrymandering, a single city won’t have enough political power at the state level. Given the political differences, state officials can withhold funding or hold back on maintenance without much repercussions.

I can name numerous blue cities in red states that, you know, have municipal water systems that work properly and have for decades. Stop blaming the Republican boogeyman for problems that are due to city-level incompetence and corruption. Jackson is most definitely not a well-run city that’s being held down by the white man. It has lots and lots of problems of their own design.

Democrats are using their party in order to associate themselves with the victims. This is an all-black city within a virulently racist state. That's the problem it has, and if you filtered cities by blackness, you'd find crumbling infrastructure and bad water everywhere. Comparing them to wealthy blue suburbs/cities within poorer red states is not useful.

White people in the state are trying to get funds to go to where they live, not where other people live (just like everyone does), and additionally they live in a revanchist mythology of Jackson being overrun by blacks with the help of the Democrats, and tell stories of how beautiful Jackson was to their grandparents. That would be enough to seal off any possible empathy.

Jackson is just big Flint. Or Dixmoor: https://news.google.com/search?q=dixmoor+water

In the 60s and 70s, ghettos grew to encompass entire cities while the middle-class retreated to subsidized enclaves. In the 2000s, the grandkids moved back into the city for work and to imitate people on television who seemed cooler than them. Maybe this is the next phase of the cycle.

I could not disagree more. The proletariat has no voice in a country where actual bribery has been legally upheld by the highest court.

How is our inability to converse and work with opposing viewpoints relevant to a situation occurring in a state entirely dominated by a single viewpoint? There are many, many problems (most problems?) whose causes have nothing to do with a lack of unity or civility (relative to when?) in US national politics or whatever.

This is a strongly blue city inside a strongly red state. That seems like differing politics could be relevant.

>This is a strongly blue city inside a strongly red state.

This is a strongly black city inside a strongly white supremacist state.

Let's just put the cards on the table here - this tends not to happen in majority white areas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_racism_in_the_Un...

You're assuming that the people of Jackson have a voice in their government. The city is majority black, and in Mississippi that's more enough than enough reason for the rest of the state elected representitives to reject any aid to the city.

That sounds true, but the Mississippi state legislature is 29% black. That's not a majority, but it seems difficult to justify the view that the state government isn't helping these people because of racism in light of this fact.

Governments in the US are set up explicitly to represent minority interests, usually those of owners of large amounts of property, over the interests of the public at large.

> We are the government. We are the politicians.

Huh? No we’re not. What are you talking about?

These are the people that have been running the city:

  - (D) Harvey Johnson Jr. [2009-2013]
  - (D) Chokwe Lumumba [2013-2014]
  - (D) Charles Tillman [2014]
  - (D) Tony Yarber [2014-2017]
  - (D) Chokwe Lumumba [2017-Present]

From the article:

> “No one is taking responsibility” for the crisis, she said. “You have the governor and the mayor blaming each other. They just keep going back and forth. Both of them knew the water needed to be fixed. This has been going on for years.”

May be they need to elect different people at both state and local levels.

From the NYT article it looks like the state legislature holds the purse strings on any federal funds that might help:

"the State of Mississippi received $75 million to upgrade drinking water systems across the state, with an additional $429 million coming available over the next five years. But that money is in the hands of the state Legislature, not Jackson officials."

It is the job of the mayor to look out for their city, lobby for it. They can also sue the state government. An impoverished city like Jackson, that's a hard problem.

I think the problem is quite deeper than just funds. Jackson has been in decay economically.

Local water systems really shouldn't depend on federal funding. Unless there's some kind of interstate impact, that should be entirely a state and local issue. Mississippi could certainly afford to keep water flowing, they just chose not to prioritize it.

> on any federal funds that might help

Why do they have to be federal funds? Mississippi is a poor state within the US but if you look at global comparisons it has a robust tax base. There’s no reason it needs to depend on federal largesse for the basics. It just needs better governance.

I'm not an expert in any way on the reasons, but it seems like all large transportation and infrastructure projects in any state have some level of federal involvement.

> Why do they have to be federal funds?

Federal/state/local tax revenue is split about 54/27/19. The US federal deficit is another 19% on-top of that.

For whatever reasons, good or bad, the US funnels tax dollars through the Federal level. They're basically a middle man. Which means large projects almost always require some Federal funding.

27 + 19 is 46%, that’s hardly nothing. Again if you compare other countries a lot of places do a lot more with less. It’s governance issue, not a resource issue.

Local funding mostly goes to schools. I'm not sure about state funding. Most of the "flex" is at the Federal level. Especially given the fact they can spend money that is literally just printed. Local and State have to pass laws and collect revenue.

The fact of the matter is that our current tax structure relies on the federal pool for infrastructure spending. That's just the way it is. Whether you like it or not. Personally I'd love Fed tax dollars shift more directly to state and local. That would be one plausible path to help achieve "better governance".

> Again if you compare other countries a lot of places do a lot more with less.

Everything in the US is radically overpriced for a lot of reasons. We spend more on health care per capita and don't even get universal coverage out of it. It's embarrassing.

Does Jackson have that tax base though? My understanding is that the wealth is just outside of the city borders

Mississippi was the most confederate of the Confederate states. Jefferson Davis was their Senator and then President of the Confederacy. After the civil war and the end of reconstruction, it was a hotbed of reactionary violence. There maybe a robust tax base, but you have to ignore the entire history of the state (which is majority white) and city (which is majority black and the descendants of slaves). I'm not as familiar with MS, but there is a great video on how this works in Lousiana - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTic9btP38

Historically (back to reconstruction), the Federal government is the guarantor of Black rights in the South and they provide significant funds to the majority black/liberal cities to make up for the fact that the state governments do not provide. Generally the state government is funneling money out of these areas.

> the State of Mississippi received $75 million to upgrade drinking water systems across the state

$75mm is about Jackson, Mississippi’s annual tax take, not including $40mm for sewers and water [1]. Apparently they need $2bn to modernise their water infrastructure [2]. Financing that at 8% is about $160mm a year in interest alone; unaffordable.

This reeks of overbuilding. The solution has to involve reducing the infrastructure footprint.

[1] https://www.jacksonms.gov/meetings/presentation-of-fy-2021-2...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2022/08/31/1120166328/jackson-mississipp...

I’d be willing to bet it was built from scratch on less than $2 billion in inflation adjusted dollars. The US has insane costs when it comes to infrastructure. Too many greedy little fingers in the pies, too much paperwork and litigation, too many people with effective vetoes.

And none of them will be held responsible. Why? Just look around this thread where the (D) behind the name and the color of their skin is protection against it. There's a algorithm for assigning responsibility: start at the lowest level connected to the problem and if the people in charge are from your favored party, you climb up one level of government. Repeat this process as many times as needed until you find someone from the other party, then that's the person responsible.

Also notice how much soft bigotry this thread is seeped in, with quite a few treating the leaders of Jackson like low IQ children who can't be held responsible for their actions. Maybe the problem isn't that they're morons like so many apologists here think but maybe they're actually somewhat smart and just crooked or incompetent. Yes, even smart people can do bad things and they're also quite capable of making errors, sometimes very large errors.

The bigotry is encoded in the weird belief that you can destroy a city water system in 10 years unless you try your hardest, like in Flint. I can't think of a Democrat I like, but wrecking and abandoning a city to its poor, then blaming the poor for its condition is an old story.

This is a problem that developed over a very long time, not just since white people completely abandoned Jackson.

The two Lumumbas are father and son, not the same person, hence why the latter goes by his middle name Antar as well usually.

Y'know, sometimes, when two people or groups are blaming each other for something...

One side is stating the factual truth (it's the other side's responsibility)...

...And the other side is blowing smoke to avoid doing things they don't want to do, for whatever reasons.

In this case, I guarantee you that the reasons the Mississippi state government doesn't want to help include both racism (Jackson is majority black) and political partisanship (as you can see, Jackson votes blue).

But Mississippi is one of the poorest states in that country.

Mississippi's GDP per capita is roughly between Spain's and Portugal's, so by global standards, the state is actually quite wealthy -- definitely wealthy enough to ensure everyone has drinking water in all its cities.

Spain has a fairly substantial shantytown outside Madrid. There are also urban areas there (including, I think, some fairly touristy ones) which just discharge all their raw untreated sewage into the rivers and sea because somehow none of the governments have managed to build sewage treatment for them, so I do wonder about the quality of their drinking water. In general, there seems to be more regional inequality and poverty in the developed world than most people realise.

Yes. There are more than a few shantytowns throughout Spain, but keep in mind that they tend to be inhabited by Gitanos (often called Gypsies or Romani in English) who haven't yet fully integrated into mainstream Spanish society. Gitanos are in fact systematically marginalized by governmental and other institutions in Spain.[a] And also, yes, there's quite a bit of dysfunction and corruption in Spain -- more than in its fellow EU members to the North.

That said, I have a hard time imagining Spanish politicians ever neglecting infrastructure in a major city (let alone the largest one, the capital, Madrid) to the point that the city's entire population finds itself without access to drinking water.

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitanos#Marginalisation

This is a city water department that has failed, not a state facility. Those in charge should be ashamed, indeed, but that shame is at a city level as far as I can tell.

In the US states tend to have the most power. The federal government can coax states by offering more money (for instance, funding 90% of highway projects), but can’t usually force states to take any specific action. There are exceptions but in general, if you want an action to happen the state needs to be OK with it.

Cities may have a lot of autonomy or almost no autonomy, depending on the specific state and city. It’s constitutional for a state to take over a city’s services, and it’s not uncommon for there to be a huge overlap in services provided between different political entities.

In this specific case it sounds like the state encouraged the development of suburbs for people to commute into Jackson, but did little to invest in Jackson’s infrastructure. The primary means of fixing infrastructure is through property taxes, and those taxes also pay for roads and parking for commuters who don’t pay (as they’ve moved outside the city limits). Basically from my understanding the suburban development and urban flight is causing Jackson to need to pay more for infrastructure on less income.

Ultimately, a state that allows its most important city to falter has a problem at the state level. Even if the city has problems as well, the state has the political tools to fix city issues, if it cares to. In this case the state could have taken income taxes from the suburbs and used it to invest in city infrastructure, but has consistently chosen to cut taxes instead.

In the US, cities tend to run their municipal water systems. That's why they're called municipal.

You're welcome.

Right.

Im in awe at the mental gymnastics some are doing in this comment section trying to blame “racism” and Republicans.

This was caused by incompetent city government, period. Blame Jackson’s city council, mayor or even the voters themselves for not fixing this. But it doesn’t make any sense to blame “racist”, “white supremacist” people who don’t even live in Jackson.

This is exactly the point. The goal is to take poorer people and problems (need for school funding, crime, older infrastructure) and concentrate them in a location where you can say “hey, they need to solve their own problems.” Then all the suburbs get great services and low taxes, while all the social and infrastructure problems can be ignored. The suburbs then fight like hell to make sure they don’t pay a dime for any of this stuff, while working hard to ensure that public transportation never exists to allow people to access the economic opportunities in the suburbs (AKA “bring crime into their neighborhoods.”) Cities can raise taxes to pay for their needs, but businesses and wealthier people just move across the city line. The poverty and lack of education inevitably breed local political corruption, and everyone outside the city gets another opportunity to feel righteous about writing the poorer cities off.

That might be a valid explanation for some of the more difficult and expensive problems, but providing water and sewer services to a low-6-figure population is hardly a problem requiring innovation or massive amounts of money per person.

My own city has about 28% fewer people than Jackson, yet is able to run a sewer and water department whose operation is funded overwhelmingly by water/sewer bills (averaging $115/resident last year) and capital projects funded by a Water Fund the city has banked (averaging $50/resident last year). These are not “gotta call Uncle Sam for help” figures.

This so eloquently describes the whole picture, esp in red states

The city of Flint, MI didn't have a water problem until the governor took control of the budget, appointed a special administrator, who promptly switched that city over to a polluted water source.

Actually, Detroit cut them off before the new source was ready to come online.

"The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department sends Flint a letter terminating their water service contract, effective in 12 months, or April 2014, which means Flint must find an alternative source of water until the Karegnondi construction is completed" [1]

In addition, the water was not polluted. When they switched to the Flint River source, they failed to add corrosion controls, so the accumulated corrosion in Flint's existing lead pipes quickly dissolved, allowing lead from the pipes to seep into the water.

[1] https://www.freep.com/pages/interactives/flint-water-crisis-...

This gets really close to the racial and ideological divide in MS, you have a very white conservative state government and a very black liberal city government, the former isn't going to bother trying to help the latter very much. As a poor city on the economic decline (and makes Detroit look nice), I'm not sure what we would really expect when natural disaster strikes (look at what happened to New Orleans during Katrina).

In the US, states and the federal government are the legal and political actors. Counties, cities, and other sub-state levels of government only have power to the extent that the state allows for. Cities are literally creatures of their state, not independent political entities within a state.

Of course those in city government have a duty to run the city government as well as they are able, but it's worth keeping in mind that cities can be supported or hobbled in that according to the desires of the state. Even states where city and state are nominally part of the same political faction, there is often tension -- c.f. NYC and NY state.

If the city and state are run by opposing political factions, things can get pretty tough for a city. Add in race, and that gets even worse. majority black, majority Democratic city in a majority Republican, majority white state is going to have a tough time.

It’s a Southern thing. Alabama isn’t much better. It’s the worst place to have a child in the entire country. We have people without access to fresh water or sewer systems. We have people living in conditions worse than anything I ever saw in Haiti. And we keep voting to actively make it worse.

Wait till you find out about rural Alaska.

Many people in the (few) remaining villages without running water don't want it, and certainly don't want to pay anything for it.

Urban decay. Maybe the state will step in to save Jackson, but maybe not. There isn’t a quick fix to reverse the situation in Jackson. Even with dedicated funding and committed resources it would be a multi-decade effort to save the city. The state government may just let the city rot away and disappear.

> Urban decay

Aka "the white people moved out of the town and the rest of the state doesn't care about it now"

It's the state's capitol and largest city (by more than 2x the population of its second biggest city), if the state isn't willing to help in that situation, I'm not sure what the state government is there for. Small towns I can see slipping through the cracks, but not your largest/capitol city.

Now it's possible the state just doesn't have the resources to fix it, I wouldn't be surprised about that (and reading an article that appears to be the case, they're even getting $429 million from the federal government for it and they're saying it might cost billions to fix). But that's different from just deciding not to.

Jackson is a black city in a state run by white supremacists. What is happening there is exactly what the state wants to happen.

Jackson has 150k residents in a state with 3m total residents. It’s also a state that is historically associated with libertarianism. The state is usually not responsible for local municipal infrastructure.

I’ve read various estimates on the cost to “fix” Jackson but these estimates are just to address infrastructure problems right now. It’s probably an order of magnitude more money to reverse the downward spiral and turn Jackson into a growing city.

It’s not as if Mississippi is a thriving state with cash to spare. Take away federal funding and federal welfare and it’s a third world country deep in poverty. The total annual spending by the Mississippi state government is $23 billion.

I guess your idea of America is from movies - immigrated here 24 years ago from a so called third-world country and I can tell you it’s rather unsettling when you see the bowels of America especially in the southern parts (I live in Louisiana).

Honest question - why do we send so much foreign aid but don't fix our own backyard? This has been going on for decades and there must be an opportunity cost here. Sure some things cannot be solved by just throwing more money at it, but a lot of things can be.

I remember this was a popular topic in pro Ron Paul 2008 reddit discussions.

More people are eager to help Ukraine than our own states. They'd be ashamed infact.

Ukraine accepts aid.

States reject aid.

People are willing to help, but people have to be willing to be helped.

When you say "send so much foreign aid", how much do you think we send? It's around 1% of the federal budget (maybe not this year, but until 2021 at least). In contrast, the federal government "sends" 16% of its budget to states (in 2019 at least), and obviously the rest of government spending is intended to at least indirectly benefit people in US states.

Ironically, googling sources for this is difficult because almost every result is about how Americans think we send 10-25% of the federal budget as foreign aid, but the actual number is far less.

US foreign aid is mostly synonymous to defense spending. They give money to other countries with the agreement that they will buy from the American weapons manufacturers. So, in a sense this "aid" is just a give out to the US war industry. Even when the money is earmarked as food and medicine aid, the beneficiaries are (surprise) the American agricultural and pharmaceutical industries, respectively.

I suspect a lot of foreign aid is actually used to stabilize parts of the world so they don't turn into hotspots for things like terrorism. Not that there isn't a wish to improve the lives of others, but it is easier and cheaper to maintain the status quo.

For most of the southern states in the US, their ideology demands that disasters disproportionately impact the poor for the sin of being poor. In order to do this effectively, the various state governments actively avoid supporting, maintaining, or improving infrastructure past the bare functional minimum during good times. They know that for all of their crying and complaining about welfare and handouts, the federal government will be right there to write them a check to fix their shit when times are tough, and they'll turn around and use that money to pad the pockets of themselves and their political donors. That money has to trickle down through the state legislature's pockets before even making it to the city.

>It must be so embarrassing for the politicians who have been running Mississippi.

Water systems are run by the cities, not the state.

It's fair to say that maintenance has been put off for long before the current city leadership took office, but it's also fair to say that the current leadership knew the system was failing (it's failed several times over the last few years) and didn't even develop a plan of action.

As the House member whose district includes Jackson put it:

>U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson said the state bears some blame for neglecting Jackson for decades, but if the capital city cannot properly run its water system, “I would not be in favor of the city being given back the authority to run it.”

Thompson said he has been talking with the mayor and other city leaders and repeated, “I have not seen a plan,” about a long-term fix for the water system.

https://mississippitoday.org/2022/09/02/bennie-thompson-jack...

He's also said that, like everyone else, he can't even get details on what went wrong this time.

>“I think it would be advantageous for the city to come up with a plan, and to share that plan with as many sources of help as possible. I know there’s a water problem with the city of Jackson, but nobody has shared the facts on the problem with me, as one of the Representatives, as well as what the cure or the plan for correcting it.”

https://yallpolitics.com/2022/08/23/thompson-jackson-shouldn...

It's not just Jackson, or the state of Mississippi. The US has overbuilt infrastructure since WW2. All of it was built on the assumption that infrastructure investment always leads to a massive expansion of the tax base and easily pays for itself, when in reality more and more of our investments have had a negative ROI. This is going to be the new normal for the US as many cities have continues to expand outward for decades, incurring ever greater maintenance liability, without accompanying economic growth to support the maintenance burden.

You've seen a lot of Strong Towns posts on HN, this is the issue that ST was founded on and the focus of it's advocacy.

The best short explainer is here: https://youtu.be/7IsMeKl-Sv0

You can read a lot more about maintenance here if you're interested: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/tag/Maintenance

Sometime in the 70s there was a reduction of federal funding and thus an expectation that the state could shoulder the costs of infrastructure. Combined with white flight that took potential tax base elsewhere, it became very difficult to support maintenance at this level. https://www.mississippifreepress.org/11498/under-the-surface...

The most important part about white flight is that each of these suburbs went to create even less sustainable infrastructure (via increased points of service and decreased population that is the single family home).

Does anyone else feel like all of our institutions are crumbling in real time? And to the degree they still work is a product of momentum?

Along with the raiding of coffers, because everyone feels like "I need to get mine."

Overly generous tax breaks, bailouts, "cancelling debt," etc. etc.

That was the most shocking thing to me when I visited the United States for the first time in my live last month, the road system is so incredibly poorly maintained and so incredibly poorly thought out. It all is incredibly expansive but not maintained.

That being said I only saw 3 (eastern) states, maybe it's different elsewhere.

It all depends how many rich people live in the city. You can tell when you cross city/town borders because the roads become noticeably better or worse.

I think the road systems are pretty badly designed pretty much everywhere.

Cross walks that cross 3 lanes (each side)with traffic going 40mph and no signal.

Stop signs that doesn't tell you if the intersecting direction stops or not.

Half-assed painted gutters for bike lanes.

Places with 4 signs to indicate when you can park, each with different (sometimes overlapping) times and conditions.

the list goes on.

It is indeed very different from state to state, depending on the state's tax base and priorities, and also within states from locale to locale, at times.

It varies widely from State to State, and it is never more evident as when you cross a State border on one of the Interstate highways. The sudden change in road quality can be dramatic. There is also little correlation between road quality and the amount of money spent per kilometer on literally the same stretch of border-crossing highway -- the poor quality side of the border may be spending several times what is being spent on the good quality. Some States have very nice highways that are built and maintained at modest cost.

The high variance in road quality and cost is a very visible example of how varied the effectiveness and efficiency of individual State governments can be in the US.

No, it's sample bias. You only notice when institutions fail. You don't notice the thousands of bureaucratic processes that work exactly how they're supposed to.

Institutions and infrastructure aren't supposed to fail at all in a functioning society. The fact that some of the institutions that are failing is still extremely alarming.

The water infrastructure of a single city failing doesn't say much about the whole city. Life seems to be chugging along everywhere else. Stay off the doomerism and appreciate what we have.

Every human endeavor is 100% guaranteed to fail at some point. By your definition there are zero function governments anywhere in the world.

No. This is doomerism rooted in nostalgia

Compared to where though? The US is huge. Parts of it are shiny and new and parts of it are old and decrepit, just like Europe, Israel, Mexico, South America, etc.

It’s a shift in money and resources. The US is a collection of states. As some states grow others shrink.

There’s brain drains from some states to other states.

What we are seeing is shifting tides of a large country that makes it easy to move from coast to coast

Maybe remote work will reduce the brain drain. Many folks leaving coastal cities.

HN is the last place you should ask this question. It's full of tech bros who have never known adversity or alienation.

No, there are 1000's of cities in America with who have had uninterrupted functioning water systems for decades (hundreds of years?). Doomerism anecdotes lead to lots of clicks.

People have been saying this for the last 50 years.

They were right, but didn't realize how long momentum can last.

51 years ago was 1971.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com

So what happened?

Computers started becoming widespread.

Gold standard

Who wants to work on public infrastructure when you can be a software engineer making 6 figures after a single 3 month long bootcamp.

Which is society's fault because... It can't be mine, I'm a great software engineer creating great value through my innovation. My dog massage scheduling app is valued at 10 figures.

Yep. I don't know that momentum is sustaining them so much as it is denial.

As wealth inequality grows in our capitalist society, I worry the common people simply wont control enough wealth to have their concerns considered. The common people do have the ability to vote, but more and more votes are bought with money and divisive advertising.

The bottom 50% of American's control 2% of the nations wealth. Helping the plebs simply isn't going to be profitable. All that to say, yes, I worry about crumbling institutions.

I first thought about this while considering the rise of SaaS software. Software sold with a one-time cost, an honest transaction, is dying. Perhaps common people simply don't control enough wealth to make honest software worth while. Instead, companies want our data they can sell to other wealthy entities. "Common people are out there, they don't possess any wealth to speak of, but we can spy on them and sell the data to other wealthy people."

Bureaucracy everywhere slows everything to a halt and pumps the costs of anything sky high. In developed West - through regulations and Kafkaesque process, in the rest of the world - through corruption. Pouring concrete and laying pipes is cheap and fast, it is everything else in the project that makes it costly and expensive.

Jackson is in a death spiral. It’s been shrinking for decades and the people who leave first are the people with income, money, and opportunity.

The people left are increasingly poor, on public assistance, and simply don’t pay enough in taxes to maintain their city’s infrastructure.

When this happens, cities need to restructure. Shrink the city boundaries and end service to people outside of it. Give them plenty of warning of course - years of warning - but a city that is shrinking in population and wealth also needs to physically shrink and reduce the amount of infrastructure being maintained to be solvent.

I get your general argument, and in a lot of circumstances, it has validity, but I don't think it does in this case.

Jackson has indeed experienced white flight and a population decline. But it still has basically the same population it had 10 years ago (153k now, 173k as of the 2010 census). And the water treatment infrastructure issues there have been ongoing for many years. There have been repeated appeals to the state for funding. The state has denied anything close to the requested funding.

In this particular case, it's not about failing to wisely "physically shrink" the "amount of infrastructure" to something 10% smaller. It's about failure to address chronically broken fundamental infrastructure.

It really just boils down to priorities. Politicians at all levels (local, state, federal) seem to always have money available for their personal pet projects but can't seem to find money for basic necessities like water, roads, safety, etc..

I lived a couple years in a small town just outside of Jackson. Going into the city never felt safe. You had to even look over your shoulder while golfing at the local course while wondering when you might get mugged.

For those turning this into a race issue, the United States has a large number of black controlled cities who have no problem keeping their water systems running. This isn't about race, it's about the particular leaders in Jackson not making the water system a priority. Every other excuse made here applies to other towns who have no problems keeping their water running and clean. Maybe you should ask yourself why you're so desperate to make this about race instead about less than a dozen leaders in one particular city.

"Turning this into" a race issue? It is a race issue.

You're simply making things up about Jackson's leaders and hoping they will stick. Well, they don't stick. Jackson has repeatedly appealed for funding to address this issue and they have been repeatedly denied that funding by the state's Republican leaders.

Maybe you should ask yourself why you're so lazy that you're unwilling to research the issue, and also so willing to post a knee-jerk reaction in public about how this can't possibly be about race.

Do we have a concrete proof besides suspecting malicious motives and quickly jumping to conclusions about racial discrimination?

I am seeing a lot of knee-jerk reaction from our media. Everything is about race. All the fricking time. It is a "systemic" problem that gets blamed at some ulterior level that cannot be proven or challenged. And btw, if you question it, you're a bigot. This is a great way to make zero progress because we've given up the cause to a nation wide racial discrimination problem and therefore, we must not look at incompetency in local government for instance in this case.

I guess my problem is how do we know if it is a race problem or not? Surely not every conflict between two races is from racism. US has been a melting pot for many decades and lot of people coexist fine from various cultures.

> Jackson has repeatedly appealed for funding to address this issue and they have been repeatedly denied that funding by the state's Republican leader

I'm not sure if cities in Mississippi normally get state funding to maintain municipal water systems, but regardless, if the state isn't providing funding, the next option is securing local funding.

The story quotes a few people who mention how nobody will take responsibility for this. It's the governor, or the mayor, or the city government, or state government - etc. I wish the reporter would actually take a position on this. Whose fault is this and how do you know?

> a water crisis of unparalleled scale

Unparalleled, really? Googling "China" and "heat wave" should give you pretty paralleled results.

It’s well on the way to being fixed already.

https://www.wjtv.com/news/jacksons-water-crisis/more-improve...

This article claims New Orleans might be next - https://www.wsj.com/articles/jackson-water-crisis-aging-infr...

We've been here before. Not that this makes what is happening in Mississippi any easier but Flint has had it bad for years. US infrastructure is falling apart and has been for years.

"Gift article" link without paywall: https://wapo.st/3KMLjMB

Here is a "gift article" from NYT. Not sure why they don't shorten links.

Mississippi Crisis Highlights Climate Threat to Drinking Water Nationwide https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/01/us/mississippi-water-clim...

The government(s) in the US have reneged on their social contract to care for its citizens. It's a crime.

And here I thought the social contract in the US was "the government which governs least, governs best."

$200 bucks a month on bottled water you may as well drink beer /s

I see lots of comments claiming it is or is not 'about race' or 'red vs blue'. Does anyone have any sources at all to back up either of those claims?

Maybe they can use some of that Ukraine money.

I don’t know if the $13.5 Billion committed by the US for security assistance in Ukraine would make any difference in the well being of US citizens with targeted infrastructure improvements or expanded social services.

I guess Washington Post forgot to fact-check Jackson Mississippi has been always run by corrupt democrats at federal, state and local level. They are poster child fan boy of Benny Thompson who is the longest running Congressman at the moment.

It says in the article that the city is run by Democrats, and the state has been run by Republicans for the past 19 years.

> Jackson Mississippi has been always run by corrupt democrats at [...] state [...] level.

In the past 30 years they've had a Democratic governor for only four years, from 2000-2004.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com