COVID-19 Convinces Michigan to Turn on the Tap

For years, human rights activists in Detroit and elsewhere have argued that water shut-offs should not be the mechanism of choice for collecting on unpaid bills.  Instead, water should be recognized as a human right, not necessarily free to all, but affordable and available to everyone.  A few municipalities, notably Philadelphia, have agreed and have looked for innovative ways to ensure that bills are affordable and that customers have viable options for keeping their water on.  In Detroit, however, mass shut-offs have continued.  At the time that Michigan’s COVID-19 stay-home order began, nearly 12,000 households in Detroit had no household water.

Someone in the state government recognized that this created a big problem:  beyond the many personal inconveniences and stresses that shut-offs have always created, folks staying at home with no water cannot readily wash their hands with soap or clean their surfaces, and they have to go out to satisfy their most basic needs.  Last week, the Michigan governor ordered a statewide moratorium on shut-offs and reinstated households whose water had been turned off.

Is this a beginning of recognizing that water shut-offs are the wrong approach at any time, not just in a pandemic?  COVID-19 has many terrible downsides, but it has forced society to recognize the interrelationships between us all.  If almost 12,000 households in a community are denied the human right to water, and are unable to wash their hands regularly, it’s not just their problem, but a problem for the whole society. As it turns out, the activists were right:  Detroit could turn the water back on, and they could have done it years ago.  When the COVID-19 crisis is over, Michigan should keep the water flowing, for everyone’s sake.