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.