America's Road to Economic Opportunity Is Paved With Infrastructure Jobs

In Flint, Michigan—which has become America’s poster city for aging infrastructure—the water still remains unsafe to drink, and only a handful of lead service lines have been replaced. This is a double-decker crisis: The longer Flint goes without water, the more distant its hopes of economic recovery become.

Harold Harrington, an official with the UA Local 370 plumbers’ union, believes he has a solution to both problems. If enough young people in Flint learn plumbing through the union’s apprenticeship program, he believes pipe replacement and water infrastructure projects can be sustained for decades to come. “We’d love to train them in a trade,” he told CityLab earlier this year. “Then they can have a career. We don’t just want to hand them a shovel and say ‘there.’”