Figure 1. In close proximity to city water infrastructure, the Springville community lacks access to piped water.
In 2017, a journalist wrote about the irony of a water treatment plant located near the low-income community of Springville, Texas,1 which did not have access to piped water. Formerly enslaved African Americans had founded Springville as a freedmen’s town in the 1870s but it had never received municipal piped water and other basic services. The article included the perspective of a resident who compared their situation to that of Flint, Michigan. Unlike Flint, rural and unincorporated areas in the United States typically lack municipal services (Purifoy 2021; Seamster and Purifoy 2020) but the comparison of Springville to Flint was nonetheless plausible: Springville residents also experienced well water pollution and relied on donated or purchased water bottles for daily needs. The article concluded that Springville was deadlocked between impoverished residents who could not afford to leave the community for a better place to live and county officials who saw no reason to take responsibility or action.
Researchers, including Reyes and Newton, found this article in November 2021 while researching environmental injustice and informal housing in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. It led them to read every academic and news report on Springville they could find. They realized that their research needed to bring them closer to understanding the issues of Springville, felt a strong need to act, yet were unsure how to build relationships in a neighborhood without connections. In March 2022, they drove through Springville for the first time, expecting nothing more than to see the community firsthand. The hospitable character of Springville residents quickly expanded that limited plan. As they entered Springville, a resident stopped them in the middle of the road to ask who they were and what they were doing in Springville. That person introduced them to a longstanding leader in the community who invited them to attend a town hall meeting where they heard the history of the community, listened to resident experiences, and ate BBQ with local stakeholders and environmental justice activists in the area. This meeting solidified their commitment to Springville as an appropriate research site.
Drawing on participatory action research methods and humanistic methodologies, Dr. Reyes developed a research project to understand better how impoverished Latinx residents experience environmental and climate injustices in an unincorporated community of color in North Texas. This proposal was incorporated into a larger project to understand how low-income Latinx residents in Texas, California, and Illinois experience environmental and climate injustice. In August 2022, Reyes and colleagues from the University of Illinois-Chicago and the University of California-Irvine were awarded a Crossing Latinidades Collaborative Research Grant, which provided financial support for extensive fieldwork from August 2022 to July 2024. Over the past two years, Ariadna Reyes has worked with research partners Josh Newton, Bernardo Vargas, and Luis Macias, who have contributed extensively to developing and implementing research methods tailored to documenting the conditions of this multi-racial, unincorporated community and how its impoverished Black, Latinx, and white residents understand and articulate environmental and climate injustice. The researchers have attended several meetings in Springville and have engaged residents in participatory research to understand the issues from their perspectives and imagine solutions based on their ideas and experiences.
The research that produced the date in this report was developed in three phases. The first phase consisted of observational and spatial analysis methods that allowed the team to develop base maps of the community. This process revealed that Dallas County data and mapping of Springville were inaccurate or poorly updated, so the team began collecting spatial data from observations in order to accurately map actual community land use. The second phase involved the implementation of 45 household surveys and 11 in-depth interviews on housing, water and energy infrastructure. During this phase, they learned that residents had deep awareness of and concern about environmental injustices in their neighborhood, extending to challenging experiences of climate-induced weather events. This finding led to a third research phase bringing residents into deeper participation through in-depth interviews, oral histories, and photovoice. Throughout the research phases, local activists and residents provided documents on Springville history. From this research base, the researchers are now developing ideas based on academic theory that will help to shape understanding of Springville’s issues. The following sections put Springville in historical context , then focus on data and Springville residents’ ideas about environmental and climate issues.
1.1 Springville’s History of Environmental Injustice
Springville was established in the late 1870s as an unincorporated freedmen’s town by twelve African Americans escaping racial segregation and violence with the intent to develop an autonomous community. In Texas, counties are the regulatory authority overseeing unincorporated communities (Durst et al., 2023). Counties can solely enforce subdivision regulations in unincorporated communities without reference to zoning or building codes. For more than century, Dallas County’s refusal to annex this community has deprived residents of essential services such as piped water and sanitation. Like many other low-income, unincorporated communities of color in Southern states, such as Texas and North Carolina (Purifoy, 2021; Seamster & Purifoy, 2020), Springville simply lacks municipal services widely understood to be essential. In addition to lack of paved roads, sidewalks, piped water, internet access, sewers, and trash pickup, to name a few services, residents are subject to people outside treating Springville as a dumping site for such things as tires and toxic waste, an illegal practice that is typically ignored by authorities.
Municipal service deficiencies mean residents must have coping strategies for the most everyday kinds of activities. For instance, African American residents built rudimentary wells and septic tanks in the 1960s, which enabled population growth. In 1970, 460 people were living in Springville. In the mid-1980s, residents complained that their wells were contaminated by sand from local mining operations and also smelled terrible, likely because of the nearby wastewater treatment plant. Such infrastructural deficiencies led to a dire situation, as Springville’s population experienced massive displacement. By 2000, there were only 252 residents.
In the early 2000s, FEMA designated the community as a floodplain area. Since then, Dallas County has strictly enforced floodplain regulations, which require residents to build a levee or elevate houses at their own cost or relocate or demolish their homes with a county reimbursement of $350. The result: 150 properties were sold and 149 homes were destroyed. The floodplain designation also brought citations of residents who attempted to upgrade or repair their homes, thus ensuring future deterioration of the housing stock. While Dallas County does not provide municipal services, members of its sheriff department frequently patrol the community and cite residents for efforts to improve their lots. Floodplain designation has had negative ramifications beyond housing costs. Dallas County resolved that water and sewage infrastructure in Springville was impractical and financially infeasible. Insofar as other communities in the floodplain area have that infrastructure, it seems clear that the county’s choice not to provide infrastructure is discriminatory and rooted in post-slavery racial segregation. These pressures further depleted Springville’s population. In 2010, 88 people resided there as a result of well contamination and floodplain regulations. Since that time, despite the efforts of multiple news outlets, research teams, nonprofits, local environmental organizations, and activists, the community has continued to struggle without gaining any significant infrastructural improvements.
Over the last two decades, however, Springville has grown. Low-income people from Latin America and US-born white, Latinx, and Black residents have moved to there, attracted by its low land values. Our field research indicates that as of 2024 Springville has 132 residents, a 50% increase since 2010. Unfortunately, residents continue to face precarious living conditions and safety risks tied to absence of essential services and selective enforcement of floodplain regulations, both impeding their ability to improve their living conditions. As the data reported here show, most residents live in precarious forms of housing and lack piped water, sewers, trash pickup, paved roads, and internet access.
- We use this alias to protect the identities of residents.