Jackson, Mississippi water crisis pushes local businesses to the brink

For the past five weeks, Jeff Good has operated his three restaurants in Jackson, Mississippi, under a boil water advisory - that's if he's lucky enough to have any. water. On Monday, the taps went dry and forced him to shut down for four days. Friday morning the water pressure came back and they were able to open in time for breakfast and lunch, but the headache is far from over.

The city of 150,000 people, a quarter of whom live below the poverty line, is still subject to a boil water advisory. That means its 210 employees can't safely use soda guns, commercial coffee makers or restaurant ice machines. Workers have to rely on bottled water, canned soft drinks, a Mr. Coffee and bags of ice, which are stacked to the ceiling in walk-in freezers. Even baking bread requires bottled water. These measures cost each location between $200 and $500 more per day. At the same time, sales fell by 20%.

“We are under a huge strain spending this amount of money every day,” said Good, president of Mangia Bene Restaurant Management Group. "We cling by the fingertips to the edge of the cornice."

This is not a new problem for him and his team. Since February 2021, the state capital and largest city in Mississippi has experienced five major water outages. Good, who is originally from Jackson, has owned a local business for 30 years. Now he fears the current crisis is accelerating the trend of people and businesses fleeing to the suburbs. Over the past year and a half, it has lost customers and employees in the surrounding areas, which are on various water systems.

"It's a real crisis," says Good. "That pretty much sent a signal that it's not viable to be in business in Jackson, Mississippi."

Without a clean and reliable source of water, local businesses struggle to remain solvent. For restaurants in particular, this marks another hurdle after two years of Covid shutdowns, supply chain issues, labor shortages and the highest inflation we've seen in 40 years. . If local businesses are forced to close or relocate, the pain will be felt beyond their bottom line. This blow will affect the entire local economy.

For most Americans, home ownership remains their primary source of wealth, and local real estate professionals are already worried about the negative impact of the water crisis. "There is a clear and observable relationship between home prices and water quality," Central Mississippi Realtors, a group of 1,600 industry professionals, said in a statement. "Houses in the city of Jackson are worth $30,000 less than those in Hinds County and the state."

David Keiser, environmental economist and professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has studied the economic impact of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. If the result in Jackson resembles what he observed in Flint, the community will feel the effects for a long time.

In Flint, Keizer found that home values ​​had fallen an average of 40% and still hadn't recovered despite more than $400 million in government spending to mitigate the impact. But what was just as economically devastating to the city, according to Keiser, was the loss of public trust. Even when the water was deemed potable again, residents continued to buy more bottled water.

“There are real economic consequences,” he says. "People engage in costly behaviors, which often don't show up on a city's budget sheet."

Good's cases aren't the only ones. Pat Fontaine, executive director of the Mississippi Hospitality & Restaurant Association, says all of its Jackson members are struggling with rising operating costs and declining sales. “Consumers are afraid to dine in the town of Jackson,” he says. "It has a significant impact on their bottom line."

His...