In March of 2014, Detroit’s Water and Sewage Department announced that it would begin shutting off water access to clients with outstanding accounts. Given its bankruptcy filing in the previous year, the city clearly saw its massive backlog of about 165,000 delinquent accounts as an opportunity to generate additional revenue. Nevertheless, these water shut-offs disproportionately affected the city’s low-income and African American residents. Human rights advocates were quick to point out that these already vulnerable communities were unfairly targeted, considering that water access for commercial and industrial account holders remained untouched, despite the fact that the average debt for industrial clients is more than $10,000 higher than the average debt of residential clients.