Meet the Candidates: Joel Arnold

Editor’s Note: This is the first of the Flint City Council Interview series. Flintside will host conversations with candidates running for office. We’ll talk about local politics, ask what they love about Flint, how they’ll improve the city, and get to know each candidate and a bit of their story. 

FLINT, Michigan — Joel Arnold’s story has taken him from Flint, across the ocean, around the world, and back again to Flint. This time, running for city council in the city’s 5^th ward.

Arnold has been passionate about helping others and supporting the community his whole life. Every decision he’s made has been with the intention of doing just that. So, when this upcoming election cycle started, opportunity finally met decades of preparation.

“I’ve always felt like this is a place that’s given a lot to me. I feel really obligated to give back. [I] grew up in a family that was always pretty open and talking about politics and community work.”

One of the issues Arnold hopes to address harkens back to the political issue that got him his first job in city government: blight.

“If we can’t solve those blighted property issues, it’s going to be really hard for us to do anything. It makes it hard for you to draw new jobs in, because people don’t want to invest if they see a burned-out building next to where they want to open their business,” Arnold said. “It makes it hard for people to want to buy homes, because people don’t tend to want to buy homes next to vacant and abandoned properties. So, it really holds our community back.”

One way Arnold would hope to address blight, as well as other issues, is through creating legislative accountability measures. Arnold proposes an updated Flint City website with a dashboard that tracks statistics on all public services such as police, EMS, and the blight department.

“It makes sure that you can hold City Hall accountable. If it’s publicly known that we got 500 blight complaints last month, and we only solved 50 of them, the public should have that information and should be able to judge us accordingly. I think we really need to have accountability metrics on ourselves and really build partnerships with other organizations to make sure that we’re resolving things in a healthy way.”

Arnold also envisions a path to reduce violence throughout the city without having to escalate use of force when policing. While he acknowledges that our police force is smaller than cities of comparable sizes, he envisions a solution that prioritizes programming for youth to give them alternatives outside of violent crime, as well as investing in the welfare of Flint to diminish crime rates. 

“If you don’t have access to summer employment, you don’t have access to great resources after school, you don’t have access to a community center in your neighborhood. So, we have to be making sure that we’re getting people access to the kind of programs that people want in their own neighborhoods”

And those kinds of programs, as an adolescent, Arnold came from having worked for the campaigns of Jim Ananich and Dale Weighill. Born on Flint’s west side at McLaren Flint Hospital and lived in Davison, MI for most of his childhood.

Despite being one town over, he spent most of his childhood in Flint and first became politically engaged as a youth by joining the Community Foundation of Greater Flint on the Youth Advisory Council.

The program is still around today and allows youth to work with organizers to write and propose grants that reflect the way they want to see money spent in their communities.

After graduating high school, Arnold earned his bachelor’s degree in Urban Planning and Social Policy from Michigan State University. Around this same time, Arnold became employed at the blight office in the City of Flint and recalls using his skills in city planning to help bolster one of Flint government’s most infamous offices.

“I coordinated the city’s response to over 10,000 blight complaints and managed the city’s involvement in about 250 different neighborhood cleanups,” he explained. “By the time I left that job, we were supporting over 100 cleanups a year. And we were solving about 78% of complaints that were coming in, as opposed to 33% when I started.”

As the recipient of the US Ireland Alliance Scholarship, he used the opportunity to get a master’s degree in Public Policy in Dublin, Ireland. He would bring this education and experience with him back to the United States, where he would begin working in Philadelphia. He worked on a park redevelopment project, overseeing over $5 million in funding, and once it was finished, felt the call to return to the Flint area.

“Flint is where my family is. This is where my connections are, and it’s why I care about these topics,” Arnold said. “It’s why I went and became an urban planner and wanted to do this kind of work.”

Once back in Genesee County, he immediately began organizing. In 2021, Arnold began working for Communities First Inc., a city development non-profit. While there, he focused on what he understood best: city development and planning.

However, Arnold also played an instrumental role in creating the beloved Levitt AMP Flint Music Series hosted behind Totem Books. This was also where he began interacting with city council, representing Communities First in town hall meetings.

He decided to leave Communities First to take the next step in community engagement by running for office. He explains that he was already aware of the conflict of interest that may arise from pursuing both roles at once, so the decision to run for office was about what would best serve the community.

Now, he works for Abundant Housing Michigan, a group that advocates for legislative reform to address the housing crisis in our country. He hopes that his experience and perspectives will help bring Flint politics to a more stable landscape that makes it easier for residents to engage with everyday politics.

He’s calling for more professionalism in the Flint political space, because as he believes, the goal of government is always to serve constituents rather than exclude them. 

“As long as we have this kind of us-versus-them politics, a politics focused on personal blame, a politics focused on personality disagreements, and not one focused on solving problems. We need to get back to providing basic customer service to our residents.”

Arnold made note that his personal phone number can be found on each of his flyers spread around Flint. He encourages residents to contact him if they have any interest in conversations about Flint politics.