Millions of Americans Can't Afford Water

https://www.consumerreports.org/personal-finance/millions-of-americans-cant-afford-water-as-bills-rise-80-percent-in-a-decade/?EXTKEY=AFLIP

by walterbell • 6 years ago

67 81 6 years ago

consumerreports.org

dreen• 6 years ago

How are we doing on desalination technologies?

microcolonel2• 6 years ago

We have heaps of fresh water in NA, I guess except in these areas (many of which seem to be in places where fresh water is scarcer). I think for many of these, it is still cheaper to bring water from a fresh water source than it is to bring it from the ocean, even if there is no desalination cost.

gshdg2• 6 years ago

Pretty sure lack of fresh water supply isn’t the problem in Philadelphia.

pjc502• 6 years ago

There's a fundamental lower bound on the energy usage of desalination. The current state of the art - reverse osmosis - isn't perfect, but we should not expect factor-of-ten reductions in energy usage.

whb07• 6 years ago

Somewhere like Austin could definitely use solar energy to boil water couldn’t they? Not only solar panels but those mirror/reflective panels into a concentrated spot to shine?

jojobas• 6 years ago

There was (almost) never a problem running out of river water. Freshwater (i.e. river) treatment is peanuts compared to desalination. It's pumps and pipes that cost most, not filters.

microcolonel2• 6 years ago

Water bills that exceed 4 percent of household income are considered unaffordable.

This seems extremely arbitrary. It's not that they can't afford water, it's that it's a relatively important expense rather than a trivial one. Most people in these income brackets don't even pay water bills directly.

exabrial• 6 years ago

Agree... There are plenty of items to cut from the budget first: tattoos, cigarettes, fast food, soda, energy drinks, Netflix, iPhones, or... Just moving to a cheaper area to live that's not an expensive coastal city.

simonh2• 6 years ago

I think you're confused. This article is about people on very low incomes in places like Tucson and Detroit, not hipsters.

gspr• 6 years ago

Entirely regardless of any cuts made to the expenses side of things, can we agree that having to spend 4% of household income on water in a developed country is absolutely bonkers?

simonh2• 6 years ago

"Amid rising costs and diminishing federal dollars, the use of punitive measures—shutoffs and liens (a legal claim on the house linked to a debt which can lead to foreclosure)—is widespread. Just like mortgage foreclosures, water shutoffs and liens can force affected households to abandon their homes."

and

"In 2014, shortly after filing the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, the city launched a massive shutoff program and has since disconnected at least 141,000 households, according to records obtained by news website Bridge."

Sounds like they can't afford water.

082349872349872• 6 years ago

https://www.sida.se/contentassets/700b0d2b48444b058389c27a64... "Affordability: Less than 5% of household income spent on WSS services." "Sweden has also underscored that richer states have an obligation to assist other states to fulfil the right to WSS." "In addition, Sida offers credits and guarantees for WSS investments as well as international training programs,..."

Bangladesh, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Kenya and Mali are mentioned. But it doesn't seem Sweden would set up a water and sanitation services programme for the US.

"Through development cooperation, Sweden assists countries in Africa, Asia, Europé and Latin America."

martopix• 6 years ago

The US is not poorer than Sweden, unlike the other countries mentioned. It's just that the US doesn't want to spend money on that. They like to keep their soaring inequalities.

mschuster91• 6 years ago

That truck driver guy with the 30.000 US$ bill - what? Let's generously assume he hasn't paid a single bill in 10 years to have that bill in 2013. That's 3.000 US$ a year or 250$ a month?!

How is this possible? Here in Germany average water bill is around that in a whole year!

What is the US doing with all the money? People pay a roughly thousand dollars on average based on the numbers in this article, and have abysmal service, no maintenance, and sometimes outright toxic water (Flint, the fracking areas where the water is flammable). Where is that excess money going?

[0] https://www.t-online.de/heim-garten/energie/id_77342378/wass...

christophilus• 6 years ago

I can't speak for the rest of the US, but I have a family of 4, and we pay maybe $50/mo for our water bill, so maybe $600/year. More than the German average, but not egregious. Relative to a lot of other countries, the US is kind of more like strong union of a bunch of countries (states)-- each with unique environments and ecosystems-- than it is like a united, single country. So, you can say: "Americans are like ___", and you can almost certainly find a spot in the US where your statement holds true.

As for costs, the US has wildly variable costs on most things, depending on where you live. For example, I pay $1.50 per gallon for gas, but one state up, it's above $2.00. I live in a comfortable house, and pay less for my mortgage + taxes than folks in New Jersey pay just in taxes on a smaller house. This variance is a side-effect of a more decentralized governmental system where states have a lot of power, combined with a wide variation in environments / scarcity across the country.

zaarn2• 6 years ago

Germany isn't that much different, the federal government has a bit more power but generally people from one state differ much from another. Compare Berlin and Bavaria, if you want an example. Bavaria is one of the more expensive states to live in and Berlin is somewhat cheap (other former ostblock states are even cheaper) and on the other hand we have the highest average income and pay into the other federal states the most.

Cost of water, electricity and food differ between states. A Döner Kebab in Berlin costs around 3.50€ by my experience, in Bavaria a comparable one costs around 5-7€.

You can't easily say "Germans are like ___", most of the international stereotypes are born out of the WW2 occupation of bavaria, not much else.

save_ferris• 6 years ago

I don’t know for sure, but one of the most shocking things to me has been the presence of private water companies outside of municipalities completely screwing their customers left and right (I live in Texas).

I had a friend who moved her parents up to a new development a couple hours north of Austin, and just outside the city limits. The couple thought they’d save a ton of money not having to pay city property taxes. The tradeoff meant that they didn’t get city water, their water was supplied by a private company.

Their new water bill was significantly higher, and they had no real recourse to fight their new rates. Everyone needs running water. It’s the perfect product to hold your customers captive with, and that company makes so much money exploiting that situation.

Wolfenstein98k• 6 years ago

Why is there not competition?

Sounds like a job for local lobbying!

nightski• 6 years ago

You are taking an extreme example, where they do not even mention his usage, and then extrapolating that to the entire U.S. It's entirely possible he has a leak and is spewing thousands of gallons of water into the ground or some weird thing.

We use ~3k gallons per month for normal use. In the summer months this goes up a fair bit because we water our lawn. But our overall bill is like $20/mo-$30/mo for water.

JoeAltmaier2• 6 years ago

Wow that's a lot. We use a few hundred per month, and that's mostly laundry.

Our bill is $0 because we have a well. Ok, it cost $5000 (for well and septic) 30 years ago, so divide that out and its been $13/mo

liveoneggs• 6 years ago

in Atlanta, where i live, a normal water bill is between $75 and $200 per month but I think we have some of the most expensive service in the country.

gshdg2• 6 years ago

The article talks about additional penalties and interest being tacked on.

gridlockd• 6 years ago

Seems like the guy is in a fight with the water department. He probably got a huge bill, refused to pay it because he considered it erroneous, then racked up lots of interest.

Where is that excess money going?

Salaries, most likely. Professionals in Germany earn way less than in the US. This is also the main reason why healthcare is so much more expensive.

The flip side of this is that non-professionals in the US don't earn as much.

Broken_Hippo• 6 years ago

I don't think salaries are why healthcare is so much more expensive: This would account for some costs, but not all of them. The healthcare system in the US is really fragmented and wasteful, so resources aren't pulled together to give the people the best benefit. Heck, we don't even standardize health insurance codes so that offices can hire fewer people nor are there standard costs for the consumer through an area (easing billing a bit), nor protect doctors from unreasonable false malpractice claims.

Not only that, but part of the reason salaries are higher is because of the cost of becoming a doctor... or nurse or any other healthcare professional that requires a degree.

Spooky23• 6 years ago

Alot of localities sell the water system or the operating rights to private entities, who have a shareholder obligation to rip off consumers.

My partner ran finance for a municipal water utility in a small, old US city. Average bill for a consumer was around $400/year, about 40% of which was capital expense for the sewer system (which requires alot of investment), 15% water capital expenses, and the remainder opex. That's in a high-cost state with union labor, etc. It was a surface water system, so their filtering and pumping expenses were low.

The other thing to keep in mind that anything new is much more expensive. Eminent domain and construction is 10x more than it was a hundred years ago.

tetromino_• 6 years ago

In NYC, monthly water and sewer for a family might be around $50-75. (Most city residents don't pay that bill directly; it's paid by the landlord who factors the expected cost into the rent.)

One reason for the relatively high water bills is infrastructure investment, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No....

yardie3• 6 years ago

One of the things I noticed since moving back to the US is Americans are averse to spending money on anything that doesn't improve their social standing. Municipalities included. Brand new skyscrapers get built and the taxes and fees raised from it are spent on stadiums, arenas, and beautification. But that luxury skyscraper is still plumbed into tired, 50 year old infrastructure that needs replacing now.

Shivetya• 6 years ago

The problem is best labeled as Ribbon Cutting.

Politicians love to cut ribbons but spending money to maintain does not impart any name recognition. The second motive is anything that fills their campaign coffers.

However it should be noted that one of the most major expenses in cities is paying their payroll and in particular their pension requirements as public employee unions pretty much have them over a barrel and politicians trade public money for political favor without regards to the costs.

finally it also comes down to the penalties, fees, and such, of government services affect the poor far more than any other group. That twenty dollar renewal for your license might be nothing to you but it doesn't work that way when your poor. Throw in that municipal fees tend to be a lot higher and you can see the difficulty.

Atlanta was only forced in fixing their sewers which of course exploded their service costs after they kept dumping into local rivers.

PDF of city of Atlanta budget https://s3.amazonaws.com/saportakinsta/wp-content/uploads/20...

nervousvarun2• 6 years ago

Exactly...the same reason many of our public schools are conducted in immaculate modern buildings (easily visible from the road/campaign commercials and identifiable as something the current politician spent on 'education') yet our teachers are paid a relative pittance.

nickik3• 6 years ago

This was also a huge thing in the Soviet Union, opening the biggest Truck factory in the world, fantastic propaganda. Actually economically efficiently producing trucks, far less relevant.

I totally agree that public unions are a huge issue. The prison guard union is one of the worst, basically undermining criminal justice reform. The police union is terrible, as everybody is slowly learning. But even teacher unions had negative effects.

Aunche• 6 years ago

Is this just because skyscrapers spend a lot of money on marketing, but water treatment plants don't? It's not like one is inherently more interesting than the other.

yardie3• 6 years ago

No. Modern buildings are going up and part of the proceeds from those construction fees and property taxes are supposed to be used towards enhancing the infrastructure. So a sewer system that was built for 1000 people doesn't get overwhelmed when another 1000 are added. In many cases it is spent in general funding. Only when sewage is literally running down the street do city managers even remember they have a sewer system to take care of.

My own city has pipes over 50 years old. They have to raise rates again to pay for replacement because they had not been factoring in the costs for decades.

julienfr112• 6 years ago

Does this apply also to household ? Like spending on a car or TV instead of it's utility bill ?

rabanne• 6 years ago

Austin, Texas, where the average annual bill rose from $566 in 2010 to $1,435 in 2018

How can anyone justify people paying more than $110 for water and sewers? I pay $20 and even that seems a lot to me.

bluedino2• 6 years ago

I live about 3 blocks from a friend of mine, I'm in township, he's in the city. His water bill is $120/month, mine is $90 every quarter. We get the same water/sewer from the same place.

quickthrowman• 6 years ago

Your neighbor either has huge water needs for watering/a pool or he has a leak/leaky fixture in his supply lines.

$120/month where I live would be 33,200 gallons a month. That’s nearly a gallon a minute.

virmundi• 6 years ago

How about garbage? We pay about $100 a month for water, sewer, and garbage. We get biweekly pickups and large trash hauled for free once a month. They even take fridges no question.

mhb• 6 years ago

They probably think along the same lines that justify paying for heat in, for example, New England, where water is plentiful.

Goronmon• 6 years ago

In NH my water/sewer bill is $350 a quarter at this point. "Plentiful water" doesn't seem to make an impact.

syshum• 6 years ago

I dont know about Austin, but my Water/Sewer Bill has more than just Water and Sewer on it, it also has Trash, Storm Drainage Maintenance Fee and a couple other multiplicity charges

I would say probably 40% of my Water / Sewer bill has nothing to do with Water or Sewer....

nervousvarun2• 6 years ago

If you want to be absolutely terrified, lookup the New Orleans Sewage and Water Board. Just an absolute disaster.

Full spectrum from "I haven't received a bill in 3 years" to "I regularly receive $1500 water bills" etc.

Perfect storm of aging/under-funded infrastructure, horrific bloated bureaucracy, on and on.

brudgers• 6 years ago

Shit flows down hill putting New Orleans in a difficult position with regard to sewage as it is below sea level and all the sewage has to be pumped uphill eventually and on the level before that. Pumping sewage is a hard problem involving grinders, strainers, big pipes and big pumps. On top of all the other shit New Orleans has to deal with, it has to deal with a lot of literal shit.

stevespang• 6 years ago

22 yrs. experience as a Texas licensed Irrigator here. It's true that the bureaucrats are using a "tiered" system to discourage lawn irrigation. Lawn or landscape irrigation uses tens of thousands of gallons of water each night it comes on, the usage of a house for a whole month in one night.

Those who installed water pumps for the wealthiest living along the lakes in Austin were fantastically profitable before covid19. Water is the new tax in Austin. Water front customers regularly speak of $1000 a month water bills before converting over to lake water . . . which is completely legal, the LCRA charges about $150 a YEAR for over 325,000 gallons of raw lake water.

michaelt• 6 years ago

I have read [1] (in an admittedly rather dated book) that many states in America use water bills to subsidise farmers.

Long ago, large landowners noticed you can build a big water project with a state bond issue, use 80% of the water for agriculture, then charge homeowners 50x as much as you charge farmers to pay off the bond.

Then a few years later you declare there's a water shortage, ban restaurants from bringing customers water without them asking, and ask voters to support another bond issue.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert

AuthorizedCust• 6 years ago

Part of high water costs are certain cities charge increasing per-gallon rates the more you use, to discourage lawn irrigation. This isn't just a drought measure. Dallas's predatory water-pricing scheme is permanent, even when our reservoirs are so overfull that we're just dumping excess water into the rivers, which is a surprising amount of the time. It's been years since there's been any legitimate need for pricing to discourage water use.

Scoundreller3• 6 years ago

In the electricity world, things are divided between production, transmission and distribution. You might have tons of generation, but insufficient capacity to get it to markets.

Then there’s the discharge/storm water issue. Farmers may not contribute to that, but urban/suburban usage does. A well-watered lawn doesn’t hold much water when a storm rushes in.

roenxi2• 6 years ago

Nina Lakhani is an environmental justice reporter with Guardian US, where she's reporting for the Our Unequal Earth project.

I'm not really up to date on American water politics. Is this article presented with a partisan slant or is it fairly neutral?

Job titles like that were a fair signal of things being partisan pieces a few years ago but the style might be changing.

DanCarvajal• 6 years ago

At the very least the sample size of cities they use is 12, which seems insufficient. The mention they they are diverse selection but half the cities on the list are in desert or near desert climates, where water scarcity comes into play.

I'm not saying that water can't be expensive, and that in some places agricultural uses are just downright wasteful (we grow a lot of food in irrigated deserts), but all of my bias flags have gone up in this article.

justin66• 6 years ago

They spend a few paragraphs on Cleveland, which is pretty close to the opposite of a desert city. Rebuilding the sewers is an expensive, multi-decade project here that needs to be paid for, and water treatment and pumping isn't free anywhere.

They're quite right that rising water and sewage costs are a concern here, but it would have been interesting for them to spend a little more effort and explain how the guy they mentioned accumulated $30k in debt to the water company, which is a bit extreme even for the area. (googling the guy revealed a separate story of him being foreclosed on because of taxes: https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/e-team/warrensville-heig...)

_xnmw3• 6 years ago

Partisan bias notwithstanding, the plain facts presented in the article seem to indicate pretty objectively that there is a major nationwide problem with water infrastructure. Denial is blindness.

- "Nationwide, the rising cost of water has significantly outstripped the consumer price index over the past decade."

- Federal funding for water systems has fallen by 77 percent in real terms since its peak in 1977.

- The U.S. is the only country in the industrialized world without a regulatory system, responsible for monitoring rates and performance, according to Stephen Gasteyer, professor of sociology at Michigan State University.

roenxi2• 6 years ago

Yeah, and if the piece is neutral those are quite persuasive. But if it is partisan, those facts could be carefully selected to be highly misleading. It is easy to lie with true statistics. Every group of loons has a set of favoured statistics that they can trot out.

Hypothetically, if it was decided in 1975 that there was going to be a transition from Federal to State management of water then the last two points would be evidence of a system working as intended. It isn't a fundamental truth that the US Federal government in particular has to be the body that regulates and funds water infrastructure. After reading the article I doubt there was such a deal but that is assuming the article is neutral despite a signal that I usually assume shows strong bias.

It would be absolutely routine for a partisan to assume that their pet issue requires national funding by the Federal government. Happens in every country on every topic and it is often a stupid assumption.

runako• 6 years ago

Your question (perhaps unintentionally) cuts to the heart of the matter.

Any discussion income or wealth inequality in the US is inherently partisan, as one side largely insists the topic is irrelevant/is overstated/etc. and therefore is not worthy of discussion.

Similarly, mentioning climate change or counting firearm deaths are also partisan topics in the US.

So to answer your question -- yes, this article is partisan because it attempts to examine a topic that we have decided is inherently partisan.

splitrocket• 6 years ago

"Late Stage Capitalism" really starts to make sense when you realize that profit is literally the measure of inefficiency in a market.

edit: A perfectly efficient market has no profit margin. As a market increases in efficiency, the profit margin of all participants approaches zero. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition

abstractbarista• 6 years ago

Profit is the carrot on the economic stick, driving productivity and innovation.

nickik3• 6 years ago

Late Stage Capitalism is a nonsense concept.

Perfect competition is a very simplistic assumption from unrealistic late 19th century economic model by Walras. That is fine for econ 101 but its clearly not what economists have understood for a long time.

Also, water markets are inertly political for the most part, so political economy actually gives you far more insight into how they work then Walrasian micro economics.

driverdan3• 6 years ago

None of this makes sense to me. Water is still extremely cheap. Prices should go up in drought-prone regions they mentioned (eg Austin) to help incentivize reduced water use.

If you're paying $100/m it means you're using too much water. If you can't afford that use less. Excluding laundry I currently use less than 5 gallons a day between myself and my dog. It's not hard to do.

Scoundreller3• 6 years ago

I’d prefer tiered billing. The first X gallons/day cost $x, then it goes up.

That way you subsidize sanitation, but charge for washing your car or watering your lawn.

Many places have complicated programs to do that in reverse (get this credit for removing your lawn or this tax credit for a new washing machine).

California lets you run your washing machine drain into your backyard without a permit, that’s one regulatory way to reuse gray-water. If gray water reuse requires $hundreds-$thousands in permits and plumbers, people won’t bother.

nickik3• 6 years ago

I totally agree, that is the way to do it.

However, we must realize that, specially in California, its actually agriculture that uses most water. Standford university turning of their fountains and other 'publicity' stunts will not fix anything.

You need to fix the pricing in the broader water market, change the intensives for California farmers so they plant things that require less water, or have more intensive to limit water consumption.

driverdan3• 6 years ago

Austin, which was mentioned in the article, does do tiered billing. The tiers are still quite generous though.

The only way I can see paying over $100/m in Austin is through wasting it on landscaping. If you're doing that you really have no right to complain since it's a luxury.

_xnmw3• 6 years ago

"Water is still extremely cheap." - your anecdote. The entire point of a scientific study is to determine the truth of statements like these. Comparison is made to global standards and the consumer price index.

And fine, I get you're saying you don't care about the millions of other people in your country who live a different lifestyle and pay ridiculous amounts for water. Fine, they're not your problem. But if you read the article, it's not just about affordability, it's a sign of the decay and decline of the infrastructure that supplies your water. You should care about the nation's water infrastructure, even if you don't care what other people are paying.

driverdan3• 6 years ago

who live a different lifestyle and pay ridiculous amounts for water

Who choose to live a different lifestyle. I'm not saying everyone has to live in a bus and use a few gallons a day. I'm saying that if the cost of water significantly impacts your life you should reduce how much you use.

No one in the US pays "ridiculous" amounts for municipal water. We're still talking pennies per gallon.

You should care about the nation's water infrastructure

Absolutely. It's one of the reasons water should cost more, to maintain and improve infrastructure. Water should be billed at a rate that covers all of the costs involved.

Millions of Americans Can't Afford Water

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