As housing becomes increasingly costly, over 1 million Americans live without running water, even in affluent cities, new research shows.
A paper published in the journal Nature Cities documents how many Americans are “squeezed” by rising costs of housing and normal expenses like food and utilities, as well as debt for things like medical bills and education. What the researchers call “plumbing poverty” was once a problem in mostly rural areas, but is increasingly found in U.S. cities such as Portland, Oregon; Phoenix, Houston, and New York, they found.
“The housing crisis is a water crisis,” said lead researcher Katie Meehan, a professor of environmental justice at King’s College London, in an interview with USA TODAY.
“Unaffordable housing, stagnant wages and a cost-of-living crisis,” the paper highlights, “pushed more households into situations of plumbing poverty as people end up in housing without secure or reliable running water.”
What does it mean to live without running water? Some households may prioritize paying the rent or the mortgage over paying the water bill. Some may have pipes or fixtures that broke, clogged, or stopped working for some other reason, but lack the means to repair them. Others may live in housing that’s substandard or not designed for living, such as warehouses.
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In rare but not unprecedented occurrences, some areas may face regional water outages or contaminations, like in Flint, Michigan, and Jackson, Mississippi.
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Importantly, the 1.1 million Americans estimated to be without water access as of 2021 probably does not include homeless people, Meehan told USA TODAY. She and the other researchers used data from the U.S. Census, which asks respondents about the presence of running water within their homes.
The census has trouble reaching unhoused people, and even communities of color, where lack of running water may disproportionately manifest itself, are considered “hard to count,” Meehan said. What’s more, even households that do respond to census questions may not want to admit to outsiders that they live without running water.
As a result, Meehan said, “our findings are most likely a very conservative underestimation of the scale of the problem.” The actual number might be as much as double that, she noted.
As of 2021, the city with the most people without running water was New York, with an estimated 24,700 households and 56,900 people.
But New York has made good strides since 2000 when an estimated 158,000 people were without running water. In contrast, cities like Phoenix and San Francisco have made little progress in reversing the problem, and in Portland, Oregon, where Meehan hails from, it’s gotten worse.
Solving the problem, the researchers conclude, will require “a heroic and paradigmatic transformation of housing conditions and social infrastructures.”
