Last year, 19 states banned utility shutoffs for water customers who couldn’t afford to pay for this vital resource. As local utilities have begun to resume shutoffs in states where moratoriums have expired, an estimated 28% of Americans are still struggling to pay their usual household expenses, according to a US Census Bureau survey from early August.
An investigation published by nonprofit news agency Circle of Blue found that more than 1.5 million households in 12 cities owed more than $1 billion to water utilities last year.
The difficulties and health issues arising from a lack of running water have only been compounded during the pandemic, when frequent handwashing is one of the most commonly prescribed methods to decrease infection risk. Rather than attempt to live in a house without water or settle a dispute with the water company, many people leave, said medical anthropologist Nadia Gaber, who has researched water insecurity in Detroit and Flint, Michigan.
“It’s very hard to live in a house without water,” Gaber said. “People will often move before you can even try to find them and talk to them and study what’s going on. They’re just kind of out of the city altogether, and a lot of activists believe that that’s sort of an underlying cause for the shut offs, that they’re a part of a broader picture of gentrification and displacement.”
This strain to cover water bills has underscored the need for long-term, sustainable programs to help Americans keep their taps running.
Launched in June, the US Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Low-Income Household Water Assistance Program will provide more than $1 billion to expand access to affordable drinking water and help disconnected customers pay past-due bills.
The funding released so far, however — about 15% or $166.6 million — is meant to cover administrative setup costs, not to pay bills, and as a temporary emergency measure ending in 2023, the program may not be enough to fix a complex problem decades in the making.
“The push is to get a permanent program established for water that can reach low-income households across the country who are struggling to pay those water bills, even at the current water rates, much less at higher rates as they continue to increase,” said Larry Levine, director of urban water infrastructure and senior attorney for the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council.
Legislation to create a permanent affordability program operated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was introduced to the House in May, but its future remains uncertain during the ongoing debate in Congress over the infrastructure bill and budget reconciliation.
While the HHS’ Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program has offered help with energy bills and related costs since 1981, Levine said the costs of water and sewage were relatively lower at the time of the program’s implementation, and government assistance has not caught up to water bill rate increases, which have outpaced inflation in many places in the past decade.
According to a 2017 study in the journal PLOS ONE, water rates rose 41% from 2010 to 2017. The research predicted that if water bills continue rising at their current rate, they may be unaffordable for more than 36% of American households by 2022.
The toll of water insecurity
Some advocates for water assistance worry that if HHS’ program has lackluster results, its future could be in jeopardy when the 2022 election prompts partisan concerns regarding spending and government overreach.
“Standing up a new program can take time,” said David Bradley, CEO and co-founder of anti-poverty lobbying organization National Community Action Foundation. “I think it’s going to take a few years to get this program right. … I worry that people are going to look at it and see money not spent because of slowness in implementation or inexperience … and say, ‘This is a failure.’”
Complicating the program’s rollout is the number of potential grantees and their varying levels of expertise and resources. The EPA oversees about 50,000 community water systems in the United States. Some of these local utilities already have their own water assistance programs, but many don’t. A 2016 EPA survey of 795 water utilities found less than 30% offered assistance programs.
“Some of these are mom-and-pop,” Bradley said. “How do you communicate with a water department that has a halftime employee, somebody that goes in and turns on the lights a half day a week? That’s really tough to do. A lot of the small water departments don’t have customer assistance or experience working with low-income families. That’s going to be a problem.”
The inconsistency and inefficiency of tens of thousands of disparate water utilities operating under their own rules has exacerbated many of the difficulties low-income households have with their water bills.
“There’s nobody to hold them accountable other than just local politics,” Levine said. “There’s a wide variation in how responsible and effective they are at providing customer service and providing accurate bills and dealing with billing disputes when somebody thinks they’ve got an incorrect bill.”
Difficulties and politics aside, Bradley said a federal water assistance program will provide badly needed relief to many Americans, and the program’s future may depend on them making their stories known.
“If low-income families are helped as they will be and are being helped, they need to speak out,” Bradley said. “They need to say, ‘This is the difference it made for our family,’ and to let people know that this was, in many of their instances, a matter of life and death. … I think in the end this will prevent hundreds of thousands of families from spiraling even further out of control.”
But as Gaber discovered when researching the study she co-authored on the psychological effects of water insecurity in Detroit, people are often ashamed or scared to admit their water has been shut off.
“There were … people who wouldn’t go to the city to try to get their water restarted because they were afraid that if they made it known that they had kids in a house without running water, their kids could be taken,” Gaber said. “As you can imagine, (not having water) takes a really serious toll on people’s mental health, first because it adds to so many of the stressors of everyday life when you are poor, but also because it creates an assault on your dignity, your sense of personhood, your sense that your life is valued.”
According to a 2019 study by the Thurgood Marshall Institute at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, service disconnections leading to lien sales and foreclosures disproportionately affect Black communities.
To get help to people who might be reluctant to ask for it, Greg Wukasch, the external affairs manager at the San Antonio Water System in Texas, suggested that water companies establish their affordability programs in the public relations department instead of customer service.
“Go into the community and sign people up,” Wukasch said. “Don’t wait for them to call you, because that’s a really difficult process to try to get people to sign up for your programs.”
In 2000, the San Antonio Water System began a local affordability program funded by private donations that has since grown into a more comprehensive initiative offering income-based discounts, emergency payment assistance and help paying for plumbers to fix leaks and repair sewer connections. More than 35,000 households are currently enrolled in the program, Wukasch said, but after the utility announced a moratorium on shutoffs during the pandemic last year, the number of people asking for help with past-due payments decreased.
With shutoffs scheduled to resume in October, the water system currently has more than 64,000 customers with past-due bills totaling more than $40 million. The HHS water assistance program’s funding for the state of Texas is $92.4 million.
Despite its limitations, the creation of a national affordability program is useful in changing the conversation about water, Gaber said.
“Whenever there is a federal plan, it helps kind of normalize at least the bottom line for what we feel like people have a right to and makes people feel, even if it’s kind of symbolic, like there is a national right that is being protected,” Gaber said. “That’s what advocates have been asking for around the country, that water be made accessible and affordable, and it doesn’t seem like too much to ask.”
Correction: This story has been updated to correct the number of states that issued bans on utility shutoffs.
Jeremy Martin is a news and arts writer living in Oklahoma City. Email him at jeremy.t.martin@gmail.com.
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