Millions of Americans Can't Afford Water

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...

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.

- "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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."