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.
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.
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.
It should, but it's not. The article argues that the price of water is going up, but quality is going down. Affordability is not the primary issue (it seems to be marketed that way because that's what individuals care about) but the larger issue is that infrastructure efficiency, and grid stability is going down. Bureaucratic failures all around.
> “High-cost low-quality water is a national issue . . . . the federal government is clearly not playing the role it needs to play,” said Howard Neukrug, director of the water center at the University of Pennsylvania and former head of Philadelphia’s water department.
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52384622
[2] https://time.com/longform/clean-water-access-united-states/
[3] https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/4/17/21223565/coronaviru...
[4] https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-soc-0...
[5] https://people.umass.edu/crotty/Austerity_War.pdf
[6] https://www.nber.org/chapters/c7443.pdf
[7] http://www.macrohistory.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/HSCF_...
[8] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/708815
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.
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.
Sometimes water is easy, but sewerage capacity is the limit, so gray water reuse makes sense to encourage where possible.
Water is measured, but sewage discharge isn’t.
I’d like holding tanks for gray water re-use for toilets. Apparently still gray water becomes septic after a day, but if it’s your toilet, shouldn’t you assume the water in there is septic anyway??
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.