Urban households across the United States—and the water departments that serve them—are under tremendous financial pressure to maintain access to safe and affordable drinking water. Many municipal water departments have raised water rates to meet the growing costs of providing sustainable drinking water, driven by factors such as past declines in federal support for water infrastructure investments, shrinking urban populations in some cities, and climate change. Increased rates, coupled with stagnant household incomes among the poorest urban residents over the past three decades, has resulted in a worsening water poverty cycle—a cycle that is now exacerbated by the global COVID-19 pandemic. To cover costs, water utilities sometimes cut off water services to urban households, impose liens, and even sell those liens, resulting in home foreclosures.

While resilience is often framed as protection against or recovery from climatic hazards, many communities need to first build economic resilience against other types of shocks and seasonal challenges experienced by households, such as fluctuations in employment stability and weather-based needs. Households face spiking utility bills and sharp rises in their daily cost of living, including for basic water and sanitation services. Strengthening this line of economic resilience is the first necessary step in improving the general capacity and capabilities of community members to adapt in-place.

We are working with utilities and community-based organizations to (re)design consumer assistance programs. We aim to help reverse the cycle of water poverty and precarity by ensuring that utilities understand the needs of the most vulnerable communities and households. We also work to collectively situate these struggles so that community organizations can better understand the local and national scale of these challenges.

We are developing an online, open-source toolset that employs a socio-economic and spatial model of analysis to reveal intra-urban inequalities. This toolset can be used by utilities and municipalities as well as community-based groups to ensure that decision-making processes in designing assistance programming can better reflect and address these inequalities.

Project context

Water utilities across U.S. cities have responded differently to the financial challenges they face in upgrading infrastructure and the affordability crisis experienced by many households. Some cities and states, in their efforts to address the COVID-19 pandemic, have enacted moratoria on water shutoffs for residents who have not been able to keep up with their water bills. We are working with a carefully drawn set of cities to document these experiences, and to analyze the patterns of water poverty in different climatic regions, cities of different population size, and cities with different demographic compositions.

Based on our two-year analysis of household water services, we are now helping water utilities and water user advocacy groups understand which neighborhoods have been hardest hit by water affordability challenges. We are also examining various types of Customer Assistance Programs (CAPS) offered by water utilities to see whether and to what extent these programs serve those most in need. Ultimately, our goal is to design an online interactive platform that municipal water utilities, residents, and their advocates can use to visualize which neighborhoods and groups are experiencing the worst water poverty and whether existing CAPS are serving the most vulnerable residents. Our platform will give stakeholders a way to determine whether efforts to address water poverty are working.

Approach

Our approach has two parts. We are documenting water poverty in both socio-economic and spatial terms (the latter of which has not been done in older American cities), using socio-economic data from national data sources like the American Community Survey. We are also working with utilities and consumer advocacy groups to model the efficacy of potential solutions. Water utilities do not typically collect demographic and locational data about the households they serve. This makes designing targeted outreach and assistance programming very difficult.  Our objective is to help utilities better understand intra-urban variation in their performance and to better tailor support services (such as customer assistance programs) to populations most in need, including households experiencing vulnerabilities and under threat of having their water shut off. We emphasize equity concerns that are usually lost in the aggregative way that water services are administered. Now is a particularly important moment for this work because states and cities must decide how to use recently-approved federal infrastructure support funds. We want to ensure that affordability, distributive fairness, and the rights of poor and disadvantaged urban households are given high priority in this process.

Our approach involves bringing together city governments, water utilities, community advocacy organizations, universities, and nonprofits working on the water affordability crisis to consider the promising new analytic tools we are developing. We also want to trigger collaborative problem-solving to enable a shift in the water affordability support architecture in our case study cities.

We define success in terms of increasing understanding of the scope and distribution of the water poverty problem and a willingness to try new forms of consumer assistance at the intra-urban scale. This will require making our online analytical tools user-friendly and open-sourced so that all stakeholders can understand the growing water poverty crisis and possible new solutions in their cities.

Design Outcomes and Transformations

Water utilities do not presently collect demographic and locational data on the households they serve. We are in the process of designing an online, open-source, interactive tool that utilities and communities can use to better assess water systems performance through an equity lens. The tool will equip utilities to better identify and serve vulnerable households.

Our online tool will:

• Highlight where, at an intra-urban scale, there are water affordability challenges;
• Provide a user-friendly and open-source analytical tool that water utilities—from large water departments to small-staffed utilities—can use to gauge their performance through an intra-urban equity lens;
• Provide snapshots of water utility performance at the neighborhood scale (that are not currently available) for interested community-based stakeholders;
• Trigger collaborative problem-solving among diverse stakeholders through their efforts to help us design our online platform; and
• Provide evidence that community advocacy groups and utilities can use in discussions with local policymakers about allocating new federal infrastructure improvement funds.

Different stakeholder groups have sometimes battled each other politically over responsibility for covering rising costs of basic infrastructure-based services. We will host a two-day virtual workshop in spring 2022 that brings together key stakeholders to reach agreement on steps to be taken by whom to end the growing water affordability crisis in America. We will share our water affordability research, use collaborative problem solving, and produce video documentation. Our objective is to raise awareness, support utilities and the community organizing efforts of others, and ensure that environmental justice concerns are highlighted in cities determining how to spend infrastructure improvement funds.

Conclusion

While infrastructure systems are typically evaluated solely in terms of efficiency of operations, we are trying to make it easy to give equity considerations equal attention. Our toolset will provide an opportunity for performance to be understood in terms of how well the basic water needs of different neighborhoods and communities are met. So far, the most significant challenges we have encountered are obstacles to data collection, including:

• an inability to access private utility data;
• limited staff and data organization at utilities, which often translates into slow data turnarounds from public utilities; and
• challenges geocoding anonymized data from public utilities for spatial analyses.

We hope our efforts to spatially analyze utility and other neighborhood-level data in visually compelling formats will provide clarity on the parameters of the water affordability challenges facing vulnerable households in urban communities and the utilities that serve them.