When they need to go to a bathroom, more than 1 million people in the US have to turn to chamber pots, school showers, and public restrooms. Nearly a half-million households don’t have basic indoor plumbing, new research has found.
Even though some rural and indigenous communities have never had indoor plumbing, you may be surprised to learn that the vast majority of Americans experiencing “plumbing poverty” live in urban areas – with one in three households found in 15 cities across the country, according to research by the Plumbing Poverty Project (PPP).
The Plumbing Poverty Project is a collaborative effort by King’s College London and the University of Arizona. The work is based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s community surveys. The full analysis was published Monday in collaboration with the Guardian as part of a long-running series exposing America’s water crisis.
The researchers found that renters and people of color, even in some of the country’s wealthiest cities, are more likely to be in a home without running water or toilets that flush. The situation is especially dire in San Francisco, California, and Portland, Oregon.
Both these cities are considered to be progressive west coast tech hubs with a growing wealth gap and homelessness crisis. And San Francisco has more billionaires than any global city other than New York and Hong Kong, according to Wealth-X.
San Francisco has almost 15,000 families in homes without adequate plumbing. That number has risen by 12 percent since 2000, while the median price of a house has tripled. The data also showed that while Black Americans make up 9 percent of the city’s population, they account for 17 percent of the households without indoor plumbing.
Here’s an example – In San Francisco, Rosa Ramirez and her two daughters lived until recently in a $2,300 a month studio apartment. Yellow water came out of the faucet at the sink, and the toilet couldn’t be used because it wasn’t properly connected; her landlord wouldn’t fix it.
The family went to a nearby donut shop or cafe to use the restroom. When the pandemic began, the doors were closed to them. “It was unbearable,” Ramiréz said.
“The story of plumbing poverty in San Francisco is inextricably tied to unaffordable housing, declining incomes, post-recession transformations in the California rental sector, and racialized wealth gaps, fueled by a kind of ‘anti-Black urbanism’ that has either driven Black San Franciscans into more precarious housing conditions or out of the Bay entirely,” said Katie Meehan, lead researcher of the PPP and professor of environment and society at King’s College London, according to The Hill.
San Francisco renters make up less than half of households in the city’s metro area but account for nearly 90 percent of homes lacking functional plumbing, The Guardian reported.
The report also notes that cities including Milwaukee, San Antonio, Phoenix, Seattle, and Cleveland have made little or no progress in improving plumbing issues between 2000 and 2017. All five of these cities have more than 3,000 households without proper plumbing.
