Forester Network | By: Laura Sanchez | GPE – August 01, 2017:
As utilities across America struggle to afford the repair of aging water infrastructure and climate change impacts water scarcity, the nation’s poor are simultaneously challenged to pay rising water bills. And this ever-expanding economic gap promises to present grave problems within the next decade.
Originally published July 26, 2017: Water rates across the nation are increasing. The price of water increased an average of four percent in 30 large US cities from 2010 to 2017, Circle of Blue recently reported. But in Los Angeles, during the same seven-year period, rates rose by 71%; in San Francisco, they rose about 120%. For families under the poverty line, that can mean spending a large portion of their annual income on water.
Today there is no federal water bill assistance program in place. And according to the US Census Bureau, 14.8% of the US population lived in poverty in 2014.
A 2016 EPA review of 795 US utilities found that seven out of 10 did not have a rate assistance program in place for customers.
“We have lifeline rates for electricity, weatherization, even telephones, but we do not have a statewide program that ensures that people have affordable water,” J.R. DeShazo of UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs pointed out to LA Times contributor Michael Hiltzic.
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