In many cities, shrinking populations and aging infrastructure mean increasingly unaffordable water

Water bills in the U.S. are eating up a growing share of household budgets — and becoming increasingly unaffordable for low-income families. In many areas of North Carolina, for example, a person earning minimum wage would need to work 4 to 5 days each month — 50 days per year — to cover a water bill for a household of six people, according to a recent analysis.

“The rate of water bill increase is faster than almost anything in the economy, including tuition from private universities,” said Martin Doyle, chair of the Water Resources Management Program at Duke University. Doyle discussed the rising cost of water and the reasons why during the recent Gilbert F. White Lecture in the Geographical Sciences.

After he received tenure, Doyle recalled, he had planned to spend his career on a group of water issues that he expected would dominate the science and policy landscape — adaptation to climate change, large-scale restoration of water ecosystems, and modernizing data on water.

“And then Flint happened.” The multi-year crisis in Flint, Michigan — which exposed the city’s residents to high levels of lead in water — was a disaster in itself, but it also pointed to problems that the U.S. as a whole will be grappling with in decades to come, Doyle explained.

“The Flint water crisis symbolized something bigger,” he said. “This pivoted the way I was thinking, and it made me more aware of some of the growing problems … that are present in the United States’ water system.”

Flint was an example of a “utility disaster,” which are becoming more common and frequent, Doyle said. Even when disasters don’t happen, many U.S. cities are facing a dilemma: Their aging water systems are producing water that’s declining in quality, but the expense of repairing those systems can make the water unaffordable to people who need it.

Shrinking Populations, Aging Water Systems

The U.S. population is reorganizing itself, said Doyle, with some cities becoming bigger and richer, while other communities — many of which are in the upper Midwest, the Great Plains, the Mississippi Delta — face dwindling populations and fewer resources.  “We’re getting these two Americas … a growing, enriching America, and we’re getting a shrinking and increasingly poor America as well.”  

The smaller, poorer cities are facing growing problems with their water systems. A city whose population peaked in 1970s, for example, may have developed most of its water utility infrastructure in the 1970s and 1980s. After 30 years without improvements, that infrastructure may not perform as well as it once did — leading to Safe Drinking Water Act violations or to Clean Water Act violations from sewer overflows, Doyle explained.

In the wake of these violations, cities may be required by regulations or lawsuits to update their water infrastructure. To make these upgrades, they need to borrow money on the municipal bond market.  But because investors no longer have as much confidence in these cities’ ability to pay off their debt, they ask for higher interest rates — meaning that it costs poorer cities more to fix their infrastructure. 

These higher costs must be borne by fewer residents, given shrinking populations — resulting in each resident paying more for their water.

“Utilities serving stagnant or shrinking population regions are in an impossible situation, under which the current national water policy approach no longer works,” said Doyle.

Increasingly Burdensome Water Bills

What does this actually mean for families and households? Doyle and a colleague mapped poverty and water prices in the state of North Carolina to see where people are struggling with high water bills.  They found that in some communities, a low-income household — one at the 20th percentile of income in an area — must spend 15 percent or more of its monthly income on the household water bill. In one community, it was about 25 percent.

The researchers then used a different metric: How many hours would a person making minimum wage need to work in order to pay the monthly household water bill? For the median utility in North Carolina, someone making minimum wage would have to work 11 hours each month to pay a 4,000-gallon water bill for 2.5 people. For a household of six people using 10,000 gallons per month, a person would have to work 4 to 5 days each month.

Given this trend, it’s time to consider whether the federal government — whose spending on water utilities has been declining since 1980 — should take steps to help keep water affordable, he said.  

One option would be for the federal government to provide help to utilities directly through the State Revolving Funds, Doyle said. Or subsidies could be provided directly to consumers, similar to how the federal SNAP program helps people pay for food, or the federal LIHEAP helps people pay their heating and cooling bills.

“We provide subsidies for energy, and we provide it for nutrition, but we don’t provide subsidies for household water affordability,” said Doyle. “We need to start thinking about whether or not we want the federal government to step into this realm.”

A Growing Number of ‘Utility Disasters’ 

In the past, water scientists and planners focused on natural disasters such as floods, but the future may be marked by the presence of “utility disasters,” said Doyle. “These are growing, and they’re growing in frequency as well as in economic impact.”

Flint was a massive utility disaster, and the most well-known, but there have been many others, he said. Multiple cities have faced crises involving lead in their water, and harmful algal blooms have shut down utilities from Florida to Oregon to Ohio. And an increasing number of utilities have been affected by contamination from “forever chemicals” such as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances).

As with the problem of water affordability, utility disasters raise the question of whether the federal government should play a larger role, Doyle said. In Flint, for example, Congress spent over $100 million to address the city’s water crisis, and some utility emergencies are being declared under the Stafford Act, which provides federal disaster assistance to state and local governments.

“Any new national water policy needs to address local water infrastructure and local spending on water infrastructure and the challenges associated with those,” said Doyle.

Watch the lecture, which was hosted by the National Academies’ Geographical Sciences Committee.