New research shows that nearly half a million households in the United States, mostly and perhaps surprisingly urban, lack proper plumbing, according to The Guardian.

The data, compiled from U.S. Census Bureau statistics by the Plumbing Poverty Project (PPP), a collaboration between the University of Arizona and King's College London, and released Monday, found that renters and people of color even in some parts of the country In the wealthiest cities, people are more likely to live in a home without running water or flush toilets.

According to The Guardian, the problem was particularly severe in San Francisco, where nearly 15,000 families live without a functioning plumbing system. San Francisco also has the third-most billionaires of any city in the world, the outlet noted.

Data also showed that in 2017, black people made up 9 percent of San Francisco's population, but 17 percent of homes without indoor plumbing, The Guardian reported.

“San Francisco's history of plumbing poverty is inextricably linked to unaffordable housing, declining incomes, changes in California's post-recession rental sector, and racial wealth gaps fueled by a type of 'anti-black urbanism' that has either driven black .” “San Franciscans are being relocated to more precarious housing or leaving the Bay entirely,” Katie Meehan, lead researcher on the PPP and professor of environment and society at King's College London, told The Guardian.

San Francisco renters make up less than half of households in the city's metropolitan area, but nearly 90 percent of homes without working plumbing, The Guardian reported.

The research also showed that cities like Milwaukee, San Antonio, Phoenix, Seattle and Cleveland made little to no progress in improving their sanitation problems between 2000 and 2017. According to The Guardian, there are more than 3,000 households in all five cities without proper plumbing.

“It's not just that the gap between water-rich and water-poor in America is widening, but also because it's being driven by a housing sector that lacks any safety net for working families, particularly households of color, that are stretching astronomically “We can’t afford the prices of San Francisco, Seattle or now even Portland,” Meehan said.

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Yan Yu Lin and her seven-year-old daughter live in a tight studio in San Francisco’s Chinatown, in a century-old building where 60 or so residents on each floor share a bathroom.

Along the back wall of the room is a plastic potty – the kind designed for toilet training toddlers. The shared bathrooms are out of order so often, so rank and unhygienic, that Lin has her daughter use the plastic potty instead. “It’s safer,” she said.

This Dickensian-sounding living situation is more common in the US than most would think.

An SRO residence in San Francisco’s Chinatown on 2 August 2021. Photograph: Max Whittaker/The Guardian

Almost half a million American households lack basic indoor plumbing, with renters and people of color in some of the country’s wealthiest and fastest growing cities most likely to be living without running water or flushing toilets, new research reveals.

While some rural and indigenous communities have never had indoor plumbing, the vast majority of unplumbed Americans are in fact found in urban areas, with one in three affected households living in just 15 cities, according to research by the Plumbing Poverty Project (PPP), a collaboration between King’s College London (KCL) and the University of Arizona.

Two side-by-side slope graphs, one showing cities where piped water access is worsening, the other improving. In the worsening graph, San Francisco, Portland, Phoenix and Seattle are labelled. In the improving graph, New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Cleveland are labelled.

The full analysis, based on data from annual community surveys by the US Census Bureau, is published today in collaboration with the Guardian as part of our long-running series exposing America’s water crisis.

It reveals how so-called plumbing poverty has gotten markedly worse in San Francisco and Portland – two booming ostensibly progressive west coast tech hubs with a growing wealth gap and homelessness crisis.

In San Francisco, which according to Wealth-X has more billionaires than any global city other than New York and Hong Kong, almost 15,000 families live in homes without proper plumbing. Median house prices have tripled since 2000 while the number of families in substandard housing with incomplete plumbing increased by 12%.

3 three groupings of bar charts comparing values between 2000 and 2017. Each grouping is looking at the percentage of residents who lack piped water access in that category. The categories are as follows: all households, renter occupied households, and Black/African American individuals. Each category has shown increases between 2000 and 2017.

Plumbing poverty, like all hardships in the US, is racialized: as of 2017, Black people made up 9% of San Francisco’s population but accounted for 17% of households without indoor plumbing.

“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 KCL.

The problem is nationwide.

Even though plumbing poverty appears to have declined in several major cities including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago over the past two decades, tens of thousands of residents continue to rely on public restrooms, school showers and chamber pots.

Public restrooms in New York City. Photograph: The Photo Works/Alamy

In 2017, after a period of sustained economic growth following the Great Recession, at least 28,000 households in New York and 19,000 in LA still lacked basic indoor plumbing. And the progress made could actually be inflated due to the Census Bureau eliminating one of the three survey plumbing questions in 2015.

Meanwhile other cities including Milwaukee, San Antonio, Phoenix, Nashville, Seattle and Cleveland made little or no progress in tackling plumbing poverty between 2000 and 2017. The stagnation reflects a combination of factors including the legacy of historic racist housing policies, decades of underinvestment in water and sanitation infrastructure, and widening income inequalities since the Great Recession.

Table showing “Estimated households without piped water” and “Pct of population” for the top 50 metro areas in the US.

In Phoenix, one of the fastest growing sunbelt cities in the south-west, renters are earning less and paying more to live in homes without running water compared to two decades ago. In 2017, unplumbed renters on average spent 43% of their monthly income on rent compared to 25% in 2000.

Overall, progress to eradicate plumbing poverty remains slow: in 2017, there were still enough Americans living without piped water to fill the nation’s seventh-largest city.

“It’s not only that the gap between the water-rich and the water-poor is widening in America, it’s also that it’s driven by a housing sector that lacks any safety net for working families, especially households of color, that cannot afford the astronomical prices of San Francisco, Seattle, or now even Portland,” added Meehan.

The PPP white paper, which focuses on the 15 worst cities, is intended as blueprint for lawmakers to tackle gaps in research and infrastructure funding to end plumbing poverty – which is essential if every American household is to one day have access to affordable water and sanitation.

Clean, safe, affordable water and sanitation are essential for human health, economic prosperity and environmental justice. Yet when Covid struck and public health experts recommended regular hand washing to curtail the spread, an estimated quarter of the world’s population, 2 billion people, lacked clean running water, while almost half did not have access to proper sanitation, according to UN figures.

While the vast majority live in developing countries, at least 1.1 million people in the US, ostensibly the richest country in the world, also suffer the indignity of living in homes without running water, an indoor shower or bath, or flush toilet – because of incomplete plumbing. An additional 16 million people or so lose access every year when disconnected due to unaffordable, unpaid water bills.

‘There was nowhere for me to go’

Before the pandemic, when schools were open for in person classes, Lin’s daughter knew to use the toilets before coming home. After schools, businesses and even park amenities closed down, and families without plumbing like Lin’s were increasingly forced to rely on bottled water, wipes, potties and commodes.

Lin recalled one occasion last year when she fell ill with an upset stomach and the bathroom on her floor was out of order. She rushed down one floor, but the bathroom was occupied, as was the one on the next floor. “You can imagine how embarrassing that was,” she said. “I was ashamed. And I couldn’t even clean myself up afterwards – there was nowhere for me to go.”

Her landlord usually patches up the problem within a day or two, by pumping out the drains or tightening leaky faucets, but the ancient plumbing keeps giving out, week after week.

The situation is difficult for her to talk about. When she moved to San Francisco from China, Lin never imagined living like this. “When I speak to my dad back home, I try not to give him too many details about my life here,” she said. “I don’t want to make him upset.”

Yan Yu Lin poses for a portrait in San Francisco’s Chinatown on 2 August 2021. Lin lives in a SRO apartment and struggles with substandard plumbing. Photograph: Max Whittaker/The Guardian

She is not alone. Renters make up fewer than half of households in the San Francisco metro area, but account for almost 90% of its plumbing poverty.

Yet often, those without plumbing spend more on rent than those with running water and flush toilets. In 2017 the average unplumbed renter in San Francisco spent 44% of their monthly income to live in a home without piped running water, while the typical city resident spent 32% on a home with full plumbing.

In other words, renters with incomplete plumbing are a growing subclass in one of the richest and so-called progressive US cities, according to the PPP analysis.

Horizontal bar charts comparing all households with households without piped water. The categories examined include: people of color, renters, mobile home residents, and their median household income. Households without piped water are more likely to be renters, people of color, or mobile home residents. Households without piped access have a median income that is almost $30,0000 less than all households: $33,152.

The new data reinforces earlier findings, including a 2019 report by the non-profit Pacific Institute that estimated 140,000 people in California had incomplete plumbing. The true number is undoubtedly much higher, as excluded from the count were the growing number of Bay Area residents living in mobile homes without water hookups and families who informally rent garage units or sheds.

“Lots of people were using chamber pots,” said Laura Feinstein, who co-authored the report.

In cities like San Francisco and New York, the problem is particularly marked in single room occupancy buildings – housing units with shared bathrooms like Lin’s, which are concentrated in neighborhoods mostly populated by poor and working class families of color.

Nationwide, plumbing poverty is usually clustered in small pockets, reflecting historical racist housing and infrastructure policies which have long discriminated against communities of color and tribes.

“It’s a confluence of forces and the underlying causes will depend on where you live, but the social safety net – including infrastructure spending – being hollowed out over the last 40 to 50 years, has impacted people everywhere. The role of race and structural racism is enormous,” said Stephen Gasteyer, associate professor of sociology at Michigan State University who researches water access.

Overall, federal funding for water and wastewater infrastructure has declined steadily since its peak in 1977, making it harder for underserved communities to get financial support to build and maintain systems.

As investment stagnated, new problems converged with old ones. In addition to installing indoor plumbing in homes across the country, millions of lead lines still need to be replaced, meanwhile new contaminants like PFAS and microplastics have emerged as significant health hazards.

“It’s solvable, but we’ve spent decades creating this crisis so getting out of it will take some time, money and creativity to rethink how we do infrastructure so that we can deal with emerging contaminants and deliver affordable water to everyone,” said Gasteyer.

The Bipartisan Plan that passed the Senate included $48.4bn – less than half what Biden proposed – for water programs over five years, including $15bn for lead and $15bn for PFAS, as well as $3.5bn for sanitation projects on indigenous lands.

It’s simply not enough, and means millions of Americans will continue to live without clean, safe affordable water for years to come.

Until recently Rosa Ramiréz and her two daughters lived in a studio apartment without a working bathroom in San Francisco’s Mission District, a historically working class Latino neighborhood that has rapidly gentrified, sending rents sky high. The sink spewed yellow colored water, and the toilet wasn’t properly connected to the building’s plumbing system. Ramiréz’s rent was $2,300 a month.

San Francisco’s Mission district. Photograph: Charles O Cecil/Alamy

For two years, whenever she and her daughters needed to use the toilet or wash up, they relied on restrooms at the local donut shop, cafe or taqueria.

When the pandemic hit, the situation became untenable. With schools shut down, her daughters aged eight and 15 could no longer use the facilities on campus. “It was unbearable,” said Ramiréz, 49, who works as a cleaner. “The hardest part was when one of us had a stomach ache and none of the restaurants wanted to lend me their restroom.”

The landlord refused to fix the bathroom, and it took months for Ramirez to find another studio as rents have become so unaffordable in the neighborhood. “It has been increasingly difficult to live here,” said Ramiréz. “The conditions now are inhumane.”

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This article was amended on 28 September 2021 to attribute Wealth-X as the source of research into global billionaire cities, and to remove a photograph of the Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago, which was largely demolished by 2011.

The post Virtually half one million US households lack indoor plumbing: ‘The situations are inhumane’ | US information appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

In 2019, more than 20,000 Native American community members in Nevada lacked complete indoor plumbing, a condition known as “plumbing poverty.” That’s according to a new study by researchers at the Desert Research Institute and the Guinn Center for Policy Priorities.

The two Nevada-based organizations analyzed data from 1990 to 2019. Over that span, an average of 0.67% of Native American households in Nevada were without either piped water, a shower or a flush toilet. The national average over those 30 years was 0.4%.

Erick Bandala, assistant research professor of environmental science at DRI and lead author of the study, says water security is an issue of many tribal communities face across the Mountain West.

“There has been a historical lack of investment in Native American communities related with investment on infrastructure,” he said.

Bandala says other factors adding to the problem are population growth, climate change and water rights.

The study also showed a significant increase in the number of Safe Drinking Water Act violations in water facilities serving Nevada’s tribal communities from 2005 to 2020.

This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, the O’Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West in Montana, KUNC in Colorado, KUNM in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Copyright 2022 KUNR Public Radio. To see more, visit KUNR Public Radio.

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Yan Yu Lin and her seven-year-old daughter live in a tight studio in San Francisco’s Chinatown, in a century-old building where 60 or so residents on each floor share a bathroom.

Along the back wall of the room is a plastic potty – the kind designed for toilet training toddlers. The shared bathrooms are out of order so often, so rank and unhygienic, that Lin has her daughter use the plastic potty instead. “It’s safer,” she said.

This Dickensian-sounding living situation is more common in the US than most would think.

An SRO residence in San Francisco’s Chinatown on 2 August 2021. Photograph: Max Whittaker/The Guardian

Almost half a million American households lack basic indoor plumbing, with renters and people of color in some of the country’s wealthiest and fastest growing cities most likely to be living without running water or flushing toilets, new research reveals.

While some rural and indigenous communities have never had indoor plumbing, the vast majority of unplumbed Americans are in fact found in urban areas, with one in three affected households living in just 15 cities, according to research by the Plumbing Poverty Project (PPP), a collaboration between King’s College London (KCL) and the University of Arizona.

Two side-by-side slope graphs, one showing cities where piped water access is worsening, the other improving. In the worsening graph, San Francisco, Portland, Phoenix and Seattle are labelled. In the improving graph, New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Cleveland are labelled.

The full analysis, based on data from annual community surveys by the US Census Bureau, is published today in collaboration with the Guardian as part of our long-running series exposing America’s water crisis.

It reveals how so-called plumbing poverty has gotten markedly worse in San Francisco and Portland – two booming ostensibly progressive west coast tech hubs with a growing wealth gap and homelessness crisis.

In San Francisco, which according to Wealth-X has more billionaires than any global city other than New York and Hong Kong, almost 15,000 families live in homes without proper plumbing. Median house prices have tripled since 2000 while the number of families in substandard housing with incomplete plumbing increased by 12%.

3 three groupings of bar charts comparing values between 2000 and 2017. Each grouping is looking at the percentage of residents who lack piped water access in that category. The categories are as follows: all households, renter occupied households, and Black/African American individuals. Each category has shown increases between 2000 and 2017.

Plumbing poverty, like all hardships in the US, is racialized: as of 2017, Black people made up 9% of San Francisco’s population but accounted for 17% of households without indoor plumbing.

“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 KCL.

The problem is nationwide.

Even though plumbing poverty appears to have declined in several major cities including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago over the past two decades, tens of thousands of residents continue to rely on public restrooms, school showers and chamber pots.

Public restrooms in New York City. Photograph: The Photo Works/Alamy

In 2017, after a period of sustained economic growth following the Great Recession, at least 28,000 households in New York and 19,000 in LA still lacked basic indoor plumbing. And the progress made could actually be inflated due to the Census Bureau eliminating one of the three survey plumbing questions in 2015.

Meanwhile other cities including Milwaukee, San Antonio, Phoenix, Nashville, Seattle and Cleveland made little or no progress in tackling plumbing poverty between 2000 and 2017. The stagnation reflects a combination of factors including the legacy of historic racist housing policies, decades of underinvestment in water and sanitation infrastructure, and widening income inequalities since the Great Recession.

Table showing “Estimated households without piped water” and “Pct of population” for the top 50 metro areas in the US.

In Phoenix, one of the fastest growing sunbelt cities in the south-west, renters are earning less and paying more to live in homes without running water compared to two decades ago. In 2017, unplumbed renters on average spent 43% of their monthly income on rent compared to 25% in 2000.

Overall, progress to eradicate plumbing poverty remains slow: in 2017, there were still enough Americans living without piped water to fill the nation’s seventh-largest city.

“It’s not only that the gap between the water-rich and the water-poor is widening in America, it’s also that it’s driven by a housing sector that lacks any safety net for working families, especially households of color, that cannot afford the astronomical prices of San Francisco, Seattle, or now even Portland,” added Meehan.

The PPP white paper, which focuses on the 15 worst cities, is intended as blueprint for lawmakers to tackle gaps in research and infrastructure funding to end plumbing poverty – which is essential if every American household is to one day have access to affordable water and sanitation.

Clean, safe, affordable water and sanitation are essential for human health, economic prosperity and environmental justice. Yet when Covid struck and public health experts recommended regular hand washing to curtail the spread, an estimated quarter of the world’s population, 2 billion people, lacked clean running water, while almost half did not have access to proper sanitation, according to UN figures.

While the vast majority live in developing countries, at least 1.1 million people in the US, ostensibly the richest country in the world, also suffer the indignity of living in homes without running water, an indoor shower or bath, or flush toilet – because of incomplete plumbing. An additional 16 million people or so lose access every year when disconnected due to unaffordable, unpaid water bills.

‘There was nowhere for me to go’

Before the pandemic, when schools were open for in person classes, Lin’s daughter knew to use the toilets before coming home. After schools, businesses and even park amenities closed down, and families without plumbing like Lin’s were increasingly forced to rely on bottled water, wipes, potties and commodes.

Lin recalled one occasion last year when she fell ill with an upset stomach and the bathroom on her floor was out of order. She rushed down one floor, but the bathroom was occupied, as was the one on the next floor. “You can imagine how embarrassing that was,” she said. “I was ashamed. And I couldn’t even clean myself up afterwards – there was nowhere for me to go.”

Her landlord usually patches up the problem within a day or two, by pumping out the drains or tightening leaky faucets, but the ancient plumbing keeps giving out, week after week.

The situation is difficult for her to talk about. When she moved to San Francisco from China, Lin never imagined living like this. “When I speak to my dad back home, I try not to give him too many details about my life here,” she said. “I don’t want to make him upset.”

Yan Yu Lin poses for a portrait in San Francisco’s Chinatown on 2 August 2021. Lin lives in a SRO apartment and struggles with substandard plumbing. Photograph: Max Whittaker/The Guardian

She is not alone. Renters make up fewer than half of households in the San Francisco metro area, but account for almost 90% of its plumbing poverty.

Yet often, those without plumbing spend more on rent than those with running water and flush toilets. In 2017 the average unplumbed renter in San Francisco spent 44% of their monthly income to live in a home without piped running water, while the typical city resident spent 32% on a home with full plumbing.

In other words, renters with incomplete plumbing are a growing subclass in one of the richest and so-called progressive US cities, according to the PPP analysis.

Horizontal bar charts comparing all households with households without piped water. The categories examined include: people of color, renters, mobile home residents, and their median household income. Households without piped water are more likely to be renters, people of color, or mobile home residents. Households without piped access have a median income that is almost $30,0000 less than all households: $33,152.

The new data reinforces earlier findings, including a 2019 report by the non-profit Pacific Institute that estimated 140,000 people in California had incomplete plumbing. The true number is undoubtedly much higher, as excluded from the count were the growing number of Bay Area residents living in mobile homes without water hookups and families who informally rent garage units or sheds.

“Lots of people were using chamber pots,” said Laura Feinstein, who co-authored the report.

In cities like San Francisco and New York, the problem is particularly marked in single room occupancy buildings – housing units with shared bathrooms like Lin’s, which are concentrated in neighborhoods mostly populated by poor and working class families of color.

Nationwide, plumbing poverty is usually clustered in small pockets, reflecting historical racist housing and infrastructure policies which have long discriminated against communities of color and tribes.

“It’s a confluence of forces and the underlying causes will depend on where you live, but the social safety net – including infrastructure spending – being hollowed out over the last 40 to 50 years, has impacted people everywhere. The role of race and structural racism is enormous,” said Stephen Gasteyer, associate professor of sociology at Michigan State University who researches water access.

Overall, federal funding for water and wastewater infrastructure has declined steadily since its peak in 1977, making it harder for underserved communities to get financial support to build and maintain systems.

As investment stagnated, new problems converged with old ones. In addition to installing indoor plumbing in homes across the country, millions of lead lines still need to be replaced, meanwhile new contaminants like PFAS and microplastics have emerged as significant health hazards.

“It’s solvable, but we’ve spent decades creating this crisis so getting out of it will take some time, money and creativity to rethink how we do infrastructure so that we can deal with emerging contaminants and deliver affordable water to everyone,” said Gasteyer.

The Bipartisan Plan that passed the Senate included $48.4bn – less than half what Biden proposed – for water programs over five years, including $15bn for lead and $15bn for PFAS, as well as $3.5bn for sanitation projects on indigenous lands.

It’s simply not enough, and means millions of Americans will continue to live without clean, safe affordable water for years to come.

Until recently Rosa Ramiréz and her two daughters lived in a studio apartment without a working bathroom in San Francisco’s Mission District, a historically working class Latino neighborhood that has rapidly gentrified, sending rents sky high. The sink spewed yellow colored water, and the toilet wasn’t properly connected to the building’s plumbing system. Ramiréz’s rent was $2,300 a month.

San Francisco’s Mission district. Photograph: Charles O Cecil/Alamy

For two years, whenever she and her daughters needed to use the toilet or wash up, they relied on restrooms at the local donut shop, cafe or taqueria.

When the pandemic hit, the situation became untenable. With schools shut down, her daughters aged eight and 15 could no longer use the facilities on campus. “It was unbearable,” said Ramiréz, 49, who works as a cleaner. “The hardest part was when one of us had a stomach ache and none of the restaurants wanted to lend me their restroom.”

The landlord refused to fix the bathroom, and it took months for Ramirez to find another studio as rents have become so unaffordable in the neighborhood. “It has been increasingly difficult to live here,” said Ramiréz. “The conditions now are inhumane.”

Allow Scribd content?

This article includes content provided by Scribd. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click ‘Allow and continue’.

This article was amended on 28 September 2021 to attribute Wealth-X as the source of research into global billionaire cities, and to remove a photograph of the Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago, which was largely demolished by 2011.

The post Virtually half 1,000,000 US households lack indoor plumbing: ‘The circumstances are inhumane’ | US information appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — With two kids attending school from home, Simonia Clifton saw her energy bill skyrocket during the pandemic.

Clifton said her bill was “Between $75 and $100 more than usual and that just kind of made it difficult to budget, especially having lost my job from COVID and being on unemployment at the same time.”

She began cutting back elsewhere in order to cover her family’s growing energy costs, including on running heat.

RELATED: PG&E customers could be hit with rate hike of more than $760 over 2 years

Clifton isn’t alone, according to the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey from last July through this August, which measures the pandemic’s social and economic impact.

The ABC7 News data team analyzed the survey’s findings for San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley and found that one-fifth of households reduced or forwent basic necessities, such as food or medicine, to pay an energy bill.

App users: For a better experience, click here to view the graph in a new window.

These struggles didn’t fall equally on all residents. Race and ethnicity, education level, income, and households with children all played a factor in higher percentages.

Forty-seven percent of those who identified as Hispanic or Latino reduced or forwent basic necessities, such as food or medicine, to pay an energy bill. Thirty-seven percent of individuals surveyed who identified as Black also forwent basic necessities to pay an energy bill. More than half of those who have less than a high school education faced the same circumstances, along with almost a third of households with children under 18.

App users: For a better experience, click here to view the graph in a new window.

Dennis Osmer, the executive director of the Central Coast and San Francisco Peninsula Energy Services, said the situation could become worse with the moratorium on power shutoffs ending.

“I think it adds numbers to those numbers, this is a lot worse in its effect,” he said.

Help exists. Arthur Higgins receives assistance from the low income home energy assistance program.

“The program made all of the difference in the world. It kept the power on. They made my house more energy efficient,” Higgins said.

Households with a member who lost employment income in the previous month were more than three times as likely to be unable to pay their energy bills as those without income loss.

App users: For a better experience, click here to view the graph in a new window.

Gabriela Sandoval, the director of Race & Equity Policy with The Utility Reform Network (TURN) said, “We went into the pandemic with customers owing in California about $500 million and we know that right now the big four utility company customers owe about $2 billion .”

The big four includes PG&E customers here in the Bay Area, making up approximately $900 million of that debt, according to Sandoval.

By email, a PG&E Spokesperson told ABC7 News customers who are having difficulty paying their bills can be put on a payment plan or possibly qualify for the CARE program which offers a monthly discount of 20% or more on gas and electricity. The Family Electric Rate Assistance Program offers a monthly discount of 18% on electricity only.

“It’s stunning to look at how these costs have increased and the impact on the people who can least afford it is really heartbreaking,” Osmer said.

If you’re on the ABC7 News app, click here to watch live

Copyright © 2022 KGO-TV. All rights reserved.

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New research finds that almost half a million households in the United States, largely and perhaps surprisingly urban ones, lack proper indoor plumbing, according to The Guardian.

The data, which was compiled from US Census Bureau statistics by the Plumbing Poverty Project (PPP), a collaboration of the University of Arizona and King’s College London, and published Monday, 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 issue was found to be especially dire in San Francisco, where nearly 15,000 families live without a working plumbing system, according to The Guardian. San Francisco also has the third-most billionaires of any city in the world, the outlet noted.

Data also showed that, as of 2017, Black people made up 9 percent of San Francisco’s population but 17 percent of homes without indoor plumbing, The Guardian reported.

“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,” Katie Meehan, lead researcher of the PPP and professor of environment and society at King’s College London, told The Guardian.

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 research also showed that cities including Milwaukee, San Antonio, Phoenix, Seattle and Cleveland made little to no progress improving their plumbing issues between 2000 and 2017. All five cities have more than 3,000 households without proper plumbing, according to The Guardian.

“It’s not only that the gap between the water-rich and the water-poor is widening in America, it’s also that it’s driven by a housing sector that lacks any safety net for working families, especially households of color, that cannot afford the astronomical prices of San Francisco, Seattle, or now even Portland,” Meehan said.

The post Report: Practically half one million US households, largely in cities, lack indoor plumbing appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Yan Yu Lin and her seven-year-old daughter live in a tight studio in San Francisco’s Chinatown, in a century-old building where 60 or so residents on each floor share a bathroom.

Along the back wall of the room is a plastic potty – the kind designed for toilet training toddlers. The shared bathrooms are out of order so often, so rank and unhygienic, that Lin has her daughter use the plastic potty instead. “It’s safer,” she said.

This Dickensian-sounding living situation is more common in the US than most would think.

An SRO residence in San Francisco’s Chinatown on 2 August 2021. Photograph: Max Whittaker/The Guardian

Almost half a million American households lack basic indoor plumbing, with renters and people of color in some of the country’s wealthiest and fastest growing cities most likely to be living without running water or flushing toilets, new research reveals.

While some rural and indigenous communities have never had indoor plumbing, the vast majority of unplumbed Americans are in fact found in urban areas, with one in three affected households living in just 15 cities, according to research by the Plumbing Poverty Project (PPP), a collaboration between King’s College London (KCL) and the University of Arizona.

Two side-by-side slope graphs, one showing cities where piped water access is worsening, the other improving. In the worsening graph, San Francisco, Portland, Phoenix and Seattle are labelled. In the improving graph, New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Cleveland are labelled.

The full analysis, based on data from annual community surveys by the US Census Bureau, is published today in collaboration with the Guardian as part of our long-running series exposing America’s water crisis.

It reveals how so-called plumbing poverty has gotten markedly worse in San Francisco and Portland – two booming ostensibly progressive west coast tech hubs with a growing wealth gap and homelessness crisis.

In San Francisco, which according to Wealth-X has more billionaires than any global city other than New York and Hong Kong, almost 15,000 families live in homes without proper plumbing. Median house prices have tripled since 2000 while the number of families in substandard housing with incomplete plumbing increased by 12%.

3 three groupings of bar charts comparing values between 2000 and 2017. Each grouping is looking at the percentage of residents who lack piped water access in that category. The categories are as follows: all households, renter occupied households, and Black/African American individuals. Each category has shown increases between 2000 and 2017.

Plumbing poverty, like all hardships in the US, is racialized: as of 2017, Black people made up 9% of San Francisco’s population but accounted for 17% of households without indoor plumbing.

“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 KCL.

The problem is nationwide.

Even though plumbing poverty appears to have declined in several major cities including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago over the past two decades, tens of thousands of residents continue to rely on public restrooms, school showers and chamber pots.

Public restrooms in New York City. Photograph: The Photo Works/Alamy

In 2017, after a period of sustained economic growth following the Great Recession, at least 28,000 households in New York and 19,000 in LA still lacked basic indoor plumbing. And the progress made could actually be inflated due to the Census Bureau eliminating one of the three survey plumbing questions in 2015.

Meanwhile other cities including Milwaukee, San Antonio, Phoenix, Nashville, Seattle and Cleveland made little or no progress in tackling plumbing poverty between 2000 and 2017. The stagnation reflects a combination of factors including the legacy of historic racist housing policies, decades of underinvestment in water and sanitation infrastructure, and widening income inequalities since the Great Recession.

Table showing “Estimated households without piped water” and “Pct of population” for the top 50 metro areas in the US.

In Phoenix, one of the fastest growing sunbelt cities in the south-west, renters are earning less and paying more to live in homes without running water compared to two decades ago. In 2017, unplumbed renters on average spent 43% of their monthly income on rent compared to 25% in 2000.

Overall, progress to eradicate plumbing poverty remains slow: in 2017, there were still enough Americans living without piped water to fill the nation’s seventh-largest city.

“It’s not only that the gap between the water-rich and the water-poor is widening in America, it’s also that it’s driven by a housing sector that lacks any safety net for working families, especially households of color, that cannot afford the astronomical prices of San Francisco, Seattle, or now even Portland,” added Meehan.

The PPP white paper, which focuses on the 15 worst cities, is intended as blueprint for lawmakers to tackle gaps in research and infrastructure funding to end plumbing poverty – which is essential if every American household is to one day have access to affordable water and sanitation.

Clean, safe, affordable water and sanitation are essential for human health, economic prosperity and environmental justice. Yet when Covid struck and public health experts recommended regular hand washing to curtail the spread, an estimated quarter of the world’s population, 2 billion people, lacked clean running water, while almost half did not have access to proper sanitation, according to UN figures.

While the vast majority live in developing countries, at least 1.1 million people in the US, ostensibly the richest country in the world, also suffer the indignity of living in homes without running water, an indoor shower or bath, or flush toilet – because of incomplete plumbing. An additional 16 million people or so lose access every year when disconnected due to unaffordable, unpaid water bills.

‘There was nowhere for me to go’

Before the pandemic, when schools were open for in person classes, Lin’s daughter knew to use the toilets before coming home. After schools, businesses and even park amenities closed down, and families without plumbing like Lin’s were increasingly forced to rely on bottled water, wipes, potties and commodes.

Lin recalled one occasion last year when she fell ill with an upset stomach and the bathroom on her floor was out of order. She rushed down one floor, but the bathroom was occupied, as was the one on the next floor. “You can imagine how embarrassing that was,” she said. “I was ashamed. And I couldn’t even clean myself up afterwards – there was nowhere for me to go.”

Her landlord usually patches up the problem within a day or two, by pumping out the drains or tightening leaky faucets, but the ancient plumbing keeps giving out, week after week.

The situation is difficult for her to talk about. When she moved to San Francisco from China, Lin never imagined living like this. “When I speak to my dad back home, I try not to give him too many details about my life here,” she said. “I don’t want to make him upset.”

Yan Yu Lin poses for a portrait in San Francisco’s Chinatown on 2 August 2021. Lin lives in a SRO apartment and struggles with substandard plumbing. Photograph: Max Whittaker/The Guardian

She is not alone. Renters make up fewer than half of households in the San Francisco metro area, but account for almost 90% of its plumbing poverty.

Yet often, those without plumbing spend more on rent than those with running water and flush toilets. In 2017 the average unplumbed renter in San Francisco spent 44% of their monthly income to live in a home without piped running water, while the typical city resident spent 32% on a home with full plumbing.

In other words, renters with incomplete plumbing are a growing subclass in one of the richest and so-called progressive US cities, according to the PPP analysis.

Horizontal bar charts comparing all households with households without piped water. The categories examined include: people of color, renters, mobile home residents, and their median household income. Households without piped water are more likely to be renters, people of color, or mobile home residents. Households without piped access have a median income that is almost $30,0000 less than all households: $33,152.

The new data reinforces earlier findings, including a 2019 report by the non-profit Pacific Institute that estimated 140,000 people in California had incomplete plumbing. The true number is undoubtedly much higher, as excluded from the count were the growing number of Bay Area residents living in mobile homes without water hookups and families who informally rent garage units or sheds.

“Lots of people were using chamber pots,” said Laura Feinstein, who co-authored the report.

In cities like San Francisco and New York, the problem is particularly marked in single room occupancy buildings – housing units with shared bathrooms like Lin’s, which are concentrated in neighborhoods mostly populated by poor and working class families of color.

Nationwide, plumbing poverty is usually clustered in small pockets, reflecting historical racist housing and infrastructure policies which have long discriminated against communities of color and tribes.

“It’s a confluence of forces and the underlying causes will depend on where you live, but the social safety net – including infrastructure spending – being hollowed out over the last 40 to 50 years, has impacted people everywhere. The role of race and structural racism is enormous,” said Stephen Gasteyer, associate professor of sociology at Michigan State University who researches water access.

Overall, federal funding for water and wastewater infrastructure has declined steadily since its peak in 1977, making it harder for underserved communities to get financial support to build and maintain systems.

As investment stagnated, new problems converged with old ones. In addition to installing indoor plumbing in homes across the country, millions of lead lines still need to be replaced, meanwhile new contaminants like PFAS and microplastics have emerged as significant health hazards.

“It’s solvable, but we’ve spent decades creating this crisis so getting out of it will take some time, money and creativity to rethink how we do infrastructure so that we can deal with emerging contaminants and deliver affordable water to everyone,” said Gasteyer.

The Bipartisan Plan that passed the Senate included $48.4bn – less than half what Biden proposed – for water programs over five years, including $15bn for lead and $15bn for PFAS, as well as $3.5bn for sanitation projects on indigenous lands.

It’s simply not enough, and means millions of Americans will continue to live without clean, safe affordable water for years to come.

Until recently Rosa Ramiréz and her two daughters lived in a studio apartment without a working bathroom in San Francisco’s Mission District, a historically working class Latino neighborhood that has rapidly gentrified, sending rents sky high. The sink spewed yellow colored water, and the toilet wasn’t properly connected to the building’s plumbing system. Ramiréz’s rent was $2,300 a month.

San Francisco’s Mission district. Photograph: Charles O Cecil/Alamy

For two years, whenever she and her daughters needed to use the toilet or wash up, they relied on restrooms at the local donut shop, cafe or taqueria.

When the pandemic hit, the situation became untenable. With schools shut down, her daughters aged eight and 15 could no longer use the facilities on campus. “It was unbearable,” said Ramiréz, 49, who works as a cleaner. “The hardest part was when one of us had a stomach ache and none of the restaurants wanted to lend me their restroom.”

The landlord refused to fix the bathroom, and it took months for Ramirez to find another studio as rents have become so unaffordable in the neighborhood. “It has been increasingly difficult to live here,” said Ramiréz. “The conditions now are inhumane.”

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This article was amended on 28 September 2021 to attribute Wealth-X as the source of research into global billionaire cities, and to remove a photograph of the Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago, which was largely demolished by 2011.

The post Nearly half one million US households lack indoor plumbing: ‘The circumstances are inhumane’ | US information appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Milwaukee ranks third in the nation for residents without access to running water at home, according to a new report from Kings College London.

The report found that there are approximately 3,000 households in Milwaukee with no water pipes – if four people lived in one house, it would mean 12,000 people in the city of Milwaukee do not have access to water at home.

This number has remained unchanged since 2000, according to the report.

As other cities have improved, Milwaukee’s ranking jumped from 20th to 3rd among the metropolitan areas with the highest relative proportion of household poverty between 2000 and 2017.

We see no change in poverty in plumbing equates to no progress,” says the report. “Stagnation should be understood as a wake-up call to the heads of state and government in these cities to prioritize measures that are geared towards infrastructural equity and supply for all households.”

Most of these houses belong to people of color in poor areas.

But the city of Milwaukee says the report is incorrect.

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“We have water meters on every apartment building in Milwaukee,” said Jeff Fleming, director of communications for Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. “It goes against logic for anyone to claim that there are thousands of uninstalled homes in Milwaukee.”

The report found that other cities across the country, including San Francisco and Phoenix, are facing similar problems, but Milwaukee’s history of segregation and redlining has exacerbated plumbing poverty as well as the city’s location in the Rust Belt. The unforgiving downsizing of Milwaukee’s heavy industrial sector that began in the 1970s hit the city’s black middle class hardest, and parts of the city never recovered.

“The legacy of redlining, institutional discrimination and urbanism against blacks have created an unequal and unfair environment for people of color, especially black Milwaukeans,” the report said.

In 2017, 28 percent of those with incomplete plumbing were black, although blacks make up only 16.1 percent of metropolitan Milwaukee’s population.

“Future research is needed to examine the geography of overrepresentation among black Milwaukeeans and to examine whether the unequal outcomes of poverty outcomes in plumbing represent a new form of infrastructural redlining in the city,” the report said.

Kings College London has studied a handful of cities. Austin, Texas jumped from 17th to fifth place; Cleveland, 33rd through sixth; Nashville from 22nd to 12th; and Seattle from March 37th to 14th

A report published last year by Marc Levine, a professor emeritus of history, economic development, and urban research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, found that Milwaukee ranks last in the study of racial inequality in the country’s 50 largest metropolitan areas .

The post Report: 3K households in Milwaukee are with out plumbing, principally affecting Black and low-income residents appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Isabelle Nunes / Diary

South San Francisco is giving away 75 air purifiers to low-income households that qualify. The program, which started last week, comes when the Caldor Fire south of Lake Tahoe has deteriorated air quality in the city and much of the state.

“One of the reasons we wanted to give away air purifiers was to address the inequalities within climate change and the smoke-filled air that is very dangerous for residents,” said Councilor James Coleman.

South San Francisco households earning 50% or less of the median income for the area ($ 63,950 for one person, $ 73,100 for two) are eligible for one air purifier per household.

Bay Area residents outside of South San Francisco can apply for a free air purifier from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which also runs an air purifier delivery program for low-income households.

Basic air filtration systems typically cost between $ 100 and $ 150, while better units can cost several hundred dollars.

The post South San Francisco provides free air purifiers to low-income households | Native Information appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

New research has shown that nearly half a million households in the United States, mostly and perhaps surprisingly urban ones, lack adequate indoor plumbing, according to The Guardian.

The data, compiled from statistics from the US Census Bureau by the Plumbing Poverty Project (PPP), a collaboration between the University of Arizona and King’s College London, and published on Monday, showed that even in some of the wealthiest cities, renters and black people are more likely to be in a house with no running water or flush toilets.

The problem was perceived as particularly bad in San Francisco, according to The Guardian, where nearly 15,000 families live without a functioning plumbing system. San Francisco also has the third top billionaires in any city in the world, the outlet found.

The data also showed that as of 2017, black people made up 9 percent of the population of San Francisco, but 17 percent of homes with no indoor plumbing, The Guardian reported.

“The history of sanitary poverty in San Francisco is inextricably linked with priceless housing, falling incomes, transformations in California’s post-recession rental sector, and racist prosperity gaps fueled by a kind of ‘anti-black urbanism’ that has driven either Black San Franciscans into precarious or out of the bay, ”Katie Meehan, senior researcher at PPP and Professor of Environment and Society at King’s College London, told The Guardian.

Tenants in San Francisco make up less than half of households in the city’s metropolitan area, but nearly 90 percent of homes have no working plumbing, The Guardian reported.

The research also showed that cities like Milwaukee, San Antonio, Phoenix, Seattle, and Cleveland made little or no progress in improving their plumbing problems between 2000 and 2017. All five cities have more than 3,000 households without proper plumbing, according to The Guardian.

“It’s not only that the gap between the watery and waterless in America is widening, but it’s also being driven by a housing sector that has no safety net for working families, especially colored households who don’t know the astronomy Can afford prices from San Francisco, Seattle or now even Portland, ”Meehan said.

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