Tag Archives: water

American water prices up at rates higher than inflation, groceries, and income

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A new report looking at water systems across the United States suggests people are paying more for water now than one decade ago:

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Food & Water Watch, a Washington DC-based non-profit, analyzed 2025 billing data from the 500 largest community water systems in the US, which together serve about 155 million people, or 45% of the country’s population. The analysis compared current rates with data from a similar Food & Water Watch survey conducted in 2015. The study does not include wastewater or storm water charges, which are often billed separately from drinking water service.

In 2025, the average household using 60,000 gallons of water paid $531 for drinking water service, according to the study. However, costs varied widely, with annual bills ranging from $133 at the cheapest system to $1,416 at the most expensive.

Water prices rose 1.6 times faster than overall inflation between 2015 and 2025. Consumer prices increased 39% during that period, compared with a 62% jump in water bills, according to the study. Water costs also rose more than twice as fast as groceries, which increased 30%, and eggs, which rose 28%…

Corporate-owned utilities charged the average household $823 a year, compared with $494 for publicly owned systems – a difference of $329, or 67%. Corporate systems accounted for just 11% of the 500 systems the study analyzed but represented 44% of the 25 most expensive systems. The study added that 70% of the top 10 were owned by for-profit corporations…

Grant of Food & Water Watch said water systems must make updates to repair “ageing water lines and help clean up toxic contamination from lead pipes, Pfas forever chemicals, nitrate pollution from industrial agriculture, the list goes on”. She added: “Corporate control of water systems exacerbates this affordability crisis, as big water monopolies take away local control, prioritize profit and hike water prices even higher.”

Water was pretty cheap in a number of American communities in the past. This report suggests this is changing. This could have consequences:

  1. Will Americans use less water because the price is higher? This argument has been in made for gasoline – there is a point when the price for gallon significantly changes behavior and decisions. Is there a similar point for water?
  2. Will residents protest the higher prices? And if so, what would they protest for? Perhaps push for municipal water systems or regulation of water utilities.
  3. How much money is there to be made in providing water? How many communities would choose to go with corporate-owned utilities because they offer important advantages?
  4. How might this contribute to development and relocations? If water is cheaper in some places and not others, does this help drive changes?

Infrastructure is necessary but can become contentious when it requires changes, like higher costs.

Chicago suburbs to compete with Chicago to supply municipal water needs with Lake Michigan water

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Earlier this week, a group of Chicago suburbs announced plans to pump and distribute Lake Michigan water. This would put them in competition with the water supplied by the city of Chicago:

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The DuPage commission alone is paying Chicago’s Department of Water Management $130 million this year, commission Chair Jim Zay told the Tribune Publishing-owned Daily Herald. The DuPage consortium is Chicago’s single largest wholesale customer, accounting for 15% of the city water system’s annual operating revenue, according to Fitch Ratings.

The threat to Chicago is several years away; the DuPage commission is contracted to buy water from the city until 2041. But that’s how long it would take to secure approvals, financing and build the competing system anyway.

The backers of the suburban plan complain that Chicago in the past has raised its rates suddenly and exorbitantly and that more recently the city’s service hasn’t been sufficiently reliable. “They don’t put anything back into the system; that’s the problem,” the Herald quoted Zay as saying. “This year we’ll pay them $130 million, and they put nothing in for infrastructure.”…

And if these suburban officials conclude that the risk of continuing to do business with Chicago for generations to come is greater than executing this complex and expansive infrastructure project, that’s their prerogative. To our minds, it’s not an easy call.

This reminds me of two features of American suburbs:

  1. One leading reason suburban communities stopped approving annexation of their community into big cities in the late 1800s had to do with utilities. Once costs of supplying electricity, water, gas, and other needed resources decreased, suburbs developed their own systems rather than join the city to enjoy the benefits of their systems.
  2. Suburbs and their residents like local government. Even as the competing suburban water system would be administered by suburban officials, they would prefer that local control rather than having the big city control the water. This does not mean all the suburbs will agree about how to go about the water business but they probably believe they would rather have decisions in the hands of suburbanites rather than city people.

In other words, this move to have suburbs supply Lake Michigan water is part of longstanding patterns. Yes, it involves a lot of money and effort. But the suburbs think it is worthwhile compared to relying on the big city.

Multiple water main breaks in Los Angeles

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Important infrastructure in American cities can be old. See the example of multiple water mains breaking recently in Los Angeles:

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In Studio City, an 8-inch water main failed, flooding a street and temporarily leaving about 60 customers without water while crews completed repairs.

In Hollywood, another 8-inch water main ruptured, sending water into the street and shutting off service to about 70 customers as crews worked to restore water.

The most significant break occurred in West Hollywood, where a 110-year-old, 36-inch trunk line burst, releasing an estimated 17 million gallons of water onto streets and nearby properties…

According to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, about 30% of the city’s water main lines are more than 80 years old, adding to concerns about the condition of the system…

LADWP said it is working to modernize the city’s water infrastructure as part of its $8 billion, five-year Water System Capital Plan. The project includes replacing 240,000 feet of water main pipe and 6,047 feet of trunk line pipe.

Replacing and/or repairing critical infrastructure is an ongoing task. Hopefully it gets replaced before it breaks and causes problems for the immediate vicinity.

What is hard to know from stories like these is how the number of breaks compares to patterns in Los Angeles or in other cities. How unusual is this series of breaks? How many break each month in cities with different levels of maintenance? What can be expected?

The average resident may not have much knowledge of the maintenance or the expected lifespans until something exposes the infrastructure. Perhaps it is a break or disruption in service. Perhaps it is another project which reveals all the things under the street. Perhaps it is an important budget discussion where choices about priorities, including infrastructure, need to be made. At these moments, the water flow is revealed for a short time and then it goes back to being something ordinary.

How to stop your home from flooding (when the built environment makes it hard to avoid)

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These five tips for homeowners can help them avoid flooded properties. I have done a few of them myself.

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But there is only so much an individual homeowner can do if the built environment makes flooding more common. There are numerous causes: development on top of certain kinds of land and soils; numerous hard surfaces like roads; inadequate drainage at construction or more development after initial systems were put in; low-lying places compared to higher ground nearby. Having water in one’s house is no fun as it requires cleanup and repairs that can require a lot of time and money.

Several pictures used in this story seem to make this point. How much can be done for a house if the street right in front of the home is completely flooded? What can be done if roadways are shut down because of water? Where is all the water supposed to go?

These tips can help but a broader neighborhood or community-wide approach is needed to really address flooding issues. When new development is proposed near housing, NIMBY responses are common and water and flooding issues are often part of this. There may just be some truth in these concerns; changes to land might affect drainage and/or strain existing mitigation efforts. Water has to go somewhere and one homeowner may not really be able to address what is a larger concern.

Geology and a favorable location for humans in Concord, MA

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Why did Concord, Massachusetts, become the site of an opening battle in the American Revolution and later become identified with the transcendentalists? It was a favorable spot for human settlement:

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The Concord River runs north, rather than southeasterly down the regional slope toward the sea. When the edge of the great ice sheet began to retreat from the area about 17,000 years ago, the Concord River was dammed up by the ice to create a ribbon-shaped glacial lake with a muddy bottom. Eventually the lake drained away, allowing the Concord River to cut an inner valley beneath a moist and fertile lowland.

This process set the stage for the creation of what the Indigenous Massachusett, Nipmuc, and Pawtucket peoples called Musketaquid, meaning “grass-ground river,” a marsh about 20 miles long and so flat and so uninterrupted that Thoreau skated the entire round-trip distance one freezing day—January 31, 1855. The languid stream passed through broad meadows to create a northern version of the Everglades (without the alligators). Nathaniel Hawthorne lived along the bank for three weeks before he discerned which way the river flowed.

This riparian ecology attracted colonists: Concord became the first English town in North America above tidewater, beyond the sight and scent of the sea. Here the lush growth of freshwater hay would undergird a system of English husbandry dependent on livestock. Here migrating shad, herring, and salmon thrived in the aquatic richness, furnishing plentiful protein sources, vitamins, and minerals. Here the firm, muddy banks made an ideal habitat for the freshwater mussels on which other animals depended: muskrat, otters, turtles, human beings. On July 3, 1852, Thoreau estimated that more than 16,335 freshwater clams lay along 330 feet of the riverbank. Migrating waterfowl followed the meadows. Songbirds nested along their edges…

The physical separation between Boston and Concord involves more than the linear distance between two points. The population centers occupy different watersheds—the Charles River watershed to the east and the Concord River watershed to the west. In fact, they lie on different bedrock terranes that originated in different places in different eras. The terrane boundary coincides with the Bloody Bluff fault, named for a rocky notch where British troops were trapped by ferocious provincial fire. Here the land leans toward the security of the sea. To the west, it leans toward a hinterland where pioneering residents looked to one another for community support. Without the Lexington Road and its regular stagecoach traffic, 18th-century Concord would have remained an agricultural village. Instead, it became a prominent node in an expanding trade network. The significance of the watershed divide between country and city diminished only after the Fitchburg Railroad reached Concord in 1844.

I cannot remember who said it but I recall a quote where someone says if someone wanted to start a great city today, it would be really hard because all of the good locations have been taken. The geology and ecology of Concord made it good spot for humans to settle.

To take into account the geography and ecology of land and places will continue to be important, even in an era when it is easy to ignore the physical features of places. In the world of Internet and airplanes, everything seems accessible from anywhere. But this is not true: certain places have particular advantages with access to water, protected settings, mineral resources, land for farming and livestock, good spots along trade routes, and more. Some of this can shift over time; does it matter as much today as it did in the past that Chicago was a key portage location between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed? And this could change in the future: particular locations might have new advantages in the future as the earth and societies around the world change.

The amount of water Americans use to water lawns

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In this season of growing and mowing lawns, the EPA has a number regarding the amount of water Americans use to water their lawn:

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The average American family uses 320 gallons of water per day, about 30 percent of which is devoted to outdoor uses. More than half of that outdoor water is used for watering lawns and gardens. Nationwide, landscape irrigation is estimated to account for nearly one-third of all residential water use, totaling nearly 9 billion gallons per day.

The American lawn is alive and well – in part because of all this water. To get the lawn Americans typically want, green, well-manicured, and free of weeds, much is required. And without watering, it might not even get off the ground. Some parts of the country have regular rain that can support this kind of grass. But, it may not meet the standards of Americans and other areas do not have this rainfall. I, too, have had the experience of flying over the West and then seeing Las Vegas emerge with its telltale green lawns.

The American lawn is also alive and well because of expectations and values attached to this lawn. It signifies success and middle-class suburbia. Yes, it requires water. But if the water supply was severely diminished, would the lawns necessarily disappear? Or would people adjust their behavior to make sure the lawns remain in some smaller or similar form? Just how much water would Americans be willing to devote to green lawns?

Pumping water from the ground leads to sinking American cities

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A new study finds American cities are sinking:

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The new research, published in the scientific journal Nature Cities, built on previous work using satellite measurements to paint a detailed picture of rising and falling land. It also closely examined the connection between changes in land elevation and changes in groundwater, using data from individual monitoring wells.

Water pumped from wells isn’t something that people think about often. “You just turn on your tap, do what you need to do, and you go on your way,” said Leonard Ohenhen, a researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and lead author of the study.

But extracting more water than can be replenished “can have a direct relationship with what happens on the surface,” he said. “You can cause the ground to sink significantly.”…

Other factors also influence land elevation. For example, a vast expanse of bedrock beneath parts of the country, pressed downward by enormous glaciers during the last ice age, is slowly rebounding back into place. But over time it creates a sort of see-saw effect that today is adding 1 to 2 millimeters per year to subsidence rates in much of the northern United States.

If pumping water from directly underground leads to this issue, what could happen next? Here are a few ideas that come to mind:

  1. Getting water from further away. At least then if it is pumped out of the ground it does not affect cities and metropolitan regions – the issue is pushed off elsewhere.
  2. Somehow pumping something back into the ground to refill what was depleted.
  3. Factoring in sinking ground at initial construction. This would lead to boosting the elevation of new sites in anticipation of what might happen in the future.

Or not much might happen until one city experiences dire effects from this sinking. Imagine a whole neighborhood or an important development sinks to a point where the land becomes unusable. Would that prompt urgent action?

A burst suburban water main can cause a lot of damage

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Infrastructure might not be a popular topic but when something that works every day suddenly does not work, numerous lives can be disrupted. See this example from suburban Skokie:

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Skokie residents are trying to recover from the huge water main break Feb. 14 that sent icy floodwater into nearby basements, blocked streets, prompted a boil water order for the population of 65,000 lasting nearly three days, shut down Westfield Old Orchard Shopping Center, forced Skokie Hospital to transfer trauma surgery patients and surgeons, closed most businesses, shut schools and barred restaurants’ doors on Valentine’s Day…

Though flooding problems were contained in a residential area of northeastern Skokie, locally known as Skevanston, and the northwestern portion of Evanston, a lack of clean water impacted businesses, homes, and institutions throughout Skokie. Village officials said they are preparing, at their Feb. 18 Village Board meeting, to declare a state of emergency, a necessary step before applying for federal and state disaster funds…

According to a news release from the village, the water main break was caused by a failed fitting cap installed in 1963. The part has an expected lifespan of between 80 and 100 years.

Neighbors in the vicinity of Prairie and Emerson told Pioneer Press that the village conducted emergency repairs in the same area the night before the main burst, which made some skeptical of the cause of the break.

Water is basic for everyday life. And not just any water; clean water that flows continuously. Suburbanites might not think much of these water flow on a daily basis but this broken water main disrupted residential, business, medical, and school activity. Streets and buildings were flooded. Regular suburban life was put on hold.

Skokie could be one of many suburbs across the United States that face similar issues. Skokie boomed in population after World War Two, going from just over 7,000 residents in 1940 to over 59,000 in 1960. All of this growth required infrastructure. The particular water main in question had a cap from 1963. Even with an expected life of 80 to 100 years, that cap is over 60 years old. At some point, those pipes will need to be replaced. What will that cost and how easily will it be accomplished? Regular maintenance can help address these issues but bigger replacement projects are sometimes necessary.

If all goes well, suburbs like Skokie will not experience events like these that lead to declaring a state of emergency and the infrastructure that supports suburban life will be regularly maintained so that suburban life can go on.

The endless search for water in the (fictionalized) origin story of Los Angeles

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The movie Chinatown highlights the ways acquiring water helped Los Angeles grow and hints at what may need to happen for the city and region to keep growing:

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If Chinatown’s ending forces the audience to sit in a feeling of hopelessness, it should also disturb anyone invested in Los Angeles’s future. The history of water in 20th-century California was defined by mammoth feats of engineering and an enduring belief that someone like Mulholland would eventually come along and enable the impossible. Each new dam or aqueduct only guaranteed the arrival of the next one—the population growth allowed by Mulholland’s aqueduct, for example, later resulted in L.A. tapping other water sources, such as the Colorado River. California has had a few good years of rain recently, but the long-term sustainability of the state’s water supply depends on collective conservation efforts: drastically reducing the amount of water used by Big Agriculture, moderating suburban tasks such as watering lawns, regulating the state’s groundwater.

“There is no more water to capture with big projects. There just isn’t. The future is really about much smarter water management,” Stephanie Pincetl, a UCLA professor who specializes in urban policy and the environment, told me. Conservation measures, she argues, are the way forward even if politicians wish they could stump for some grand technological innovation the way their 20th-century predecessors did: “The approach to the 21st century has to be a lot more subtle, a lot more place-based, and a lot more guided by the realization that water is a scarce resource, and so we need to treat it like a scarce resource.”

Finding water in Los Angeles, the Southwest, the West, and the United States more broadly may become more paramount in the coming decades. Which cities and regions would do well in competing for water? Would a lack of water in some places lead to growing populations in places with plenty of water?

While we are at it, why not tell more exciting stories in these categories:

  1. Origin stories of modern places. Take any of the big cities in the United States and put its origin story in a movie or a miniseries. How about the rise of Phoenix?
  2. It would be interesting to popularize more stories about water and other necessary resources in daily life. How about a thrilling tale about concrete? It is hard to imagine modern life without out. Or air conditioning. Can’t have a lot of the global development of the last century without it. Or salt. Where do we get all this salt in our daily lives from?

If Chinatown can entertain and inform about place, why not engage in more storytelling that explains where places have come from and where they might be going?