Daily-Dose

Contents

From New Yorker

From Vox

  1. August 18, 2021

Yet while gentrifying neighborhoods create those types of interactions between neighbors or heavier “order maintenance” policing, the gentrification isn’t the root issue. Segregating neighborhoods does not get rid of these sentiments or the harms they cause: It simply hides them. In a wealthy, white enclave like the Upper East Side, there aren’t somehow fewer people who assume any Black person on their street is begging for money than there are in gentrifying neighborhoods. In fact, there are likely more. Gentrifying neighborhoods pull back the veil and allow for these worlds to collide, displaying the vast differences in income, access to education, and government protection and investment.

All of the problems people worry about when they invoke gentrification — displacement, police action against people of color, lack of investment, predatory landlords — are also present in segregated neighborhoods, often even more so.

As George Washington University professor Suleiman Osman wrote in his 2011 book The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: “Stories abounded of renters [in Brooklyn] being pressured by landlords to leave revitalizing areas. But non-revitalizing blocks with high rates of abandonment and demolition saw rates of displacement that were just as high.”

What is gentrification?

Defining gentrification is hard, even for the experts.

The Urban Displacement Project, a research and policy group at the University of California Berkeley, defines it as:

a process of neighborhood change that includes economic change in a historically disinvested neighborhood — by means of real estate investment and new higher-income residents moving in — as well as demographic change — not only in terms of income level, but also in terms of changes in the education level or racial make-up of residents.

While this covers the conceptual ideas, determining which neighborhoods are gentrifying has been difficult for researchers. Not for lack of trying: MIT urban studies PhD candidate Benjamin Preis and his study co-authors compared four different models of gentrification and displacement risk and found “striking differences between the models.” For instance, one weighted “access to public transit” as a gentrification risk factor while the others didn’t, and another didn’t include data on racial composition.

The researchers applied all of the models to Boston and found that there are “only seven [census] tracts that all four models agreed were either gentrifying or at risk of gentrification or displacement.”

“[The models] disagree on the front end, they disagree on what we call gentrification, and then not surprisingly, they really disagree on the back end to actually map out what those neighborhoods are,” Preis told Vox. “You end up with radical disagreement. One method identified nearly 120 tracts facing displacement pressure and another had just 39.”

As Columbia University researcher Brett McMillan explains in the publication Shelterforce, while people often assume that gentrification happens predominantly in overwhelmingly Black or brown neighborhoods, that is not actually the case. He details research finding “Chicago neighborhoods with Black populations of greater than 40 percent experienced significantly lower rates of gentrification” and “white ‘invasion’ into census tracts with Black populations of 50 percent or more has been a relatively infrequent phenomenon.”

The other big issue with defining gentrification is attempting to quantify physical displacement. Widely viewed as the most pernicious byproduct of gentrification, the evidence that gentrification causes physical displacement is a mixed bag.

Displacement is another phenomenon that is difficult to define. The reasons people move are not cataloged in any database, and poor Americans are notably transient due to financial insecurity. Additionally, defining “forced” displacement is difficult — if someone can afford a one-bedroom apartment in their community but not a larger home, are they being displaced if they have a kid and move to a more affordable neighborhood? People move for a variety of reasons: In 2015, FiveThirtyEight calculated that the average American moved more than 11 times in their lives, indicating that there are very few “longtime residents” of anywhere.

Importantly, research by preeminent eviction scholar Matt Desmond “found no evidence that renters residing in gentrifying or in racially- and economically- integrated neighborhoods had a higher likelihood of eviction.” But perhaps increasing rents can cause displacement without evictions. (The way to avoid that would be to keep rents low by building more housing and preserving existing affordable housing, but more on that later.)

While the arson in Hoboken was a clear-cut case of forced displacement, measuring the insidious ways that financially insecure Americans could be nudged out of their neighborhoods is extremely difficult.

The research literature in this space is mixed. Some researchers have found that “rather than rapid displacement, gentrification was associated with slower residential turnover among [disadvantaged] households.” Other research, however, found that “between 8,300 and 11,600 households per year were displaced in New York City between 1989 and 2002 . … between 6.6 and 9.9 percent of all local moves among renter households.”

Overall, the research literature leans toward the view that gentrifying neighborhoods can lead to displacement, but they don’t have to. Gentrification can bring with it the promise of integration and sorely needed investment that can increase residents’ quality of life — but only if disadvantaged residents are set up to take part in the benefits of increased investment.

Most urban dwellers live in poor neighborhoods that stay poor, or in higher- income neighborhoods doing their damnedest to stay that way

The cry of “fire, fire gentrifier” spread through city neighborhoods last year during some of the racial justice protests. The battle lines in these neighborhoods are not clear but the anger directed at the yuppies brunching on the sidewalks was palpable. The group that conspicuously gets to avoid this conflict? Wealthy (often white) urban and suburban homeowners who have long refused to allow either integration or even yuppies to live in their segregated neighborhoods.

Chants of “Fire fire, gentrifier. Black people used to live here!” as the crowd makes their way through Logan Square this evening in Chicago #Chicago #AdamToledo pic.twitter.com/04S1qHUQvU

— Brendan Gutenschwager (@BGOnTheScene) April 17, 2021

While there are very real harms that accompany gentrification, it’s important not to lose the forest for the trees.

Gentrifying neighborhoods are “very tiny pieces of the story,” says UC Berkeley professor of city and regional planning Karen Chapple, who leads the school’s Urban Displacement Project (UDP), which has worked to map gentrification in several US cities.

When Chapple was doing her first map of the Bay Area in 2005, she says, “about 10 percent of the neighborhoods were gentrifying but about 40 percent were just getting poorer over time. And it wasn’t the story that anybody wanted to hear. … Systemic poverty and racism is so hard … and [gentrification] is also much more visible.”

Looking at UDP’s work in Southern California, they find that in San Diego County only “7 percent of tracts experienced risk of or ongoing gentrification/displacement.” In Chicago, they find that only 18 percent of low-income households “live in low-income neighborhoods at risk of, or already experiencing gentrification and/or displacement.”

What’s happening in the rest of the neighborhoods? Segregation and/or concentrated poverty, which have been constant companions to disadvantaged communities.

In Denver, Colorado, they find that while only “17 percent of neighborhoods were at risk of gentrification,” and “45 percent of Denver’s moderate-to-high-income neighborhoods demonstrated risk of or ongoing exclusion of lower-income households.”

Racial and income segregation locks low-income people in a trap of concentrated poverty. The best schools are relegated to the highest-income neighborhoods, good jobs often exist in either exclusive or gentrifying neighborhoods, and businesses are less willing to take root in an area of concentrated poverty because there are fewer customers. All of this is a vicious cycle that traps low-income Americans. It also hinders their ability to foster growth on their own because financial insecurity makes people transient and lacking in time and energy to build community.

Meanwhile, homeowners in well-off neighborhoods have cemented systems of local control through rules like exclusionary zoning to keep their neighborhoods prohibitively expensive for lower-income Americans, including many Black and brown Americans.

Zoning laws are the rules and regulations that decide what types of homes can be built where. While this can sound innocuous, exclusionary zoning is anything but. These rules have a dark history in the United States as a tool of racial and economic segregation, used explicitly to keep certain races, religions, and nationalities out of certain neighborhoods. And while the explicit racism has been wiped from the legal text, the effect of many of these rules remains the same: keeping affordable housing and the people who need it away from the wealthiest Americans.

City by city, the message is clear: Segregation and concentrated poverty are the true blights of urban life, despite our fascination with gentrification.

Local zoning rules often keep affordable housing and the people who need it away from the wealthiest Americans.

How to ethically create integrated neighborhoods

Gentrification does carry with it real harms, but there are ways to reduce those and to provide a pathway for integrated, equitable cities.

Integration is not a panacea, but research shows that following gentrification, “children benefit from increased exposure to higher-opportunity neighborhoods, and some are more likely to attend and complete college.” Further, gentrification can allow existing homeowners in a community to benefit from the rising property values, as long as anti-displacement policies exist to ensure property tax payments don’t price people out.

There are a few other policies the US could pursue to mitigate the harms that accrue to disadvantaged communities.

First, the economic literature is clear that increased housing production reduces rents. It also ensures that new entrants don’t bid up the price of existing homes but rather turn to new construction for their housing needs. The evidence that does exist showing that modern-day gentrification leads to displacement links that displacement to rising rents. Reducing that pressure is paramount to stopping unwanted displacement. In Hoboken, New Jersey, during the violent evictions and arsons, the vacancy rate fell below 1 percent by the start of the 1980s. This supply crunch contributes to the incentive for property owners to push out lower-income tenants.

Second, tenant protection policies could help forestall some evictions. A right to counsel in housing proceedings, for example, would rebalance power between low-income tenants and property owners seeking to evict due to potential profits from selling or converting the property for higher-income use. It’s also important for cities to work to preserve existing affordable housing, especially as new housing gets built.

Third, we need to rezone wealthy white segregated neighborhoods to slow the speed at which gentrifying neighborhoods change and to tackle segregation. Slowing gentrification can ensure that local officials can respond to protect existing residents while also allowing the benefits of the phenomenon to accrue.

These types of interventions can provide a roadmap for how to ethically integrate urban neighborhoods.

None of this is to undermine the very real cultural conflict that gentrification brings. Even if you’re able to stay in your neighborhood and your home, watching store after store pop up that doesn’t serve your community or isn’t available to you at your income level can be deeply alienating. It’s no wonder that people who have faced centuries of disinvestment grow angry as public and private money flows into their neighborhoods only after high-income college-educated people choose to move there. Even if those people are not wholly responsible for the inequality, the blatant injustice is hard to ignore.

Taken all together, it becomes clear why we focus on gentrification while the unseen culprits (segregated enclaves) are able to avoid controversy: Gentrification is the most visual manifestation of inequality in urban life.

“Gentrification is a cultural sphere to work out feelings of resentment around inequality. … Those feelings aren’t to be discounted,” Gottlieb argues. “This is a manifestation of a long-running sense of ‘I am not welcomed in the city, I don’t have a right to the city.’ Sometimes those feelings can be worked out in the cultural terrain of gentrification, even indeed if the people moving in aren’t the proximate cause for them leaving.”

  1. “It doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing that one should be respecting at all. It’s just like finding a cognitive bias that we have, and then adding it back into your economic analysis in order to make your analysis biased in the same way.”

    One classic reason individuals undervalue future events is because there’s a chance they’ll no longer be alive when those events happen, so they won’t be affected. That might make sense when it comes to individual choices, like eating a bunch of chocolate chip cookies. But in the case of climate change, respecting that bias means accepting that future generations will face centuries of climate disaster because of the choices we’ve made (and continue to make).

    There’s an implicit intergenerational trade-off here. And although there’s no philosophical consensus about the right way to handle such trade-offs, many philosophers think we have a moral responsibility to care for future generations.

    Frank Partnoy, now a Berkeley Law professor, argued this point in a 2012 interview with the New York Times. “A human life is often estimated to be worth around $10 million,” he said. “But if you apply a 3 percent discount rate to this, that means that a human life 500 years from now is only worth $3.81 today.”

    Most people would agree that seems ridiculous. Philosopher Derek Parfit and economist Tyler Cowen underscored the absurdity of a social discount rate in a 1992 paper, writing: “Why should costs and benefits receive less weight, simply because they are further in the future? When the future comes, these benefits and costs will be no less real. Imagine finding out that you, having just reached your twenty-first birthday, must soon die of cancer because one evening Cleopatra wanted an extra helping of dessert. How could this be justified?”

    Now, that’s not to say the pure rate of time preference should be absolutely zero. As Carleton and Greenstone wrote, “Perhaps the most compelling explanation for a nonzero pure rate of time preference is the possibility of a disaster (e.g., asteroids or nuclear war) that wipes out the population at some point in the future, thus removing the value of any events that happen afterwards.” Ord has made the same argument, suggesting we should discount the future by the extinction risk to humanity, and no more.

    Whatever you think about discounting, intellectual honesty requires us to admit that how we choose to answer the question of what we owe to future generations gets baked into the discount rate and thus into the SCC. And any answer to that question will be a subjective moral judgment, not some objective mathematical truth.

    “Ultimately, we can’t rely on only numbers — we have to make really hard value judgments,” Partnoy told the New York Times. “We should stop pretending this is a science and admit it is an art and talk about this in terms of ethics and fairness, not what we can observe in the markets.”

    The Climate Cost Project’s Johnson agrees. “Some economists like to do a lot of smoke and mirrors and pretend that everything is objective and not based on values,” she said. “But it is based on values.”

    She pointed out that even the first purely economic reason to discount the future (society will be wealthier in the future, and damages matter less the wealthier you are) is not some objective truth. She doesn’t take it for granted that economic growth will continue, since climate change could hamper or even reverse it. But many economists, she said, have an “irrational love affair” with the idea of ongoing economic growth.

    “There’s a blind spot there among some economists — they really think growth can just continue like this,” Johnson said. “But it’s a delusion.”

    Because Johnson thinks the first and second reasons to discount the future are deeply flawed, she does not think it makes sense to continue talking in terms of a social cost of carbon. Instead, she said we should simply set an emissions target and then determine the most cost-effective ways of reaching it.

    She’s not alone. Even Stern, one of the main economists to shape the idea of the SCC, advocated for the same shift in a February report he co-authored with Nobel laureate and Columbia professor Joseph Stiglitz.

    Realistically, though, the Biden administration will almost certainly set a social cost of carbon, as it’s promised to do so by early next year. The experts I spoke with expect the new SCC to factor in the latest empirical data. That includes what we now know about the mortality cost of carbon as well as data on what the market is doing; as Carleton noted, interest rates have dropped, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see that reflected in a lower discount rate — and thus a higher SCC.

    The Biden administration may well follow the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s general guidance on how to determine the SCC. One important aspect of those recommendations is that they “put uncertainty center stage,” Carleton said, meaning they “price in the uncertainty we face about future economic growth — and hence future discount rates.”

    This careful treatment of uncertainty would go some way toward accounting for Johnson’s objection that economic growth may not continue in the era of climate change. However, “I think the discussion still needs to be honest about what the real ethics are,” Johnson said. “You can’t reduce this problem to a mathematical equation.”

Workers in Jackson make repairs at the site of a water main break on East Pascagoula Street.

“In some areas, we’ve got 100-year pipes,” says Charles Williams, former head of the Jackson Public Works Department. “They’ve been in the ground for a very long time, and we’ve been patching the system due to lack of availability of funds.”

As a result, issues like water main breaks have become more common, contributing to stoppages in service and cracks that make it easier for contaminants to get into the water. Williams estimates that in the past year alone, there have been more than 100 water main breaks.

Equipment at the city’s water treatment facilities — including machines at the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant, which froze during February’s winter storm — are old too, causing further delays in making sure the water is clean and drinkable. Much of this equipment hasn’t been properly weatherized either, so it’s especially vulnerable during cold snaps.

“If you don’t make the critical upgrades and the desired maintenance, it’s going to break,” Williams says.

While the EPA has deemed Jackson’s water safe to drink as long as there isn’t a boil water notice, it’s also called for major repairs at its treatment facilities in order to better address potential contaminants. In 2015, annual water reports showed that lead levels in the city’s water were nearly 50 percent higher than the acceptable standard, the Clarion Ledger reported. Government analyses in June 2016 also found that more than a fifth of Jackson homes had water that exceeded the federal government’s “action” lead level, according to the Guardian.

Earlier this year, city officials laid out a plan for increasing staffing at treatment plants and fixing machines there. The estimated costs include $70 million to address maintenance at two treatment plants and $100 million to repair the distribution system — though Williams notes that the full price tag of a water overhaul is likely to be much higher. (Lumumba’s $2 billion estimate for complete repairs to Jackson’s water and wastewater systems easily dwarfs the city’s annual $300 million budget.)

One reason the city hasn’t been able to fix its water issues is that it just hasn’t had the funds to do so. Over time, the city has seen its population and tax base decrease, significantly reducing its revenues for utilities and other services, as the Christian Science Monitor explained:

As in other metro areas nationwide, school integration led to white flight, and in later decades other factors including rising crime rates fueled a further exodus to the suburbs among Jackson’s white and Black middle class alike.

With them, too, went a large portion of a tax base that Mississippi’s largest city has historically depended upon.

Federal funding for water infrastructure has also sharply dipped since the 1970s, forcing states and localities to try to cover these gaps. (According to the US Water Alliance, federal funding accounted for 63 percent of capital spending on water infrastructure in 1977, a number that’s since dwindled to less than 10 percent.)

To raise more infrastructure funds, Jackson previously instituted a 1 percent hike to its sales tax in 2014, which brings in roughly $14 million a year. It also received $47 million as part of the American Rescue Plan earlier in 2021, some of which is being allocated to water-related repairs. And state lawmakers granted Jackson $3 million in funding for water plant fixes.

These measures still aren’t enough to solve Jackson’s water problems, though. And given the funding shortages it’s experienced, the city has focused on using its limited water budget to stem the damage rather than fixing it wholesale.

More federal funding could be significant in helping the city address the overwhelming expenses it still has, if it’s properly targeted. ”This kind of package from the federal government is truly our only hope,” Jackson City Council President Virgi Lindsay said recently.

The infrastructure bill may not be targeted enough to be effective

Getting much-needed funding to Jackson will depend on how Mississippi ultimately chooses to dole out its infrastructure money.

The EPA manages two programs to send federal dollars to states to help fix their water systems: the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund and the Clean Water State Revolving Fund. But the amount they typically parcel out is small compared to the scope of needs in a city like Jackson. Under the Senate-passed infrastructure plan, much of the federal money for water systems would flow through those programs, which are administered by the states, rather than going directly to cities and municipalities in need.

 Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba addresses the city’s water problem during a press conference on March 8.

In 2021, the federal government sent $1.1 billion to states via the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF) and an additional $1.6 billion via the Clean Water State Revolving Fund (CWSRF). Mississippi received about $26 million of those funds, which it is distributing to local governments in the form of loans and grants. (Because of how the state revolving funds are set up, they also include more money than the annual federal allocations places receive. In total, Mississippi’s drinking water fund has roughly $37 million to distribute in 2021, for instance.)

According to the Associated Press, “Jackson has received almost $20 million over the past four years and is seeking an additional $27 million [in 2021]” from the DWSRF.

In the past, residents and organizers have raised concerns about whether Jackson’s water needs were getting adequate attention from the state government: During February’s water crisis, Mississippi officials moved slowly to submit a disaster declaration or offer additional aid to the majority-Black city.

And while Jackson received $47 million in federal stimulus funds from the American Rescue Plan, the state approved only $3 million of another $47 million in funding that the city had asked for to recover from its water emergency, a situation that has led some residents and activists to question if racial bias has been playing a role in some officials’ treatment of the city. Previously, the state legislature sunk another proposal for a sales tax increase to raise more infrastructure funds as well.

“If it was a majority-white city of the same size, I don’t think people would have drug their feet to come help,” Bertram Roberts says. The governor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Mississippi Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann has pointed to how much federal money the city was poised to receive when discussing the state’s decision to allocate just $3 million earlier this year.

Money from the DWSRF and CWSRF, meanwhile, is separate from the support Jackson got from the state and federal governments following its water emergency, and it’s allocated through state agencies.

Jackson, Mississippi Struggles With Lack Of Water 3 Weeks After Winter Storms Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Charles Williams (not pictured), former head of the Jackson Public Works Department, estimates that in the past year alone, there have been more than 100 water main breaks.

According to data from the EPA’s Project Benefits Reporting System, which was shared with Vox by the Environmental Policy Innovation Center’s Katy Hansen, Jackson received about $20.2 million of $253.9 million in funds allocated via the DWSRF between 2010 and 2020, roughly 8 percent of the total pot of money. Jackson’s 170,000 residents also make up roughly 6 percent of the state’s total population of 3 million, though factors other than a city’s size, such as a place’s reliance on low-cost financing, contribute to need for these funds. (Data from the Mississippi Department of Health also showed that the initial loan awards for the city were $23.8 million between 2010-2020, in addition to an emergency loan it received of $467,000.)

Whether the money in the infrastructure bill will effectively be distributed to places in need like Jackson is an open question. Jim Craig, Mississippi’s Director of Health Protection, noted that state legislation would end up determining how the process would work, and added that officials have approved past loans to the city that have exceeded the $5 million maximum loan amount that had been set for the program.

A report from the Environmental Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) co-authored by Hansen, a senior water adviser at EPIC, previously looked at 10 states’ allocation of DWSRF money and found that several states struggled to deliver this aid equitably: Smaller localities and places with a higher proportion of people of color have historically received less money from the program both because they had less resources to pursue this funding and because much of it was dispensed as loans instead of grants. The study did not include Mississippi, though Sri Vedachalam, EPIC’s director of water, noted that the dynamics of the report were likely to be relatively consistent across states.

“We see this pattern where money is given to certain types of communities while others struggle to secure that type of money,” says Vedachalam. Because states have significant control over where these funds go, the boost the bill provides doesn’t necessarily guarantee that Jackson would receive sufficient extra money.

How the infrastructure bill could help

The bipartisan infrastructure plan includes about $48 billion in new funds for water-related repairs. As detailed by the US Water Alliance, there is $11.7 billion allocated to the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund over five years, $11.7 billion allocated to the Clean Water State Revolving Fund over five years, and $15 billion allocated to addressing lead service lines over five years that will be distributed via the Drinking Water Fund. There’s also an additional $10 billion total that focuses on emerging contaminants.

In all, Mississippi is expected to receive $429 million over five years for water infrastructure were Congress’s legislation to become law, the Clarion Ledger reported.

Although the federal government still gives states significant leeway to determine how Drinking Water Funds and Clean Water Funds are targeted, there are some provisions in the legislation that make it more accessible for “disadvantaged communities,” which are classified in Mississippi as having lower median income.

Nearly half of the funding for the Drinking Water Fund and the Clean Water Fund will be available as grants, which could mean that this money is more accessible to localities that can’t take on loans, including lower-income cities, for example. In the new bill, 49 percent of the new funds in both are available as principal forgiveness loans or grants. Additionally, the bipartisan bill would require that a larger proportion of the funding in the Drinking Water Fund be directed to disadvantaged communities.

 US Water Alliance
A US Water Alliance breakdown of the water funding in the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

The amount of money in the bill — which includes more than $2 billion in spending on both the Clean Water and Drinking Water Funds each year, with an additional $3 billion focused on lead service lines annually — is huge, but far from enough to meet the enormity of the problem.

For replacement of lead service lines alone, for example, the NRDC estimates that costs could be as much as $45 billion, so the $15 billion in the bill only begins to address that problem. For water infrastructure more broadly, the costs are also expected to be quite a bit higher than the roughly $48 billion in new funds included in the bill, notes Scott Berry, director of policy and government affairs at the US Water Alliance.

States also still have pretty broad discretion in determining which projects to prioritize. For now, while Mississippi prioritizes projects on an array of criteria including compliance with drinking water regulations and a cost/benefit analysis, there’s relatively wide latitude in what that could entail. This prioritization, depending on how it’s applied, could leave Jackson without the funding it requires, with state officials instead directing federal funds to other water projects in the state.

Still, this would be one of the largest federal investments in water infrastructure in decades, and what policy experts see as a vital “down payment” on needed repairs.

“It is one of, if not the single largest investment in water infrastructure in 50 years,” Berry tells Vox. “That’s not nothing. Will it solve all of the country’s water infrastructure problems? Emphatically no.”

The costs of failing to address America’s water struggles

The consequences of failing to address this problem are dire.

Without access to clean water, Jackson residents are forced to seek out alternative water sources, while continuing to pay sometimes exorbitant water bills. It also means people are deprived of a resource that’s fundamental to their daily lives, a stark reality in a developed country like the US.

“It was definitely shocking to know that we didn’t have clean drinking water to cook with, to just take care of our families,” said Cassandra Welchlin, head of Mississippi’s Black Women’s Roundtable, of Jackson’s February water stoppage.

And even when access to water is secure, there’s a different set of worries that people encounter when drinking contaminated water. Lead in drinking water can lead to high blood pressure, brain damage, and kidney problems, for example. Multiple studies have found that the health care risks posed by lead contaminants may have serious effects for children’s growth and reproductive health as well.

 Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
A water and food distribution site set up at the planetarium in Jackson, Mississippi, seen in March. There are still 2 million people in the US who don’t have access to clean running water.

According to the NRDC, as many as 20 million people are likely getting some of their water from lead pipes, along with others who are sourcing their water via very old equipment.

In 2016, Pittsburgh detected high levels of lead in its water, spurring the city to begin replacing the thousands of lead service lines it still has. In 2021, New Orleans is still grappling with aging infrastructure and repairs to a water treatment facility that opened more than 100 years ago. In 2019, Newark also found elevated lead levels in its drinking water, pushing the city to replace its pipes with new copper ones.

Across the country, the scale of the issue is alarming: Per a report from the US Water Alliance, there are still 2 million people in the United States who don’t have access to clean running water at all, a problem that disproportionately affects “low-income people in rural areas, people of color, tribal communities, [and] immigrants.” A 2018 study led by UC Irvine water economist Maura Allaire also found that “in any given year from 1982 to 2015, somewhere between 9 million and 45 million Americans got their drinking water from a source that was in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act,” Science reported.

The bipartisan infrastructure bill has the potential to funnel much- needed funds across the country, but precise implementation will be critical to ensure that different localities really benefit.

“I am hopeful that the federal infrastructure funding will address our needs. It absolutely has to,” says Welchlin. “We can’t afford to have another water crisis.”

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