Barcelona Metropolis

Water is a cornerstone of democratic life; and yet universal water access remains quietly incomplete or is deteriorating for many households in the United States. Trapped in a housing affordability and cost-of-living crisis, millions of urban dwellers are moving into precarious living situations without secure access to running water and sanitation. A paradigm shift is needed in the context of the climate emergency.

In 2016, a fire broke out and killed 36 people at Ghost Ship, a former warehouse in Oakland, California that had been illicitly converted to living and working spaces. Rent was cheap at Ghost Ship, especially compared to the rest of the metropolitan region. Around the same time, a journalist moved into a rented shack behind a bungalow in rapidly gentrifying West Oakland. “There was no plumbing or running water to wash my hands or brush my teeth before sleep”, he explained in a magazine article, describing his backyard dwelling, “Electricity came from an extension cord that snaked through a yard of coyote mint and monkey flower and up into a hole I’d drilled in my floorboards. The structure was smaller than a cell at San Quentin – a tiny house or a huge coffin, depending on how you looked at it – four by eight and ten feet tall, so cramped it fit little but a mattress, my suit jackets and ties, a space heater, some novels, and the mason jar I peed in”.[1]

Water and sanitation access in cities is never just about water – it is about citizenship, belonging and security, the core tenets of democratic life. The modern infrastructural ideal, argued Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, is shaped by at least three major social and design elements: first, a networked system of bundled and integrated resources; second, resources of a uniform quality and quantity; and third, a universal notion of resource provision, embodied by the United Nations’ goal of ‘water for all’.[2]

Of course, the democratic ideal of ‘water for all’ quickly unravels in the face of plain data truths. In many Western nations, modern water is so normalised and taken for granted that we may easily ignore the fact that it was never fully realised – until, perhaps, like the journalist above, we end up living in conditions with no running water and must pee in a jar.

Unfulfilled promise

Modern water is a horizon of struggle, rather than an accomplished fact. In the United States, an estimated 1.1 million people lack running water in their homes, with 73% of those affected living in major metropolitan areas such as New York City (65,000 people without running water), Los Angeles (44,200), San Francisco (27,400), Chicago (22,300) and Houston (20,300). Nationwide, households without basic running water access are disproportionately urban, low-income, renters and non-white.[3]

In some US cities, these trends have only worsened. On balance, while household water access has improved in the United States since 2000, our research shows that access trends have deteriorated in some of the country’s wealthiest and fastest-growing cities, such as San Francisco, Portland, Austin, Nashville and Seattle (among others). Portland is a prime example of worsening trends: in 2000, the city registered 3,200 households without running water. By 2017, this number had jumped to 6,200 households, a 50% increase.[4]

What drives these corrosive trends? As our 2021 report[5] explains, the case of San Francisco provides important clues at the confluence of housing and water. Renters make up less than half of households in the San Francisco metropolitan area, we found, but they account for nearly 90% of all households without running water.[6] The region’s celebrated tech boom and the emergence of corporate landlords in the Californian rental sector, following the global financial crisis of 2008, helped to produce the housing crisis of today: high housing prices, low rates of homeownership and untenable rents for low- and middle-income households.[7]

Home to the third-highest number of billionaires among global cities, San Francisco also has one of the highest rent burdens in the United States. In 2024, the median rent in San Francisco was $3,371 per month, a figure that was 61% higher than the national median.[8] According to our report, the average unplumbed renter in San Francisco spent 44% of their monthly income – paid to a landlord – to live in a home without running water. Put simply, renters in San Francisco are earning less and paying more for substandard services.

Democracy, deferred

What makes a city of the unplumbed? The romantic mythology of San Francisco – as a beacon of progressive politics – belies its history of uneven geographic development and racialised exploitation. The writer and critic James Baldwin cut through the sugar-coated surface of the city to reveal deeper truths. “I imagine that it is easy for any white person walking through San Francisco to imagine that everything was at peace, because it certainly looks that way on the surface”, he said in the 1964 documentary Take This Hammer, “San Francisco is much prettier than New York. And it’s much easier to hide because you’ve got the views; you’ve got the hills. You’ve got the San Francisco legend, too. That it’s cosmopolitan and forward-looking but it’s just another American city”.

Baldwin’s observations could apply to the hidden crisis of water inequality today. As we explain in the report, “despite San Francisco’s shrinking Black population, the number of Black people in plumbing poverty increased by nearly 50% that period [of 2000 to 2017], from 3,200 to 4,600 individuals”.[9] The story of water poverty in San Francisco is tied to a combination of unaffordable housing, declining incomes, post-recession transformations in the rental sector and racialised wealth gaps. “This is the San Francisco [that] Americans pretend does not exist”, argued Baldwin, “they think I am making it up”.

Water poverty in urban America is not a technical matter or a relic of the past, but the product of a capitalist social order that exploits racialised and class-based differences, experienced through a housing sector that privileges profit over life. Empirically, the situation is getting worse, not better, in several major US cities – a finding that raises alarm for household adaptations to the climate emergency. While the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed in 2021, is a welcome step in the right direction, it remains to be seen whether its relatively modest investment can transform the system. Until that day, the struggle for more equitable and just water continues, even in the places we may least expect.

References

Graham, S. and Marvin, S. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. Routledge, London, 2001.

Meehan, K., Jurjevich, J. R., Chun, N. M. J. W. and Sherrill, J. “Geographies of insecure water access and the housing-water nexus in US cities”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(46), 28700-28707. 2020.

Meehan, K., Jurjevich, J. R., Griswold, A., Chun, N. M. J. W. and Sherrill, J. Plumbing Poverty in US Cities: A Report on Gaps and Trends in Household Water Access, 2000 to 2017. King’s College London, London, 2021.

Moore, R.O. Take This Hammer. KQED National Educational Television, 1964.