Correction: A Burgeoning Crisis? A Nationwide Assessment of the Geography of Water Affordability in the United States

Measuring water affordability and the financial capability of utilities

“…Previous studies highlighted water affordability challenges by describing the aggregated, utility-scale results for a few volumes of water use at a specific threshold and reported findings across geographic regions or utility size (Colton, 2020;Goddard et al, 2021;Mack & Wrase, 2017;Teodoro & Saywitz, 2020). In addition, many of these studies prioritized certain geographies (e.g., Goddard et al (2021) focused on California and Van Abs and Evans (2018) focused on New Jersey or were limited to certain utility sizes because of data availability (medium or larger utilities such as in Teodoro & Saywitz, 2020).…”

“…The use of MHI has received considerable scrutiny, in part because it does not capture impacts on low-income residents, who are most sensitive to water affordability challenges (Mack & Wrase, 2017;NAPA, 2017;Raucher et al, 2019;Teodoro, 2018;Teodoro & Saywitz, 2020). There are a growing number of metrics based on assessing the financial burden for the 20th percentile income (i.e., low-income) instead of the median income household (Raucher et al, 2019;Teodoro, 2018).…”

“…However, the amount of water used (and billed) varies by household size, age of household, appliance efficiency, irrigation needs, and so on. Previous studies of water affordability used different volumes of monthly water consumption such as 5000 gpm (Van Abs & Evans, 2018), 6200 gpm (Teodoro & Saywitz, 2020), and 12,000 gpm (Mack & Wrase, 2017). A recent joint report of several water utility organizations (Raucher et al, 2019) recommended assuming 2.65 persons per household at 50 gal per person per day, resulting in an average use of 4030 gpm.…”

“…This "affordability gap" reflects the widening difference between the costs of providing water services and the ability to pay for those services. While there may be a willingness to pay more to maintain and ensure access to water, the ability of many households to do so may be limited (Baird, 2010;Mack & Wrase, 2017). Detroit, Michigan provides a stark example, where nearly 40% of the population lives below the federal poverty threshold, yet water rates increased by over 400% since 2000 (Lakhani, 2020).…”

An affordability assessment of consolidated management of nitrate treatment

“…With some variation nationwide, not only do water rate increases exceed the inflation rate, they have also been found to be greater than increases in the costs of other essential household expenses (Harrison, 2018; LaFond, 2015). Despite increasing rates, many utilities have rates that are still too low to generate the revenues needed to upgrade, operate, and maintain community water and wastewater systems (Mack & Wrase, 2017b).…”