Water Insecurity Is (Also) a First World Problem

Safe, reliable, sufficient & affordable water for all is not the reality.

Photo by Luis Tosta on Unsplash

Denver Water has been tearing up the streets in my neighborhood all summer, replacing known or suspected lead pipes with copper pipes, at no cost to homeowners or renters. Last week my husband and I watched in wonder as they tore a hole in the street, replaced some pipes, patched up the hole, then returned the next morning to more cleanly and thoroughly cover the patch. By noon, it was like new. 

If you've ever spent any time in New Orleans, you'll understand our wonder. Neighborhood potholes hang around for months or years, with no one ever expecting the city will fix them. Here is one around the corner from our old house, which after a season or two started to grow greenery, like a wild garden in the street:

Here to stay, I guess?

It's no secret that New Orleans, with its hundred-year-old pipes and scandal-ridden Sewage and Water Board, has a lead problem. When a water testing program from Healthy Babies Bright Futures looked at lead levels in household water samples from around the US, they separated out the results from New Orleans, because the percentage of households with dangerous levels of lead was so high, it would have distorted the national results. Yet, until earlier this year, there was no movement toward addressing the problem.

Like the crisis in Flint, Michigan, New Orleans's water contamination problems are well-known — but they are far from isolated. Water infrastructure in the US is fragmented and deeply inequitable, reflecting a history of housing segregation, and a present in which communities of color and other historically marginalized neighborhoods and groups have inadequate access to affordable and uncontaminated water.

The Inhumanity of Water Insecurity

Water insecurity is "a lack of safe, reliable, sufficient, and affordable water for a thriving life," according to this excellent paper by Meehan et al. that examines the myths around household water security in the global North, with a focus on the US and Canada. Between 2013 and 2017, over 1.1 million people in the US lacked a piped water connection, most of them living in metropolitan areas, where you would expect water infrastructure to be accessible and reliable. A study examining "plumbing poverty" found that San Francisco had the highest proportion of households without piped water, while New York City had the highest number of individuals without piped water.

What household conditions and characteristics are linked to insecure water access? Compared with the overall US population, we find that unplumbed households are more likely to be headed by people of color, earn lower incomes, live in mobile homes, rent their residence, and pay a higher share of their gross income toward housing costs.

The researchers conclude:

Our study reveals persistent disparities in piped water access in urban areas in the United States, a finding that is strongly linked to precarious housing conditions and racialized wealth gaps.¹

Unhoused individuals are the most water-insecure of all. A report here in Denver found that over half of the city's public water fountains were not working in 2022 and 2023, and almost 50% were closed during the cold-weather season (October through April). Almost one-third of the unhoused people the researchers spoke with reported mental health challenges because they had poor access to water, sanitation, and hygiene. "I feel like I am not human," said one person they spoke with.

Lead, Household Water & Injustice

Water insecurity can also occur when that "safe" part of the "safe, reliable, sufficient, and affordable water" is missing or uncertain. Lead contamination is particularly rampant, as lead pipes were not banned in the US until 1986, and the EPA estimates that between 6 to 10 million lead service lines still exist around the country. Lead exposure is particularly dangerous for developing fetuses, babies, and children, causing damage to the brain and nervous system, hearing and speech problems, and lower IQ.

According to an investigative report from Buzzfeed: 

In 2016, about 11% of the kids under 6 in New Orleans tested for blood lead showed concentrations at or above 5 micrograms per deciliter (the CDC maintains that no level of blood lead is safe for children). That’s far higher than the national figure — 2.5% of kids between 1 and 5 — and double the rate in Flint during the water crisis there, when 5% of kids tested had blood lead levels that high.

The report details how the New Orleans Sewage and Water Board, which was supposed to regularly test water from homes at high risk for lead contamination, instead took samples from employees' and their friend's homes, and thus concluded lead was not an issue. This conclusion differed from the findings of researchers conducting their own tests — and from the experiences of New Orleanians with children. (And even children themselves! In 2019, a seventh grader used an off-the-shelf water testing kit to expose the high lead levels in his French Quarter school's drinking fountain, which finally prompted the school district to install the water filters it had been promising for years.)

Because of environmental racism, Black children are at greater risk of lead poisoning, from water as well as other sources like soil contamination and lead paint exposure. Children are not typically tested for lead levels until they are one year old, so during that first year of life — when exposure to lead in water can be especially high for formula-fed babies — lead intake is both unknown and has the greatest potential to harm.

"Trust in household water is fundamentally linked to social power," writes Meehan et al.

What Flint makes clear is how trust is related to how certain people are perceived and valued by decision-makers and authorities—in short, a function of who people are and the extent to which they are (de)humanized.²

The people of Flint — where the population at the time was 57% Black, with 42% living below the poverty line — knew there was something very wrong with the water and they told authorities about it, but nothing was done for over a year. Feeling powerless, living in uncertainty about your exposure to a pollutant, and experiencing injustice are all factors that can exacerbate the stress and trauma of environmental injustice.

These aren't topics covered in most nutrition curricula, perhaps because the concept of "water insecurity" is not something we usually associate with the US or Canada, or because understanding the inequities in who experiences it would require talking about institutionalized racism. But that's exactly why they should be.

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I Wrote a Thing

Here’s another article I worked on during my newsletter hiatus, a more deeply researched look at the connections between early dietetics and eugenics, euthenics, and xenophobia. The senior food editor at Well+Good reached out about writing this (hi, Betty!) after reading my newsletter piece on Lenna Frances Cooper and the Kelloggs.

The Unspoken History of Early Dietitians & Eugenics

I so appreciate that a large food and wellness publication is taking on stories like these, and hope more outlets will follow their lead.

Read the article: Eugenicists Shaped the Pathologized Way Many Americans Think About Nutrition Today

1. Meehan, K., Jurjevich, J. R., Chun, N. M. J. W., & Sherrill, J. (2020). Geographies of insecure water access and the housing–water nexus in US cities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(46), 28700–28707. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2007361117

2. Meehan, K., Jepson, W., Harris, L. M., Wutich, A., Beresford, M., Fencl, A., London, J., Pierce, G., Radonic, L., Wells, C., Wilson, N. J., Adams, E. A., Arsenault, R., Brewis, A., Harrington, V., Lambrinidou, Y., McGregor, D., Patrick, R., Pauli, B., … Young, S. (2020). Exposing the myths of household water insecurity in the global north: A critical review. WIREs Water, 7(6), e1486. https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1486