People of color are more likely to live without indoor plumbing even in the richest US cities, study says

This comes from a team of geography researchers from King’s College London and the University of Arizona who published their findings this week in the peer-reviewed PNAS journal. From 2013 to 2017, more than 1.1 million people in the US did not have access to a tap water connection, according to the study. Almost half of them lived in the 50 largest cities in the country.

And those people were usually colored people, and their households were 35% more likely to be lacking tap water than white, non-Hispanic households, the study says. The breed was not specified further in the study.

“Compared to the entire US population, we find that uninstalled households are more likely to be colored by people, have lower incomes, live in mobile homes, rent their homes, and pay a higher percentage of their gross income for housing costs.” “said the study.

Of the 50 largest metropolitan areas, San Francisco had the highest proportion of people without access to indoor plumbing, followed by Portland, Oregon, Milwaukee, San Antonio, and Austin. Based on the total, New York has the most people without indoor installations at 65,000, followed by Los Angeles with 44,200 people and San Francisco with 27,400 people.

The results, the researchers say, reveal a “theory of unsafe water access as a relational condition caused in part by racial gaps in prosperity and uneven neighborhoods”.

Urban water management and security are more of a supply problem. However, the results of the study show otherwise.

“Our results develop an alternative conceptual paradigm – the housing-water connection – that theorizes gaps in urban water access as a product of structural inequality, neither random nor accidental, but of a social and systemic nature,” researchers write.

Going forward, researchers say policies are “urgently needed” to reduce poverty poverty.

Access to water is especially important in the Covid-19 era as many guidelines recommend keeping hands clean. The researchers also drew this connection.

“In a global health pandemic like COVID-19, the difference between safe and unsafe water access – starting with those 65,000 uninstalled New Yorkers – is a matter of life and death,” the researchers wrote.

With more than 200,000 people dead from the virus, researchers concluded the study with a dire reminder: Without universal access to water, efforts to limit the spread of infectious diseases like Covid-19 will undermine global health and will undermine certain populations over others benefit “. “

And in an even more sobering memory, researchers predicted that poverty poverty in US cities could get worse if the cost of living continued to rise.