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The widespread and unjust drinking water and clean water crisis in the United States
Open accessAbstract
Many households in the United States face issues of incomplete plumbing and poor water quality. Prior scholarship on this issue has focused on one dimension of water hardship at a time, leaving the full picture incomplete. Here we complete this picture by documenting the full scope of water hardship in the United States and find evidence of a regionally-clustered, socially unequal nationwide household water crisis. Using data from the American Community Survey and the Environmental Protection Agency, we show there are 489,836 households lacking complete plumbing, 1,165 community water systems in Safe Drinking Water Act Serious Violation, and 21,035 Clean Water Act permittees in Significant Noncompliance. Further, we demonstrate this crisis is regionally clustered, with the specific spatial pattern varying by the specific form of water hardship. Elevated levels of water hardship are associated with the social dimensions of rurality, poverty, indigeneity, education, and age-representing a nationwide environmental injustice.
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“and nearly half a million households have been estimated to not have complete piped water services.58”
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References 25 · Cited by 247
Research works printed but not linked: 1
- Manson, S. S., Chroeder, J., Van Riper, D. & Ruggles, S. 2020. IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information system: Version 15.0, IPUMS, Minneapolis, MN https://doi.org/10.18128/D050.V15.0 (2020). · DOI
Metadata
- Authors
- Mueller, J. T., & Gasteyer, S.
- Affiliations
- Utah State University (US)
- Michigan State University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Mueller, J. Tom
- Venue
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2021-06-22
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 3544-3544
- ISSN
- 2041-1723 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC8219686
- OpenAlex
- W3173340291
- Cited by
- 247
- References
- 25
- Citations by year
- 2026: 37 · 2025: 57 · 2024: 57 · 2023: 56 · 2022: 32 · 2021: 8
- FWCI
- 53.01
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Update notices
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- Nature Communications (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Environmental Justice and Health Disparities
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Water Governance and Infrastructure
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Water Science and Technology › Water Resource Management and Quality
- Keywords
- drinking water quality, clean water, environmental injustice, social inequality, rurality, poverty, indigeneity, regional clustering, United States
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