Plumbing

Report: 3K households in Milwaukee are with out plumbing, principally affecting Black and low-income residents

Milwaukee ranks third in the nation for residents without access to running water at home, according to a new report from Kings College London.

The report found that there are approximately 3,000 households in Milwaukee with no water pipes – if four people lived in one house, it would mean 12,000 people in the city of Milwaukee do not have access to water at home.

This number has remained unchanged since 2000, according to the report.

As other cities have improved, Milwaukee’s ranking jumped from 20th to 3rd among the metropolitan areas with the highest relative proportion of household poverty between 2000 and 2017.

We see no change in poverty in plumbing equates to no progress,” says the report. “Stagnation should be understood as a wake-up call to the heads of state and government in these cities to prioritize measures that are geared towards infrastructural equity and supply for all households.”

Most of these houses belong to people of color in poor areas.

But the city of Milwaukee says the report is incorrect.

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“We have water meters on every apartment building in Milwaukee,” said Jeff Fleming, director of communications for Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. “It goes against logic for anyone to claim that there are thousands of uninstalled homes in Milwaukee.”

The report found that other cities across the country, including San Francisco and Phoenix, are facing similar problems, but Milwaukee’s history of segregation and redlining has exacerbated plumbing poverty as well as the city’s location in the Rust Belt. The unforgiving downsizing of Milwaukee’s heavy industrial sector that began in the 1970s hit the city’s black middle class hardest, and parts of the city never recovered.

“The legacy of redlining, institutional discrimination and urbanism against blacks have created an unequal and unfair environment for people of color, especially black Milwaukeans,” the report said.

In 2017, 28 percent of those with incomplete plumbing were black, although blacks make up only 16.1 percent of metropolitan Milwaukee’s population.

“Future research is needed to examine the geography of overrepresentation among black Milwaukeeans and to examine whether the unequal outcomes of poverty outcomes in plumbing represent a new form of infrastructural redlining in the city,” the report said.

Kings College London has studied a handful of cities. Austin, Texas jumped from 17th to fifth place; Cleveland, 33rd through sixth; Nashville from 22nd to 12th; and Seattle from March 37th to 14th

A report published last year by Marc Levine, a professor emeritus of history, economic development, and urban research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, found that Milwaukee ranks last in the study of racial inequality in the country’s 50 largest metropolitan areas .

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