Government
Why Water Costs 10 Times More in Flint Than in Phoenix
And what that says about how water is valued.
There’s something wrong with this picture: You’ll find some of the cheapest water in the U.S. in a desert metropolis, and the priciest within 40 miles of the Great Lakes.
According to a new report by Washington-based advocacy group Food & Water Watch, households in Phoenix, Arizona, paid an average of just $84.24 annually as of January 2015. Those in Flint, Michigan, paid $864.32—more than 10 times* as much. (The average in Michigan was $323.47, just a little over the national average.) These cities bookended the report’s cost-ranking of the 500 largest community water systems in the country. Their counterintuitive rankings—costly by the lakes, cheap in the desert—say a lot about how the U.S. values water.