Or just raise the price of water to a market level and let things work themselves out. people waste and act irrationally when they get something for less than it should cost.
To do this, though, you'd have to resolve the water rights issue first. The vast majority of water consumption is by farmers who are not in the same market as residential consumers. There's little point in making regular people pay a progressive rate for water usage.
> Or just raise the price of water to a market level and let things work themselves out.
This doesn't work well for something which is required to support life and a scarce resource.
The result would be that the very rich still continue to water their acre of front lawn, wasting a lot of water on something nonproductive because money is not an issue. Meanwhile poor and middle class people get priced out of being able to afford basic usage of water to live.
progressive water rates. Figure out a decent figure for a person to live on in a decent manner (say 100 gallons, or whatever), then make that 100 gallons super cheap, but go above that and it rapidly gets expensive.
Set the top marginal prices high and use all that money the rich people with mansions are paying to build up a bunch of infrastructure to go get more water.
Today's major consumers, on the other hand, don't present a way to capture the revenue like that, while still using the water in ways that are still nonproductive from a "why do we have to do this here" standpoint.
On the contrary, it works very well indeed, and far better than a centrally planned "equitable" allocation system. Such a system is the very reason we're in the pickle we're in!
> This doesn't work well for something which is required to support life and a scarce resource.
Actually free markets do very well for that. Free market farming in the US in 1800 was the first economy to provide a consistent food surplus.
As a counter-example, no country or society has ever managed to feed itself with collective agriculture. They always wind up starving and eating each other.
You can have progressive water rates. Everyone gets X gallons of water at the current rate, then the rate goes up by 10 times. Then perhaps another 10x for the top 1% of water usage.
Not doing anything makes the situation worse for everyone, poor people included.
The good thing about a market-based approach is that it might allow for water to be obtained from means that are currently economically non-viable. Perhaps high-volume water users would happily pay 1000x current prices, and at those prices, desalination, or other alternate forms of water collection become viable.
You might be able to give water to poor people for free. If there was a system where a households using under a certain volume of water could pay nothing, in exchange for freeing up water to be sold to large purchasers who pay 10-1000x the per gallon price.
Rich people can afford to game those rules. We don't have a rulemaking system that doesn't eventually cede to lobbying where flat, even rules evolve into entire regulatory systems that favor the rich
> You might be able to give water to poor people for free.
This would be a lot more fair. Allocate a reasonably small minimum amount of gallons/month/person and that is very cheap (maybe not free). Then have increasing tiers of expensive and much more expensive usage. If someone wants to have an acre of lawn it should cost them millions a month instead of just thousands as today.
Unfortunately some water systems in California have almost gone in the other direction to discourage conservation. During the previous drought they encouraged conservation and everyone did. Then they complained about not making enough money because people conserved.
Instead of raising the top-tier consumption rates to compensate, instead they raised the base rates by a huge amount (base rate being the flat monthly fee they charge even if you use zero gallons). It's not almost $100/month just to be connected even if usage is zero. So a poor family who conserves a lot and barely uses water is still stuck with a huge bill.
Pretty sure this is by design when possible California prefers regressive taxes. Some good examples: gas tax, vehicle registration, highest sales tax in the country (7.25%) with most counties raising it even more, parcel taxes, etc.
Actually, poor people pay significantly (2 orders magnitude) more per unit water than (presumably sometimes corporate) farmers, who are often growing cash crops that make almost no impact on feeding anyone in the area.
I don't disagree with the market being a fancy BS system to separate the working class from the wealth or anything, but you can't let your politics colour your perception in arenas you know nothing about. Otherwise you are ironically furthering the exact politic you probably hate - emotionally driven
This is fully detached from mainstream economic theory. Barring a few rural agriculturalists, people below the poverty line don’t make a dent in overall water usage - a small handful of wealthy individuals and organizations use the vast majority of water. Pricing water appropriately benefits those poor, rural agriculturalists in the long run too, as appropriate rationing means they don’t have to compete with their wealthier neighbors in a race-to-the-bottom arms war, drilling ever deeper into depleted aquifers and purchasing potable water for drinking.
Not to mention the bandaid solution of subsidizing water only up to, e.g., the first thousand gallons per resident per month.
> How are those with low/no income supposed to afford it.
They're not — they're supposed to suffer and die in a way that's "their fault" or that "couldn't be helped". Bolinas California is a prototypical example of this, where a complete ban on new water hookups has been the excuse to prevent any new housing construction at all since the civil rights era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolinas,_California#Bolinas_Co...
They ignore it because it's a non issue since. We do progressive pricing with all sorts of stuff and the amount of water needed to support a household is vastly different than a farm or other large scale operation.
Most cities already have progressive water costs. Enough to drink and bathe is cheapest, and overage to water huge lawns and fill pools costs more per gallon.
It seems you have misunderstood. This point is not about supply of water, it is about supply of dollars in a given wallet. Doesn't matter how much water is in supply: if someone cannot meet the price, they won't have access.
Any time there is a minimum price on something, people who cannot afford that price won't receive that thing. When that thing is water, they will die. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
"With new construction halted and Bolinas's desirability unabated—or enhanced—after the moratorium, housing became pricier. In 1979, to create more affordable housing, the District allowed property owners to build second units on their property. Today [2007], property owners waiting for a chance to develop outnumber property owners with [water] meters, and homes can easily fetch $1 million."
You will find it difficult to quantify a dollar-value of the damage done to people who would like to live in a particular place but have been locked out due to artificial constraints on housing supply. That's why it's such an effective strategy.
If you don't know of anyone in California who has died of thirst because of water cost, please don't assume that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
