Water Insecurity on Skid Row: The Role of Water in the Spread of Disease

What is your favorite brand of water? Fiji? Smart Water? Dasani? Anything but Arrowhead, right? This lighthearted debate over which water brands are the worst and which are the best has taken over social media — to the extent that TikTok has even created an entire filter dedicated to assigning people a brand of water based on their appearance. For many of us reading this paper, having a water brand preference, or jokingly criticizing Arrowhead, is not given a second thought. In fact, our day-to-day access to safe water for drinking and cleaning and how that contributes to the quality of our health is unappreciated, especially within our USC bubble. However, for millions of families around the globe and in our own communities, sickness and disease is a constant threat due to the lack of potable water and basic sanitation services. While some may suggest that governmental legislation is the best way to combat the spread of disease caused by water insecurity, I argue instead that the non-profit nature of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) facilitates the most effective aid, because of their humanitarian approach that emphasizes the needs of underserved individuals.

The residents of Skid Row, the epicenter of Los Angeles’s homelessness and addiction crisis, are one of California’s greatest victims of water insecurity. But how did that come to be? How is it that immediately outside the strict borders of USC, a university filled with some of the most privileged students in the world, lies an entire community that struggles to obtain basic necessities? Coty Montag from the Legal Defense and Educational Fund describes the evolution of waterworks systems in communities similar to Skid Row. During America’s 19th century “building years,” there was heavy investment in infrastructure, particularly the construction of citywide public waterworks systems. However, Black Americans were segregated into filthy, disinvested areas that lacked access to these water and sewage services. From 1896 to 1897, Dr. Du Bois, a social scientist and author, found that “just under 14 percent of the [9,000 Black Philidephians] he surveyed had access to bathrooms or water closets” (Montag 2019). As a result of both the lack of opportunity for sanitation and extreme crowding in these enclaves, “black people (as well as newly-arriving immigrants and the poor) were especially vulnerable to and often blamed for the spread of epidemic disease” (Montag 2019). Although these specific statistics were obtained from a survey in Philadelphia, parallel events took place in Los Angeles, as the use of urban planning to further discriminate against minority populations was a nationwide phenomenon. From the start, predominantly Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, namely Skid Row, lacked the infrastructure and government funding necessary to support the development of a self-sufficient community with basic utilities. Despite the drastic technological and infrastructural improvements in Los Angeles since the construction of waterworks systems in America over a century ago, the residents of Skid Row today are still plagued with basic water and sanitation challenges.

Today, upon a simple first glance of Skid Row, the lack of water and sanitation services is evident. When I visited Skid Row with a local organization just a few weeks ago to deliver gallons of water to unhoused residents, I passed by several murky green water puddles that were littered with floating garbage. In addition to the visible lack of sanitation in the community, individual residents explicitly expressed their reliance on these weekly water deliveries. Public access to drinkable water on the Row is extremely limited, if not obsolete. In fact, “in Skid Row, there are only five public water fountains for a population of roughly 5,000 people” (Kanbarian 2020). The problem has grown so severe that the “residents of Skid Row often trap rain runoff — possibly full of waterborne pathogens — or tap into fire hydrants” in order to quench their thirst (Aoun 2021). Beyond the dangers posed by the consumption of unsanitized water from rain and fire hydrants, inadequate access to clean water for hygiene services has led to “cases of hepatitis A and murine typhus outbreaks” (Portillo et al.). Not only does water insecurity create short term deprivation, but it also creates long term health issues by making entire communities more susceptible to sickness and disease.

In an attempt to mitigate these problems in the past, the city of Los Angeles has passed legislation aimed at cleansing the city’s underserved neighborhoods, particularly Skid Row. In 2014, the “Los Angeles City Council authorized a $3.7-million skid row cleanup plan” (Holland 2014) to eliminate squalor that contributes to the growth and spread of fatal disease, such as the hepatitis A and murine typhus outbreaks mentioned previously. Despite the Council’s original intent to simply sanitize Skid Row without disrupting the residents, local police today go on weekly “street sweeping” missions that actively destroy personal property in an effort to push out and further displace the homeless. This method provides absolutely no benefit to the unsheltered population of the community. Instead, “street sweeping” soley caters to the more affluent members of the community that want to elevate their neighborhood by eliminating the appearance of poverty. In this, governmental organizations neglect the needs and desires of homeless individuals because the homeless are not as able to financially and politically contribute to the city via taxes and voting as the more affluent residents are. Instead of genuinely prioritizing the people, politicians prioritize their own motives to generate profit and maintain their status by pandering to the wealthiest members within their jurisdiction. In other words, government officials view the homeless as simply a burden to be rid of. This perspective proved especially dangerous when the world was suddenly forced to face one of the most rapidly spreading viruses it has seen in a century: Coronavirus.

Although the onset of the pandemic was catastrophic for everyone, everywhere, unsheltered individuals were especially “susceptible to contracting COVID-19 because of cramped quarters, utensil sharing, and lack of proper sanitation facilities” (Lima et al.). Immediately, “local governments…[did] not have the capacity…to contain the virus and mitigate its effects on our most vulnerable groups [the homeless]…because of budget cuts or a lack of commitment” (Neto et al.). Because of the unwillingness of local governments to allocate sufficient time, funds, and resources to homeless populations, legislative corner-cutting approaches created even greater problems. In a hasty attempt to mitigate the spread of Covid, the city of Los Angeles shut off the mere five public water fountains that were available on Skid Row — and have yet to turn them back on today. Instead of providing extra resources and safety materials, such as disinfectant wipes, liquid hand sanitizer, and masks, to Skid Row’s crowded community, the city chose a costless “solution”. As a result, the residents were not only left with the same lack of materials as before to combat the increasingly deadly virus, but are now even more deprived of water than they were already. In this, it is important to propose solutions that can provide both immediate and long term relief to the homeless without causing them further burdens.

As an alternative, next steps should be to stray away from governmental policy and transition towards non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Already, NGOs offer a higher quality of aid because their coordinators and volunteers are not motivated by profit and power like government officials are. One local NGO that supports Skid Row residents weekly is Water Drop Los Angeles. According to the official Water Drop Los Angeles webpage, “to be hydrated, the average person needs about half a gallon of water a day” (2020). To help meet this need, every Sunday, Water Drop Los Angeles delivers over 2,000 gallons of water, along with any available sanitation supplies and food, to the 5,000 residents on Skid Row (Water Drop Los Angeles 2020). By consistently providing potable water, Water Drop Los Angeles not only alleviates temporary thirst, but, more importantly, prevents the contraction of waterborne diseases. Because NGOs lack the same ulterior motives that drive governmental organizations, NGOs have genuine intentions of uplifting unsheltered individuals, and thus are more equipped to successfully provide both reparative and preventative support.

Though the efforts of Water Drop Los Angeles have seen success on Skid Row, comparable community engagement is not available everywhere. Just southeast of Los Angeles, on the border of Texas and Mexico, “residents living in sixty El Paso colonias are not connected to community water systems…Instead, residents rely on water delivery trucks to fill…plastic storage tanks. [However,] trucked water…is not considered potable, and many residents experience skin rashes due to contamination” (Jepson and Vandewalle). Throughout North America alone, millions of people are stricken with waterborne illnesses due to inequitable urban planning, particularly inequitable distribution of community water systems. While the restructuring of entire communities and their infrastructures may reverse these inequalities, it is an unrealistic solution. Instead, the expansion of the work of NGOs similar to Water Drop Los Angeles across America and potentially to other countries can significantly curtail the spread of waterborne disease by providing safe, potable water. Beyond the prevention of the spread of disease through immediate, short term water provisions, the onset of Coronavirus and its unknown lifespan illustrate the need for long term solutions as well.

When scientists announced that the Coronavirus may be here to stay, communities were quick to generate long term plans of action. Because little was known about the virus’s spread and adaptations, Los Angeles looked at other countries that experienced similar outbreaks for insight. As a result, some of Los Angeles’s NGO initiatives to combat the spread of Covid-19 today were “inspired by [the] Congo’s earlier community efforts” (DiGuiseppi et al. 9) in combating the Ebola epidemic by placing hand washing stations throughout the country. One LA-based NGO that advocates for similar measures is Water Box. Water Box aims to alleviate water insecurity by installing public water fountains and sanitation spaces, such as bathrooms and showers, “that can be hooked up to any water line. The water…passes through three filters and a UV treatment, ensuring it’s free of lead, bacteria and other contaminants” (Aoun 2021). Opposite to the approach of the Los Angeles City Council in removing public water supplies, Water Box creates more public water stations, and thus, creates more opportunities for Skid Row residents to have long term access to hygiene and sanitation services. As seen through the work of Water Drop Los Angeles and Water Box, investment in NGOs over governmental organizations is significantly more beneficial to underserved communities. However, despite the successes of community engagement in both Los Angeles and the Congo in mitigating the spread of disease through water and sanitation provisions, it is not enough for just select regions to have such services.

Solutions, both short and long term, to combating the spread of disease require widespread, collective efforts. As demonstrated by the not-so-global approach to the Covid pandemic, if one country is continually doing a poor job of controlling the spread, the consequences extend to the rest of the world. Because legislative approaches have proven inequitable, the solution to reducing disease outbreaks that are caused by the consumption of contaminated water and inadequate access to hygiene services is by reallocating funding from governmental organizations to NGOs. This raises the greater issue of the government’s inability to fulfill their responsibilities to the people, and how that should change: whether it’s through reversing deeply rooted corruption, or humbling the extent of political power.

Works Cited

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