Delaware, leading the nation in plumbing as the only state that has all counties below 0.5%.
Some of the data for the Northeast (and I’m sure elsewhere) is likely skewed by weekend camps / cabins / cottages / whatever you want to call them along lakes, rivers, and in mountain ranges.
Wow so many close to the reservations… Coincidence??
Apache and Navajo counties in NE AZ have cheap, rugged land. You’ll see people living in a 5th wheel or travel trailer with no plumbing, well, running water, or electricity. There are general stores/feed stores and laundromats that have showers for rent. They’ll have propane tanks for heating.
Looks a lot like a map of where no one lives
As a Canadian who has cold showers all summer and sometimes even in the winter, I could probably live without hot water in a lot of those southern blue blobs.
Alaska like “be a bear,.you know what to do”
Alaskans digging latrines in 2024
A lot of Alaska is low because you have 50-200 person communities that are entirely off the road system (to be fair there are ice roads to some of them in the winter). A proper water treatment plant costs like $50 million to build out here. For maybe 200 people. Everything has to be shipped to a hub, and then barged out to the community, then labor has to be flown in, and people have to be paid well enough to live without running water while they’re building said plant, said plant has to be built on melting permafrost… all of this for an area with basically zero economic output.
Do we know if this also includes reservations?
Roughly 30 years ago I performed a door to door water and sewage survey (Do you have running water? Do you have a flushing toilet?) of permanent homes in one of the dark blue counties. The survey had a religious (Amish) exclusion.
A shockingly high number of households didn’t have toilets or showers. Huge swathes of the county only had outdoor hand pumps for water. Some used ponds.
Although I should hope that these homes gained indoor toilets in that time, the continuation of crushing poverty doesn’t give me hope.
I grew up in that vertical blue strip in Wisconsin. It’s the Amish. More buggies than cars on the back roads around my hometown.
Interestingly, my neighboring county (Juneau) has a ban on outdoor plumbing, so the Amish density goes from 60 to 0 when you cross the county line.
I find my desire to live in Alaska somewhat lessened.
Good to see most of my state is doing well with this
That said the fact this map isn’t completely pale yellow color is disgusting.
Looking at the west, I say it tracks pretty well with the locations of native reservations.
Is it really fair to include rural Alaska?
Most won’t have pipes because they will burst, right?
17 comments
Source: Census Bureau
Tools: Datawrapper, Illustrator
More data [here](https://usafacts.org/articles/us-households-with-plumbing-poverty/), including an interactive map (in case you don’t happen to know the names of all 3,000+ counties and parishes).
Delaware, leading the nation in plumbing as the only state that has all counties below 0.5%.
Some of the data for the Northeast (and I’m sure elsewhere) is likely skewed by weekend camps / cabins / cottages / whatever you want to call them along lakes, rivers, and in mountain ranges.
Wow so many close to the reservations… Coincidence??
Apache and Navajo counties in NE AZ have cheap, rugged land. You’ll see people living in a 5th wheel or travel trailer with no plumbing, well, running water, or electricity. There are general stores/feed stores and laundromats that have showers for rent. They’ll have propane tanks for heating.
Looks a lot like a map of where no one lives
As a Canadian who has cold showers all summer and sometimes even in the winter, I could probably live without hot water in a lot of those southern blue blobs.
Alaska like “be a bear,.you know what to do”
Alaskans digging latrines in 2024
A lot of Alaska is low because you have 50-200 person communities that are entirely off the road system (to be fair there are ice roads to some of them in the winter). A proper water treatment plant costs like $50 million to build out here. For maybe 200 people. Everything has to be shipped to a hub, and then barged out to the community, then labor has to be flown in, and people have to be paid well enough to live without running water while they’re building said plant, said plant has to be built on melting permafrost… all of this for an area with basically zero economic output.
Do we know if this also includes reservations?
Roughly 30 years ago I performed a door to door water and sewage survey (Do you have running water? Do you have a flushing toilet?) of permanent homes in one of the dark blue counties. The survey had a religious (Amish) exclusion.
A shockingly high number of households didn’t have toilets or showers. Huge swathes of the county only had outdoor hand pumps for water. Some used ponds.
Although I should hope that these homes gained indoor toilets in that time, the continuation of crushing poverty doesn’t give me hope.
I grew up in that vertical blue strip in Wisconsin. It’s the Amish. More buggies than cars on the back roads around my hometown.
Interestingly, my neighboring county (Juneau) has a ban on outdoor plumbing, so the Amish density goes from 60 to 0 when you cross the county line.
I find my desire to live in Alaska somewhat lessened.
Good to see most of my state is doing well with this
That said the fact this map isn’t completely pale yellow color is disgusting.
Looking at the west, I say it tracks pretty well with the locations of native reservations.
Is it really fair to include rural Alaska?
Most won’t have pipes because they will burst, right?