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.
We will have a housing and water crisis as it will bring investors and speculators. It has destroyed oil prices, housing, land, etc.
Our market is a sham. Tying essential life-giving water to it was a mistake.