Toxicity In Sociopolitical Areas

Sociopolitical factors such as race and economic class heavily impact access to safe and affordable drinking water. While infrastructural differences appear to be the cause of the water disparities, discriminatory housing policies, land use practices, and zoning laws caused low-income communities and communities of color to form on unwanted and unincorporated land and underlie the inequalities in water access and quality. When well-represented cities grew, they annexed land around unincorporated areas, which they often saw as transient and undesirable. The discriminatory expansion of cities left unincorporated communities under-resourced, and as a result, their infrastructure suffered, including infrastructure that would have provided access to potable water, leaving them ill-suited to combat both drought and pollution from various industries. Due to discrimination and exclusionary housing practices, unincorporated communities grew around agricultural land or industrial areas. Additionally, industries formed and grew near these unincorporated areas because of zoning laws or their proximity to available and cheap labor and materials. The communities’ proximity to industry and industrial agriculture has only exacerbated the pollution from nitrates, arsenic, and other pollutants as well as the depletion of …show more content…
The extreme consequences of the drought drew attention to the drastic disparities in drinking water access that exist in California. It revealed that many communities lack the fundamental human right to potable water despite living in California, an environmentally progressive state in one of the most heavily industrialized and wealthiest countries in the