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Micro-level inequalities in plumbing completeness along the US–Mexico borderlands

Nature Water volume 3, pages 793–805 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Plumbing poverty remains an issue in parts of the United States, including the US–Mexico borderlands. Previous research has suffered from data limitations including reliance on area-level data and small sample sizes. We address these limitations with American Community Survey restricted microdata. These individual- and household-level data permit us to assess social inequalities, including those related to intra-household demographic heterogeneity, in an incomplete plumbing border-wide analysis in the United States and by residence in a colonia (informal peri-urban settlements) versus non-colonia. We use restricted individual and household data for 2015–2019 (n = 145,500) with fine-scale geographic identifiers to locate households within/outside community water system and colonia boundaries. We employed multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression models. Half a percent of households had incomplete plumbing. Households without any non-Latinx white member and those with only foreign-born non-citizen members had greater odds of incomplete plumbing. Non-English-proficient households were more likely to experience incomplete plumbing. Additionally, incomplete plumbing was associated with disability, working age, poverty and home ownership. There were more inequalities outside of colonias than within them. This Article documents the unequal nature of plumbing poverty in the borderlands. Future initiatives and planning efforts must consider the specific inequalities experienced there to reduce plumbing poverty in the region.

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Fig. 1: US southern borderlands.

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Data availability

Data and code availability cannot be shared due to Census Bureau disclosure regulations and data protection laws related to data sensitivity. For more information on secure research facilities and access to Census Bureau microdata, you can fill out the Standard Application Process at https://www.census.gov/about/adrm/fsrdc/about.html or contact a regional Research Data Center adminstrator at https://www.census.gov/about/adrm/fsrdc/contact.html.

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. Kamimura and J. VanDerslice for their constructive feedback on an earlier version of this paper. Additionally, we are thankful to K. Ramos who aided in the construction and verification of the border-wide colonia boundaries utilized in the analysis. University of Utah funds were used to pay fees for the Federal Statistical Research Data Center project (#2717, principal investigator: T.W.C.) under which analyses for this paper were conducted. The US Census Bureau reviewed the data products reported in this paper to ensure appropriate access, use and disclosure avoidance protection of the confidential source data. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not represent the views of the US Census Bureau.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Ricardo Rubio, Sara E. Grineski & Daniel E. Adkins

  2. The School of Environment, Society and Sustainability, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Timothy W. Collins

  3. Department of Human and Organizational Development, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

    Yolanda J. McDonald

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Contributions

R.R. was responsible for conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, investigation, methodology and writing the original draft and review and editing. S.E.G. and T.W.C. were responsible for conceptualization, funding acquisition, methodology, supervision, validation and writing—review and editing. D.E.A. was responsible for methodolgy validation and writing. Y.J.M. was responsible for writing, review and editing, and provided access to her community water systems dataset.

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Correspondence to Ricardo Rubio.

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Nature Water thanks Shiloh Deitz, Raul Pacheco-Vega and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Rubio, R., Grineski, S.E., Collins, T.W. et al. Micro-level inequalities in plumbing completeness along the US–Mexico borderlands. Nat Water 3, 793–805 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-025-00463-2

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