Gregory Pierce

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · Luskin Center for Innovation

Several gaps remain in understanding individuals' water consumption reliance outcomes in disadvantaged communities. We utilize a cross-sectional sample of household-level survey data from predominantly low-income, minoritized households in Detroit, MI, to examine the relationship between tap and tap-alternative drinking water consumption and purcha...

Key Takeaways Community water systems (CWSs) underpin the US water supply network; the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) made historic investments to improve CWS regulatory compliance. Recognizing the need for a nationwide assessment of regulatory compliance to inform BIL funding priorities, two policy organization partners released a “Roadm...

In the United States, most residents receive water from centralized utilities regulated under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. Yet, a sizable portion of U.S. residents satisfy their household water needs through decentralized means, including domestic wells, very small water systems, and hauled water. These federally unregulated water users are...

This study uses data from the 2020 nationally-representative U.S. Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) to analyze the under-explored relationship between housing type, household characteristics, and two novel heat health risk measures. We use a combination of descriptive analysis and logistic regression models. The results show that renters...

Rising water bills across the U.S. underscore the need to understand the factors that contribute to disparities in local system bills. In this paper, we examine residential water bill amounts from 1,720 systems in four states in different regions of the U.S. (Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire and Wisconsin) to (1) examine how local system bills at a...

Scholars and policy makers alike frequently promote drinking water system consolidation as a solution to the longstanding struggles of small water systems and the related consequences of service fragmentation, including vulnerability to climate change and persistent racial and economic inequalities in access to safe and affordable drinking water. D...

Growing recognition of water quality concerns, particularly in socially vulnerable communities in the United States, has prompted recent policies and investments to improve drinking water system performance. Current environmental justice tools limit measurement of drinking water quality issues to proximity to point-source contamination, such as sup...

Households reliant on unregulated, non‐grid water and sanitation infrastructure, like private wells and septic systems, face water quality and reliability deficiencies and associated negative impacts on human health at greater proportions than households reliant on publicly‐regulated, water and sewage systems. This study uses the 2019 American Hous...

Rapid adaptation is necessary to maintain, let alone expand, access to reliable, safe drinking water in the face of climate change. Existing research focuses largely on the role, priorities, and incentives of local managers to pursue adaptation strategies while mostly neglecting the role of the broader public, despite the strong public support requ...

In the longstanding debate over efficiency and effectiveness in drinking water provision between public versus privately governed systems, one of the main contention points is the reasons for different bill levels imposed by city-run as compared to privately owned water systems. In this study, we examine one potential explanation for disparities in...

We examine the fairness of congestion pricing from two perspectives. First, using data from California’s six largest urban areas, we empirically estimate the share of the population that is both economically vulnerable and likely to be impacted by freeway congestion charges. Our estimates suggest that 13 % of households would fall into this categor...

Assumptions of trust in water systems are widespread in higher-income countries, often linked to expectations of “modern water.” The current literature on water and trust also tends to reinforce a technoscientific approach, emphasizing the importance of aligning water user perceptions with expert assessments. Although such approaches can be useful...

Natural treatment systems (NTS) for stormwater have the potential to provide a myriad of ecosystem services to society. Realizing this potential requires active collaboration among engineers, ecologists and landscape planners and begins with a paradigm shift in communication whereby these groups are made aware of each other's perceptions about NTS...

Heat is the deadliest weather-related hazard in the United States. This paper studies municipal heat adaptation using survey and planning data from California. We first analyze the characteristics of municipalities that innovate. Cities with heat-related policies have greater degrees of projected extreme heat, leadership support, environmental just...

Green stormwater infrastructure such as bioretention cells (BRCs) have the potential to influence human well-being through ecosystem services. Many services are regulated by vegetation, but only a handful (primarily regulating services) have been linked to specific plant functional traits that control their provisioning. Less attention has been pai...

Some cities directly provide drinking water and other utility services to their residents, whereas others contract out these responsibilities in full or in part, with considerable implications for service and non-service outcomes. There is a robust literature considering reasons for city-private provider binaries, as well as a growing number of stu...

This report is the first comprehensive analysis of how clean water is provided in a state (California), and estimation of how much it would actually cost to deliver safe water to every resident. The needs assessment does three things: (1) identifies California small water systems and domestic wells that are failing or at risk of failing to provid...

Stormwater infrastructure substantially impacts water quality and supply. In the U.S., local agency investments rely on public support from taxes or fees. Assessing individuals’ knowledge and willingness to pay helps inform potential pathways to funding and green infrastructure implementation. Using a 2018–2019 survey of 868 University of Californi...

Rapidly‐growing concern among scholars and policy makers over residential drinking water affordability in the United States highlights the need to identify and assess the efficacy of potential solutions to address this problem. Accordingly, in this advanced review of the literature, we examine the state of scholarly evidence over the last 30 years...

Despite their negative externalities, cars provide many benefits. Chief among these is the ability to travel to destinations within a reasonable time budget. Consequently, in the U.S. most households—even low-income households—own and use automobiles. But technological innovations may be altering this dynamic. New technology-facilitated services an...

U.S. public university campuses are held directly responsible for compliance with many of the same federal- and state-level environmental regulations as cities, including stormwater management. While operating as ‘cities within cities’ in many respects, campuses face unique constraints in achieving stormwater regulatory compliance. To compare the a...

As deadly and destructive wildfires become increasingly common in the western United States due to climate change, low-income households face particular difficulties recovering from these disasters. Despite this threat, surprisingly little empirical evidence exists about the exposure and vulnerability to wildfire hazards of residents of subsidized...

Safe and secure water is a cornerstone of modern life in the global North. This article critically examines a set of prevalent myths about household water in high‐income countries, with a focus on Canada and the United States. Taking a relational approach, we argue that household water insecurity is a product of institutionalized structures and pow...

Extreme heat is the leading weather-related cause of mortality in the United States, but there is little evidence about how this climate hazard affects residents of different housing types. In this study, we examine whether Californians living in subsidized housing are more vulnerable to extreme heat than those living in unsubsidized housing. We cr...

Outdoor watering of lawns accounts for about half of single-family residential potable water demand in the arid southwest United States. Consequently, many water utilities in the region offer customers cash rebates to replace lawns with drought tolerant landscaping. Here we present a parcel-scale analysis of water savings achieved by a “cash-for-gr...

Informed by the design of a program in California, we make a three-part argument for why state-level governments might consider implementing direct bill-assistance programs for drinking water service to address growing affordability concerns for low-income households. State-level operation of bill-assistance programs represents a departure from the...

Parking regulations are a central part of American zoning. There is mounting evidence about the negative effects of parking requirements on the environment and housing affordability. Given this evidence, some cities have reduced or eliminated parking requirements in certain areas. Our research examines how real estate developers respond to municipa...

As a response to profoundly poor air quality and associated environmental justice concerns in the San Joaquin Valley region in California, the Tune In & Tune Up (TI&TU) program provides residents with free vehicle emissions testing and vouchers for smog repair. We used data on approximately 19,000 repaired TI&TU vehicles from 2012 to 2018, and seve...

Residents of marginalised urban settlements in low- and middle-income countries jointly experience multiple short-term basic service deficits which impair their health and broader wellbeing. A wide range of bottom-up strategies has been identified and employed to enhance basic service access in these contexts, but few scholars have attempted to con...

Tap water mistrust has adverse impacts on health and welfare. This study identifies, defines and motivates attention to cases of mistrust of tap water which originate between the treatment plant and the tap where people ultimately consume it. Between treatment and the tap, water quality contamination can be introduced within two segments of the bui...

Building on a recent increase in scholarly attention to the problem of tap water mistrust and resulting negative health impacts, we examine the relationship between neighborhood reliance on tap water alternatives and a range of explanatory factors. We model retail water store locations as a proxy for reliance on tap water alternatives in urbanized...

Across the United States, poorly-performing, small drinking water systems operate under nominal public oversight in spatial patterns that neither cohere with other administrative jurisdictions nor conform to environmental, efficiency, or equity criteria. This study lays out the case for planning intervention to address the over-dispersion of drinki...

Using 2015 American Housing Survey data, this study generates the first national estimates of the use of drinking water alternatives among households who perceive their tap water to be unsafe. Multivariate regression models examine factors influencing both perception of tap water and the choice of tap alternatives. We find that minority households...

More than 6% of Americans live in mobile homes, and yet there has been limited scholarly attention to mobile home location or quality of life compared to conditions in other housing types. There has not been a single comprehensive study to date that assesses where mobile home parks (MHPs) are located within metropolitan areas, that explores why som...

The U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department designed the landmark Moving to Opportunity (MTO) Experiment for Fair Housing Voucher Program to help low-income households move out of and stay out of concentrated poverty. The program was designed based on the assumption that households benefit from living in higher-opportunity neighborhoods. Earl...

Existing evidence regarding drinking water access and environmental service access more broadly suggests that service provision is substandard in mobile home parks (MHPs). Insufficient water access conditions are particularly troubling given that a substantial proportion of the population resides in MHPs. There have been few targeted studies on env...

Basic service security remains grossly insufficient for many urban slum households in low-income and middle-income countries. While participation in collective action has often been hailed as the most effective means to secure improvements, households also employ standalone strategies to enhance service provision. Yet potential trade-offs or comple...

Many residents of urban areas face joint obstacles to basic service access, but these barriers are more prevalent and severe in slum settlements. Analyses of obstacles have typically been conducted in a piecemeal rather than synthetic framework and have focused on access to single services rather than the range of services needed to support househo...

Urban fiscal policy in India remains poorly understood compared to many rapidly urbanising countries. Using underutilised data from the 2001 Census Town Directory and state legislative records, this study examines the level of fiscal transfers from states to urban centres across India to assess the factors which influence urban dependency. The stud...

How individuals perceive the safety of their public drinking water influences whether they reach for the tap to quench their thirst, or an alternative such as bottled water or a sugary drink. In turn, mistrust of drinking water quality and subsequent reliance on alternative beverage sources can adversely impact health, welfare and the environment....

There is a major housing affordability crisis in many American metropolitan areas, particularly for renters. Minimum parking requirements in municipal zoning codes drive up the price of housing, and thus represent an important potential for reform for local policymakers. The relationship between parking and housing prices, however, remains poorly u...

Transportation enables low-income individuals to find and travel to employment. This article analyzes the relationship between access to automobiles and public transit and employment outcomes of low-income households. We use longitudinal survey data from participants in the Welfare to Work Voucher Program, which was conducted in five US metropolita...

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development sponsored two major experiments to test whether housing choice vouchers propelled low-income households into greater economic security, the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing program (MTO) and the Welfare to Work Voucher program (WTW). Using data from these programs,...

Unreliable water access significantly impairs household health and welfare. While press and policy reports suggest that residents of mobile home communities in the United States experience unreliable water access, scholarly examination of this issue has been lacking. Using data from the 2011 American Housing Survey, we first present descriptive evi...

Tenant-based rental vouchers have expanded housing choice for millions of low-income households, yet assisted households still face hurdles when trying to secure housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods with desirable economic, social, and environmental characteristics. Although inadequate transportation is arguably one of the most important hurdl...

Gregory Pierce and Donald Shoup critically respond to an article by Millard-Ball, Weinberger, and Hampshire on 'Parking Prices and Parking Occupancy in San Francisco'. The authors agree that random fluctuations in demand, regression to the mean, and endogenous price changes could have produced the parking occupancy results during the first year of...

This article explains changes in the literature on urban water privatization in low- and middle-income countries and demonstrates the need for a revised research agenda. Since the Great Recession, privatization practice has subtly evolved, but scholarship has been slow to follow. This period of shallow growth is characterized by phenomena that have...

Problem, research strategy, and findings: We evaluate the role of transportation in improving the employment outcomes of participants in the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) for Fair Housing Voucher Program, a 10-year demonstration project designed to enable low-income families to improve their outcomes by moving out of high-poverty neighborhoods. We us...

Political and economic reforms in India have made private sector participation (PSP) in urban water delivery a viable strategy for state and city policy, against the expectations of many scholars. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the development of temporal, geographic and stakeholder variation in urban water PSP within India. Basic...

Most travel behavior studies focus on discrete mode-choice outcomes. They predict the likelihood of traveling by a single mode (e.g. solo driving, carpooling, taking public transit, walking, and biking). Yet qualitative studies focusing on low-income households suggest that theirmode choice does not fit neatly into a single category; they regularly...

Bangladesh is generally considered to be one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world, with flooding, droughts and cyclones being the most common annual disaster events. This article provides an overview of existing social-protection programmes and government policies in the context of long-term adaptation to climate change related to sudd...

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Underpriced and overcrowded curb parking creates problems for everyone except a few lucky drivers who find a cheap space; all the other drivers who cruise to find an open space waste time and fuel, congest traffic, and pollute the air. Overpriced and underoccupied parking also creates problems; when curb sp...

This paper chronicles the implementation of water service privatization to combat severe water shortage in Mexico City, also known as the Distrito Federal (DF), from 1994 to 2011. Initially, the DF's administration successfully employed private actors to provide more extensive and efficient service while retaining public control of infrastructure....

Income, or the lack of it, influences household transportation decisions and the ways in which individuals travel. Low-income households are less likely to own cars and more likely to travel by modes other than the automobile. Less is known, however, about the specific determinants of travel among the poor, which was the purpose of this analysis. T...

How much do people with limited resources pay for cars, public transit, and other means of travel? How does their transportation behavior change during periods of falling employment and rising fuel prices? This research uses in-depth interviews with 73 adults to examine how rising transportation costs affect low-income families. The interviews exam...