Access to clean, affordable water is essential for life—and a human right. Despite this, thousands of households across Chicago face the twin crises of unaffordability and brain-damaging lead when it comes to their drinking water.

Chicago required that buildings use lead service lines until 1986. Since then, city actions via the water main replacement program and recently halted water meter installation program have been shown to increase risks from lead in water for some households. At the same time, Chicago's water and sewer bills have tripled in the last decade.

According to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, no safe blood level of lead has been identified for young children, and even low levels can affect IQ, behavior and learning, so all possible exposure sources must be addressed.

For youth in Little Village, Pilsen, the Southeast Side and countless other majority Black and Latinx neighborhoods, risks associated with lead in drinking water are just the beginning. Children also face lifetime consequences of a toxic cocktail of lead in paint of older housing stock, lead in soil of front yards and parks from industrial pollution, and lead in the air from industrial emissions.

While the city says that Chicago’s water consistently meets or exceeds all standards set by the U.S. EPA, Illinois EPA and drinking water industry, the problem comes from the service lines around homes.

Hit hardest by these risks, Chicago's low-income communities of color are the least able to shoulder the resulting financial and public health burdens. In Little Village, 93 percent of residences were built before 1970, and over 64 percent of households are renter-occupied.

Parents note the shame of struggling to afford filters and providing water for their kids that they cannot guarantee is lead-free. For those whose children have attended any of the schools or child care facilities where testing found lead in drinking water—a practice now required by state law—the distress is most acute.

Families have also told of landlords who have little incentive to fund out-of-pocket lead service line replacement due to high permitting and labor costs of these projects on a building-by-building basis.

As one resident asked, "Chicago charges us for water we struggle to buy. Chicago required lead pipes. Why can't they help fix the problems they created? Do the math: Wouldn't that be safer and cheaper?"

Knowing their water may contain lead only compounds the blow of increasingly expensive drinking water. When low-income tenants or their landlords fall behind on payments and have their water shut off, they tell of extreme psychological and physical burdens of lacking water for basic functions. When driven to reconnect their water out of desperation, violating Department of Water protocols, residents are made to pay a $500 fine with each incident, with no access to payment plans unless they can pay 50 percent of what they owe upfront.

An in-depth investigation by WBEZ and American Public Media revealed that this pattern is widespread across Chicago as illegal reconnections outpace legal ones. There were 150,000 disconnections issued and $7 million in fees and fines collected in the last decade, over $2 million of which came from the city's 10 poorest ZIP codes.

Environmental justice requires bold work by the city and state to accept the consequences of harm to the public's health and economic well-being as a result of their own laws and policies, and to work in collaboration with communities to change the status quo.

To respond to our water crises, Chicago must continue Mayor Lori Lightfoot's moratorium on water shut-offs. The Department of Water must reform and lower billing and fine structures so that access to the city's life-giving water does not transform into destructive debt for low-income families here and in the nearby suburbs.

Illinois and Chicago need to lead the charge for statewide requirements that all water utilities plan for filter distribution and taking all lead out of our water systems, starting with communities facing the most cumulative risks. Illinois and Chicago must also spearhead creation of water assistance programs to support the households struggling most with their bills.

There is too much at stake to wait.

Juliana Pino is policy director at the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization.