Affordability

• Author: Michael Curley
• Pages: 27-30

27

Chapter 3—Affordability

A

year or so after the CWA was amended in 1987 to create the CWSRF,

some folks at EPA began to wonder if people could aord the new

loan program. Grants were free, but loans were not. Were communi-

ties across the country going to be able to repay these new loans?

So, they convened a meeting at EPA for the specic purpose of discussing

the “concept of aordability.” Most people there were EPA folks; but they

invited a few outsiders. ese discussions went very well, but there was one

gentleman, an economist from EPA, who sat there with his arms folded

across his chest, visibly upset. Final ly, no longer able to conta in himself,

he blurted out: “In the world of classica l economics, there is no such thing

as t he ‘concept of aordability’.” To which one of the outside participants

gently responded: “Yes, but in t he real world, there is no such thing a s clas-

sical economics.”

ere are two aordability issues: community aordability and individual

aordability. ey are not mutually exclusive. You wi ll have cases of indi-

vidual unaordability in the wealthiest communities. And, perhaps surpris-

ingly, there are also c ases of individual unaordability in places where there

is community unaordability as well.

We will deal with community afordability rst.

Back in the mid-1990s, the Environmental Finance Center at the Univer-

sity of Maryland convened a meeting to discuss the dilemma of a small town

in western Maryland situated on a tributary of the Potomac River. Just a few

feet below the surface of the la nd was a stratum of solid bedrock. is was a

rural community where all of the homes had septic systems. But because of

the bedrock below, the septic systems did not work very well. e scientists

from the state were puzzled with the readings they were getting on their

downstream water quality tests. After much investigation, they concluded

that the problem was coming from the little town’s septic systems sitting

on bedrock. So, the state ordered the town to install sewers. ere were two

problems with this requirement. First, to install the sewer mains they would

have to blast out the bedrock. And, second, the homes in this town were not

very close together. ey were going to need several hundred ex tra feet of

sewer mains. So, this wa s going to be a very expensive enterprise.