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

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. Incomplete plumbing affects over a million people in the USA. Analysis of individual and household data for the 2015–2019 period from the US–Mexico border reveals the unequal nature of plumbing poverty in the borderlands and provides insight for future planning.