You’ve probably noticed that your electric and gas bills in D.C. have been getting more and more expensive recently. Well, now your water bill might do the same.

Over the holidays, D.C. Water announced what would amount to a rate increase for many homeowners, tenants, and businesses in the city. The increase comes by way of a fee that’s tacked onto every bill based on the proportion of a property that’s impervious to water — surfaces like roofs, parking lots, or cement driveways. D.C. Water says it now has an improved way to measure these surfaces allowing it to better align the appropriate amount of the fee to any home.

The increase is linked to a years-long effort to clean up the Potomac and Anacostia rivers by dramatically reducing the amount of stormwater runoff flowing into them (both from old sewers and impervious surfaces). But its abrupt implementation prompted enough questions and complaints from residents that D.C. Water now says it’s holding off on imposing it until it can better explain what’s going on. 

Here’s everything you need to know.

CRIAC, ERUs – what the heck is all this?

It’s easy to get lost in all of the acronyms being thrown around, but you need to understand them to know why your water bill might go up.

They’re part of D.C. Water’s Clean Rivers Project, a multi-year $3.5 billion infrastructure project kicked off in 2009 to clean up the city’s rivers. The heart of the project is the construction of 18 miles of underground tunnels that will hold runoff before sending it to be treated, preventing past practices of just dumping it untreated into the rivers. Those tunnels are being paid for in large part by the Clean Rivers Impervious Area Charge (CRIAC), a fee assessed on properties in the city based on how much impervious surface they have. 

That fee is measured as an Equivalent Residential Unit (ERU); 1 ERU is roughly 1,000 square feet of impervious surface on your property, and each ERU now costs homeowners around $24 a month. The bigger the home and the more of the land that is impervious, the more ERUs you’ll be assessed and the larger the CRIAC fee you will pay. In 2025, the average citywide CRIAC payment was $23.24 — or $278 a year — but it varied significantly, ranging from $19.29 in Ward 8 to $34.69 in Ward 3.

So what is D.C. Water actually doing differently now that’s leading to higher bills?

In short, it’s not that D.C. Water has dramatically raised the rate for every ERU – they’ve gone up a few bucks a year recently – but rather that the utility says they’ve gotten better at measuring impervious surfaces. A new aerial assessment of D.C. was conducted in March 2025 — the first in almost a decade.

“We utilize aerial imagery to calculate measurements,” writes D.C. Water spokeswoman Sherri Lewis in an email to The 51st. “Advances in aerial imagery allow us to measure impervious areas more precisely including areas that may not have been previously detected in 2016, to provide equitable assessments and ensure everyone is paying their fair share across the District.”

Say D.C. Water missed that patio of yours the last time it did a survey almost a decade ago. Well, it’s not missing it anymore — and that’s going to be reflected on your monthly bill. Or maybe tree cover made it tough to fully assess your property the last time D.C. Water did so, back in 2016. Not anymore.

How significant are some of the changes to water bills?

It all depends on your property, but in one letter to a resident we saw, a home that had been charged for 1 ERU would now be charged for 2.4 of them. So if that single ERU would have cost that homeowner some $24 every month ( the going rate this year), the new survey and assessment would increase it to almost $58 — a jump of 140%. 

Now, not everyone in D.C. is going to see that type of increase — or an increase at all. Lewis says 72% of the city’s 110,000 residential customers should see no change, 2% will see a decrease, and 26% are in line for an uptick.

But nothing about my house has changed. Why is my bill going up?

Needless to say, if you’re in that 26%, you may feel like you’re getting soaked, especially if you say nothing about your home or property is any different now than it was years ago.

“There has been no change to our impervious area since we purchased our home in 2001,” wrote one irate resident this week on a neighborhood listserv. Others quickly chimed in to agree.

It’s concerns like these that prompted quick complaints from residents and elected officials, as did understandable questions about why D.C. Water took almost a decade to conduct a new aerial assessment of the city — and whether the utility would share maps of both so residents could scrutinize them and appeal any increases. 

“You may have chosen to put in pervious pavers or some other way to do stormwater management rather than just paving over a surface,” says Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen, who chairs the council committee that oversees D.C. Water. “But a picture from a satellite doesn’t capture that very well, which puts the onus back on the homeowner if they’re seeing these big charges.”

D.C. Water was quick to concede that there are more questions than solid answers or explanations. “Our initial communication did not provide enough information or time for you to fully understand the change,” wrote the utility in letters to customers announcing that it would pause the implementation of the new charges. During this pause, D.C. Water says it will be working to “provide clearer explanations about how impervious areas are measured,” as well as giving customers “time to review their property data and understand what changed.”

How long is this pause going to last? And will water bills continue to go up?

D.C. Water hasn’t said how long it will hold off on imposing the new charges; officials tell The 51st that the priority now is better communicating why some bills are going up and addressing concerns from individual homeowners. 

Still, at some point they will go up — and then continue going up. While construction on the Clean Rivers Project tunnels is expected to wrap up in 2030,  work is underway on the Potomac tunnel near the Kennedy Center, and soon to start on the Piney Branch tunnel. The CRIAC fees are expected to be around for a lot longer than that to help pay for all the work.

Per documents submitted to the council last year, monthly CRIAC fees will continue to go up through 2030 (when they will top out at more than $32 per ERU per month), and then stabilize around $29 a month in the years after. 

And complaints about those fees are likely to flare up again. It was almost a decade ago that churches and non-profit groups said the CRIAC fees — which some dismissively referred to as a “rain tax” — were a heavy burden for them, threatening their continued existence in the city. In response, the council created a mechanism for D.C. Water to offer them some relief. (For a list of all assistance programs, check here.)

Now, it’s always worth remembering that all of this is for a good cause: cleaning up the Anacostia and Potomac rivers. And while doing so is a slow and somewhat painful slog, it seems to be showing results. Last year the Anacostia Watershed Society said that “overall the river continues steady progress toward a clean and healthy future.” A large part of that is the tunnels that have already been built to hold stormwater runoff when D.C. gets hit by large storms; D.C. Water says the tunnels already functioning have helped achieve a 98% reduction in sewage runoff into the rivers.

Things I’ve been thinking about lately …

I broke my back skiing when I was a teenager. It’s still screwed up and I occasionally tweak it, leaving me in agony for a few days. When I’m in pain I’ve noticed: I’m irritable, short-tempered, and impatient. I try hard to not be, but pain can override the best intentions.

One lesson I’ve tried to learn is that whenever I see someone being a jerk, my knee-jerk reaction is to think, “What an asshole.” My second reaction is: maybe his back hurts.

It’s not an excuse, but a reminder that all behavior makes sense with enough information. You can always see people’s actions, but rarely (if ever) what’s happening in their head.

Here’s a related point: Most harm done to others is unintentional. I think the vast majority of people are good and well-meaning, but in a competitive and stressful world it’s easy to ignore how your actions affect others.

Roy Baumeister writes in his book Evil:

Evil usually enters the world unrecognized by the people who open the door and let it in. Most people who perpetrate evil do not see what they are doing as evil. Evil exists primarily in the eye of the beholder, especially in the eye of the victim.

One consequence of this is that it’s easy to underestimate bad things happening in the world. If I ask myself, “How many people want to cause harm?” I’d answer “very few.” If I ask, “How many people can do mental gymnastics to convince themselves that their actions are either not harmful or justified?” I’d answer … almost everybody.

An iron rule of math is that 50% of the population has to be below average. It’s true for income, intelligence, health, wealth, everything. And it’s a brutal reality in a world where social media stuffs the top 1% of moments of the top 1% of people in your face.

You can raise the quality of life for those below average, or set a floor on how low they can go. But when a majority of people expect a top 5% outcome the result is guaranteed mass disappointment.

I think the majority of society problems are all downstream of housing affordability. The median age of first-time homebuyers went from 29 in 1981 to 40 today. But the shock this causes is so much deeper than housing. When young people are shut out of the life-defining step of having their own place, they’re less likely to get married, less likely to have kids, have worse mental health, and – my theory – more likely to have extreme political views, because when you don’t feel financially invested in your community you’re less likely to care about the consequences of bad policy.

Every economic issue is complex, but this one seems pretty straight forward: we should build more homes. Millions of them, as fast as we can. It’s the biggest opportunity to make the biggest positive impact on society.

I heard someone say recently that the reason so many people are skeptical AI will improve society – or are terrified it will do the opposite – is because it’s not clear the internet (and phones) made their life better.

That’s a subjective point, but it got me thinking: Imagine if you asked people 25 years after these things were invented whether life was better or worse because of their existence: Electricity, radio, airplane, refrigeration, air conditioning, antibiotics, etc.

I think nearly everyone would say “better.” It wouldn’t even be a question.

The internet is unique in the history of technology because there’s a list of things it improved (communication, access to information) but another list of things it likely made worse for almost everybody (political polarization, dopamine addiction from social media, less in-person interaction, lower attention spans, the spread of misinformation.)

There aren’t many examples throughout history of technology so universal with so many obvious downsides relative to what existed before it. But the wounds are so fresh that it’s not surprising many look at AI with the same fear.

This is more hope than prediction, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in 20 years we look back at this era of political nastiness as a generational bottom we grew out of.

There’s a long history of Americans cycling through how they feel about government and how politicians treat each other.

The 1930s were unbelievably vicious. There was a well organized plot to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt and replace him with a Marine general named Smedley Butler, who would effectively become dictator. The Great Depression made Americans lose so much faith in government that the prevailing view was, “hey, might as well give this a shot.”

It would have sounded preposterous if someone told you in the 1930s that by the 1950s more than 70% of Americans said they trusted the government to do the right thing almost all the time. But that’s what happened.

And it would have sounded preposterous in the 1950s if you told Americans within 20 years trust would collapse amid the Vietnam War and Watergate.

It would have sounded preposterous if you told Americans in the 1970s that within 20 years trust and faith in government would have surged amid 1990s prosperity and balanced budgets.

And equally absurd if you told Americans in the 1990s that we’d be where we are today.

Cycles are so hard to predict, because it’s easier to forecast in straight lines. What’s almost impossible to detect in real time is the same forces fueling public opinion plant the seeds of their own demise. When times are good, people get complacent and stop caring about good governance. When times are bad they get fed up and say, “Enough of this.” And I think we’re not far from that today.

I have a theory about nostalgia: It happens because the best survival strategy in an uncertain world is to overworry. When you look back, you forget about all the things you worried about that never came true. So life appears better in the past because in hindsight there wasn’t as much to worry about as you were actually worrying about at the time.

Autism diagnoses have increased but only because of progressively weaker standards for what counts as autism.

The autistic community is a large, growing, and heterogeneous population, and there is a need for improved methods to describe their diverse needs. Measures of adaptive functioning collected through public health surveillance may provide valuable information on functioning and support needs at a population level. We aimed to use adaptive behavior and cognitive scores abstracted from health and educational records to describe trends over time in the population prevalence of autism by adaptive level and co-occurrence of intellectual disability (ID). Using data from the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, years 2000 to 2016, we estimated the prevalence of autism per 1000 8-year-old children by four levels of adaptive challenges (moderate to profound, mild, borderline, or none) and by co-occurrence of ID. The prevalence of autism with mild, borderline, or no significant adaptive challenges increased between 2000 and 2016, from 5.1 per 1000 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 4.6–5.5) to 17.6 (95% CI: 17.1–18.1) while the prevalence of autism with moderate to profound challenges decreased slightly, from 1.5 (95% CI: 1.2–1.7) to 1.2 (95% CI: 1.1–1.4). The prevalence increase was greater for autism without co-occurring ID than for autism with co-occurring ID. The increase in autism prevalence between 2000 and 2016 was confined to autism with milder phenotypes. This trend could indicate improved identification of milder forms of autism over time. It is possible that increased access to therapies that improve intellectual and adaptive functioning of children diagnosed with autism also contributed to the trends.

The data is from the US CDC.

Hat tip: Yglesias who draws the correct conclusion:

Study confirms that neither Tylenol nor vaccines is responsible for the rise in autism BECAUSE THERE IS NO RISE IN AUTISM TO EXPLAIN just a change in diagnostic standards.

Earlier Cremieux showed exactly the same thing based on data from Sweden and earlier CDC data.

Happy New Year. This is indeed good news, although oddly it will make some people angry.

The post Autism Hasn’t Increased appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Why Everyone Loves Japan — “Even more astonishing than my interview with Kodansha is the fact that to this day, I have not met a single Japanese person who has heard of the word ‘weeb’.”

The Next Renaissance is Coming

Vogue on Instagram: “Did @tchalamet study giraffes to prepare for his role in “Marty Supreme”? Yes, yes he did.

Epicycles All The Way Down. Not really sure what this means but, food for thought.

We simply do not know what a human being who has read a billion books looks like, if it is even feasible, so an immortal who has read a billion books feels about as smart as a human who has read a few dozen.

How To Find Time To Do Science

Strategy means sticking to what matters the most. On the science front, that’s getting results and writing about them. And so I try to spend most of my science time on this. These are the only things that matter. And so if I’m not doing either, I question why. … To reiterate – doing science means learning about the world, then communicating the results. That’s the ultimate end point, so it’s the thing I try to spend the most time on.

Statistics is a Scientific Instrument 

We don’t often think about statistics as being in the same category as a microscope. But if you think about it, it’s a tool (built with math rather than physical engineering) that enables us to observe phenomena in the world that are invisible with the naked eye. … Statistics is a powerful instrument, but like any instrument, it provides evidence that then needs interpretation to infer what’s going on with the underlying phenomena – it doesn’t generate truth directly. Look at the X-ray crystallography image of DNA: it’s nowhere near obvious that you’re looking at a double helix. Statistics is the same. The problem is that many people – both practitioners using the tool and people listening to them – treat it as some kind of oracle.

Book Week 2025, Day 6: The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, by John Muir Laws

Fix Your Gut Health Forever by Thinking About Ice Cream

The first time I had the sense that I really needed a green vegetable, it shocked me. It was a new feeling. I’d had cravings before—the standard kind, for carbs and sweets and salty crunchy junk—and this was similar, but it was also distinct. There was a subtlety to it, a strength without the familiar urgency of carb addiction. Make no mistake: I’d always enjoyed green vegetables. But even in the deepest depths of my finals week burrito marathons, I’d never once craved them. 

On the same theme: Self Selection of Diet by Newly Weaned Infants: An Experimental Study

Blind Spot Light vs Rear View Camera

In a hostile information environment, you want surface, NOT solve.

…

If the blind spot light stops working, you might think it was safe to turn.

If your fact checker made an error, you might update your world model with the error.

Reliance on these kinds of signals I think is worse than not having a signal at all. If I know that I do not know (whether there is a car there), I am forced to manually turn my head, or be more careful as I turn.

Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost? “The admissions in private that Oliver Sacks’ stories were too good to be true were less equivocal than what he hinted at in the preface to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” (literalbanana)