Our sewer backups always seemed to happen on Thanksgiving Day or at a similarly inconvenient time. Our remedy of preemptive roto-rootering was effective until our line to the street just fell apart (as we discovered when returning home from the hospital where my husband had spent two days as doctors tried to figure out why he was having heart attack symptoms – such is life). On an emergency basis (so much more expensive – at least it was summer time), we had to replace the entire pipe running from street to house – a ceramic pipe installed when the house was built in 1894 – with a new plastic pipe. Since the houses on our street were all built in the same decade, the neighbors took note and, over the next year or two, the street’s front lawns were busy with backhoes.
Parts of Boston and other cities in MA are like Philly, though I don’t know if there are any wooden pipes still in operation! A major part of the Boston Harbor Project, and its expense, was reconfiguring much of Boston’s sewer and its entire water treatment system. The expense of sewers and water treatment contributes to the difficulty of addressing the problem of affordable housing, esp. in rural, suburban, and exurban locations: extending sewer lines and/or increasing the capacity of existing lines is beyond the means of many towns.