Calif. homeowners slowly getting rid of green lawns
AGOURA HILLS, Calif. — Erin Brockovich made her name decades ago as an environmental activist who exposed corporate wrongdoing that polluted drinking water.
So she felt a bit defensive when a television reporter asked how her name landed on a list of water guzzlers during a dire California drought. At one point last year, she received a $1,700 bill for two months of water and fines.
Brockovich ultimately decided she had to get rid of her lawn, a central part of the backyard oasis she had built over more than two decades living in Agoura Hills, a suburb of large homes with immaculate yards about 40 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. She replaced 3,100 square feet of grass with high-tech artificial turf.
“This is not a fire drill, and every one of us has to participate,” she said. “We have to get past the blame and sadness of it.”
For the better part of a century, the lawn has been one of Southern California’s most durable middle-class fantasies: a single-family house with a manicured emerald yard that always remains lush — even in the dead of summer when much of the region’s native vegetation is golden brown.
But as climate change exposes the limits of the water supply, homeowners and water officials say the end of the thirsty lawn may finally be here.
Where residents once looked askance at any yard that resembled a desert diorama, there are now parades of gravel beds studded with cacti, native plant gardens and artificial turf. The change reflects a different kind of neighborly peer pressure, supercharged by stringent new water restrictions that took effect in June.
Over most of the past year, 300 applicants a month sought rebates that paid homeowners to swap out grass, according to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which distributes water to utilities serving 19 million people. In May, the number jumped to 870. By June, it was almost 1,400.
Many don’t even need cash incentives. A recent study by the water agency found that for every 100 homeowners who took advantage of rebates, an additional 132 nearby also made the switch.
In Woodland Hills, a neighborhood of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley, where temperatures are routinely hotter than along the coast, Alex Hoffmaster and Camilla Jessen recently bought a ranch house with a dead lawn. Rather than revive it, they decided to install decomposed granite and native plants, inspired by a family across the street.
“Having a lawn up here in the Valley is completely nonsensical,” said Jessen, 45, as she maneuvered her 5-month-old son, Scout, into a sliver of shade on a recent 100-degree afternoon.
Nearby, Hollywood long exported a vision of the American dream that included a tidy house with fastidiously maintained lawn. (Picture The Brady Bunch kids bounding out the sliding kitchen door of their house — modeled on a real one in the San Fernando Valley — and onto a perennially verdant backyard.)
Despite that portrayal, the region has a patchwork of communities with varying landscaping conventions. Many neighborhoods in Los Angeles have yards that would be considered tiny by people in, say, the Midwest, and dirt lots or concrete are hardly unusual.
Still, real grass often reigns in a±uent neighborhoods.
Experts say that getting rid of lawns alone will not solve the state’s water problem. And there are persistent debates about who should shoulder more painful cuts: residents of California’s cities, where per capita water usage has steadily decreased, or farmers, who say they grow food for the nation.
Southern California’s rise was predicated on ready access to water. The Los Angeles Aqueduct, which opened in 1913, ushered millions of gallons from the Owens River Valley across more than 200 miles to what would rapidly become the nation’s second most populous city — an engineering triumph that defied nature.
Los Angeles’ growth over the following decades coincided with a booming middle class whose aspirations of suburban homesteading trace back to the English countryside. There, lawns were an early means of displaying conspicuous wealth among the landed gentry, said Christopher Sellers, a history professor at Stony Brook University who has written about lawns in the United States.
American horticulturalists developed heartier hybrids of grass designed to survive in warmer, drier climes, though they still needed regular watering. And the lawn made its way west to California, where it took hold as what Sellers described as “the cultural norm, the expectation.”
Over the decades, the lawn’s supremacy has weathered cycles of drought and rain. Because of climate change, though, droughts have become more frequent and intense.
“The new drought is a hot drought,” said Ellen Hanak, director of the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy Center. “We have to be ready for it to get acute quickly.”
Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, last year pleaded with residents to cut back voluntarily. But water use in some parts of the state actually increased, and Newsom this year said he would impose mandatory restrictions if water agencies could not get people to conserve. “This is a wake-up call,” Adel Hagekhalil, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District, said in April when outlining new watering restrictions.