Rolling up the grass, Southern California says goodbye to the lawn

LOS ANGELES—When Gov. Jerry Brown ordered Californians to reduce urban water use by 25 per cent, he declared war on the ubiquitous manicured lawn that, more than palm trees or pools, has for more than half a century been the beloved badge of Southland suburbia.

Among the early casualties is the expanse of green turf that Tom Beck and his wife planted around their Arcadia home 26 years ago.

“I have mixed emotions,” Beck said recently as he watched a gardening crew scrape up the grass in his backyard and cart it to a truck headed for the green waste dump.

The Becks’ four children grew up playing on the lawn. Their dogs romped on it. They hosted garden parties on it.

But “times have changed,” Beck said.

Now the Arcadia city councilman is re-landscaping his spacious lot to cut his water-guzzling lawn in half.

Big droughts leave their stamp on California. The 1976-77 drought helped launch the move to low-flow plumbing fixtures.

This one may be the beginning of the end of that standard of Southern California, the lush lawn.

“The idea of your nice little green grass getting lots of water every day — that’s going to be a thing of the past,” the governor said when he issued his Apr. 1 directive.

The Greater Los Angeles Area is expected to tear out the equivalent of more than 2,100 football fields of grass — or more than twice the turf removal goal Brown set for the entire state in his emergency drought order.

“I think people will look back 10 years from now (and say) that was the period when Southern California started moving away from lawns,” said Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

Demand for turf removal rebates has exploded since Brown’s order.

In a single week this month, Metropolitan received nearly $49-million worth of requests for conservation rebates, most of them for cash-for-grass subsidies. The board is considering pumping an extra $150 million into the program and is likely to set new rebate limits to stretch the funding. But that clearly won’t be enough, and the agency is warning rebate applicants there is no guarantee of approval.

Metropolitan, which supplies the region with water from Northern California and the Colorado River, isn’t just trying to get through one of the worst droughts in the state record. It’s attempting to alter the climate-defying face of the seven counties of Los Angeles permanently.

“We need to be leading a change in behavior,” said Deven Upadhyay, Metropolitan’s water resource manager.

Water in the Greater Los Angeles Area, first from the Owens Valley, then from the Colorado and from Northern California, was, for most of the 20th century, cheap and plentiful. Easterners and Midwesterners who streamed into the region could create yards even lusher than those they left behind, oblivious to the fact that they lived in the drought-prone, semi-arid West.

“One of the first sounds I associated with waking up in the morning was the clickity-click-whoosh, clickity-click-whoosh of overhead sprinklers watering lawns and gardens,” Southern California gardening guru Pat Welsh wrote, recalling her family’s 1944 move to Los Angeles on her blog last year.

“There was something empty and slightly sad about all these abundant gardens with their over-irrigated lawns.

“Los Angeles didn’t feel real.”

Brent Haddad, director of the Center for Integrated Water Research at the University of California at Santa Cruz, grew up in the San Fernando Valley. Back in the 1970s, he said, Los Angeles could be described as an urban wetland. “I remember fog so thick in the mornings that I couldn’t see my hand in front of my body when I was walking to school — blinding fog that was evaporation of all the irrigation in the morning,” he said.

Since then, major droughts and environmental restrictions on deliveries from the Owens Valley have made Angelenos more water-conscious. Despite growth, the city uses less water than it did 45 years ago. But lawns, large and small, still reign supreme in the sprawl of Greater Los Angeles.

Getting rid of lawns is a huge step forward in water conservation. The Metropolitan Water District estimates that removing one square foot of grass in Southern California saves 42 gallons of water a year. Turf-removal programs are in essence buying water, often at a high price.

Metropolitan has been paying homeowners and businesses $2 a square foot to rip out lawns. When costs are pro-rated over a decade, the agency says the price of the conserved water amounts to $1,500 an acre-foot. Some cities, including Los Angeles, are adding their own rebates to that of the Metropolitan Water District, pushing the total water cost, ultimately born by ratepayers, even higher.

The Becks built their two-storey, Cape Cod-style house on a big lot in the affluent foothill town of Arcadia in the middle of the 1987-92 drought. Yet it didn’t occur to them to limit grass.

“We wanted a lawn for the kids and dogs. Lawns look good,” said Beck, 63.

It wasn’t until the Becks bought a second home on the chronically water-starved Central Coast a decade ago that he began to think about water.

Then, last year when he was elected to the City Council, he attended a regional workshop for local politicians that included sessions on California’s dwindling water supplies.

“The more I learned, the more concerned I got,” said Beck, a retired partner in a Pasadena law firm.

Plans for his garden makeover, spread across his dining room table, call for converting nearly 3,900 square feet of lawn into patios and less thirsty plantings.

“I think a lot of people are going to be doing this,” he added.