California Lawn Watering Economics | Hacker News Reader

California Lawn Watering Economics

priceonomics.com

Interesting. I'm a big proponent of Xeriscaping instead of lawns, but Xeriscape can look great, or absolutely awful, depending on how well it's done, and I think that's part of the reluctance.

The problem is that lawns are easy to do: put down sod, water, mow, fertilize, and it'll look fine. Any idiot can make a surface look OK with grass.

Xeriscape doesn't need mowing nor water, but it needs to be designed by a competent landscape architect to look good, and needs decent layout and rocks and whatnot. If you just tear up your lawn and mulch the remainder, throwing in the odd plant, it's going to look like hell.

I think part of this battle, then, is showing people that xeriscape can look really good, and although it's a different kind of pretty than a lawn, it's still pretty. HOAs will take a while to come around to it, still, but it's nice to see the conversation starting.

I very much agree about the turnkey nature of a turf grass lawn. Everyone knows how to do it, and everyone knows how to take care of it.

But for example, the outfit called "Turf Terminators" (they convert your front yard for free, and pocket the ~$4/sq.ft. rebate) has been churning out travesties like this all over LA:

http://s3-media2.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/WsdchuaR6H96tnC2LEZ9R...

Not enough people know that it's possible to do much, much better with a zero- or low-irrigation landscape.

i recall something posted here on ycombinator about kids having lung diseases from playing on turf football fields? It's due to the rubber in the turf getting kicked up into their lungs, and into their cuts.

Yeah, from my friend's experience, if you want a terribly Xeriscaped lawn you can get it from just the rebate. And the ones who provide a good Xeriscaped lawn bumped their price up by the same amount of the California rebate.

So you can get a terrible one for free, or a good one for the same overall price as you had to pay before the rebate was introduced.

The other problem is you can't play in a xeriscaped yard. Most people have kids at some point, and being able to play in the yard is pretty important for most.

100% reduction in lawns saves 7%. 10% reduction in agricultural use would save 7.7%. Given how incredibly inefficient most California irrigation systems are, the long term cost of the systems needed to implement at 10% reduction would probably pay for themselves rather quickly. Too bad agricultural water is subsidized.

the bulk of the agricultural use of water is for dairy cows, either directly watering the fields, providing feed, and even in processing cows for meat. http://www.businessinsider.com/real-villain-in-the-californi...

"Fleur de lawn" is a lawn alternative I am looking at for the Pacific Northwest. It is a hardy mix of lawn, herbs and flowers. It is drought tolerant and most importantly to me, never needs mowing. It was designed by university researchers.The plants are small, but the roots go down 2 feet. Each plant helps feed the other plants, so they are synergistic. Maybe they have something similar for the Southwest area.

http://protimelawnseed.com/products/fleur-de-lawn

never needs mowing

From the link, "Mow about once a month to maintain this lawn at a height between 3 and 5 inches.".

On the flip side, I replaced all of the grass with a patterned stone garden, in the places where there is no lounging, and small pea pebbles and rubber mulch in the places where people are likely to play. So I'm 100% mowing free, and it still looks nice since the stones/pebbles have interesting patterns.

edit: Change lawn to grass for clarity. Trees, shrubs, etc all stayed or were replanted.

Stone gardens will make your house hotter in the summer.

How does a lawn cool my house?

I'm guessing it doesn't reflect as much heat.

Walk on a lawn barefoot, then feel your feet burn walking on pavement. The radiant heat from stone will envelop your house.

It was designed by university researchers.

So... I'm reading a planted advertisement? How could this be relevant?

My theory: humans prefer grass and open-canopy tree coverage on a biological basis. It's our natural habitat, and perhaps even has roots in the African Savana.

Every other animal has an instinctual attraction to an appropriate habitat, so why wouldn't humans? The problem with us is that we "nest" in a desert and then try and make it look like a bucolic grassland.

alternate theory: gravel and cactus are pointy.

There are non-pointy options that also don't "feel right." You could replace your lawn with beach sand, for example.

Or a cultural derivative, leftover from English gardens being a signal of wealth.

Wow! That's low...

  "we found that if everyone in California got rid of their lawn, it would
  save 5-7% of total water usage in the state."

That's total water in a state with an enormous population and also happens to be one of the world's biggest breadbaskets. 5-7% sounds amazing to me.

Yeah, agriculture (especially livestock) is the real thing that needs to be tackled. Everything else is small potatoes in comparison.

Industrial farms use a lot of water.

Given that agriculture accounts for most of the state's water use, even a drastic reduction in any other sector will look small in comparison to the whole, since they can't possibly account for more than ~20% of the total.

"we found that if everyone in California got rid of their lawn, it would save 5-7% of total water usage in the state."

But what part could be saved if agricultural water subsidies were removed? And unlike washing cars, I'm not saying making it illegal - just not encouraging the waste with artificially low prices, below the market prices.

We will never know for sure, as all we can have is studies, and estimations. And it would be deemed unfair for those who have invested in agriculture.

Who could have known irrigating the desert would be a wasteful endeavor and likely to cause water shortages in the future?

EDIT: my main idea was to not make anything illegal, or taking any rights, but let whoever bear the full true costs and let the market sort it out. Industrial and agricultural uses of water are fine in my book - if you pay the price.

"And unlike washing cars, I'm not saying making it illegal"

Wait, you're suggesting washing cars should be illegal ?

It already is in parts of California. You can get a $500 for washing your car.

This over simplifies the problem. Water rights are treated a lot like property rights. How is taking water from these people any different than taking someone's land because they obtained it 100 years ago when the region had fewer people?

Because water is mobile and needed by humans to survive. If the state runs out of water, people will die.

Also, when land is needed for the public's need, there is Eminent Domain, which gets invoked from time to time.

No, people will not die. They will buy bottled water.

Is it expensive? Well, maybe living in the middle of a desert should not be subsidized. Anyone who thinks that's too expensive is free to another place. Notice the "free to".

Eminent Domain is awful. As I just posted in another thread, I think the best way in general is leaving everyone free - not forcing anyone to do what they don't want to do, as I don't like the concept of force or violence.

I don't care about government action as such - if it was optional, as in a "recommendation". As in saying cigarettes are bad. Not in banning or taxing them.

Eminent Domain is using the force of the government and the threat of violence against whoever stands in the way. Like people whose homes are in the way of making new private buildings, as seen in many cases. All it takes is giving them enough money to make them leave on their own free will.

If they don't want to, or if you're too cheap for that, what makes anyone think you have more "rights" to their property than these people do??

I can't ever agree to that, sorry.

If they can't afford to buy expensive water (which we need for sewers, showers, washing dishes, etc -- not merely drinking), chances are that they'd have a hard time finding the money to move elsewhere, even if it would be cheaper in the long-term to do so.

How very strange, in that you think that water should not be a resource appropriately managed/subsidised by a government, but you're totally on-board with the concept of private ownership of land - a concept wholly enabled by government. It's only the government's "threat of violence" that allows private ownership of land in the first place.

You don't want the government to manage water for the benefit of the population? Why do you want government to manage land, then?

Isn't it funny how libertarianism is always so lopsided? "Freedom for everyone, as long as the elites get to keep their status quo!". There's always some flowery rhetoric protecting the power of the elite...

> because they obtained it 100 years ago when the region had fewer people?

Because most of them didn't obtain it 100 years ago. Most of them obtained it as a subsidized attempted by California to settle the useless Central Valley.

At this point, California needs to simply start buying out the agribusinesses and shutting them down. Unfortunately, this will kill the Central Valley. However, as we have seen, so will a lack of water.

David Zetland has outlined a system of "All-in Auctions" that would preserve water property rights while imposing an opportunity cost for using that water, by auctioning water usage and paying the funds to any rights holder to the extent that they forgo water extraction they would otherwise have the right to.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1658193

That is, you can continue to invoke your traditional rights in the water, but you have to forgo cash payments from the new auctions for doing so. This would eliminate the ridiculous system of "use it or lose it" that results in farmers blowing $1 worth of water to produce $0.05 worth of crops.

> Water rights are treated a lot like property rights.

No, water rights are property rights.

One of the biggest costs of maintaining a lawn in Southern California is the cost of paying the weekly "mow, blow, and go" gardening service. This cost is actually more than that of the water.

This gardener service cost savings should really be accounted for in estimates of the time to recoup costs when a plastic lawn replaces a real one.

Wait, did this article not factor in maintenance costs?

Edit: I'm not seeing any substantive analysis on maintenance, though, they do claim:

  "Because water is so cheap, the financial payback period of 
  replacing your lawn with a more drought tolerant substitute 
  is around 30 years."

There is just as much maintenance on xeriscape. The focus of the article is around cost centers that consume water, not the cost of a lawn.

I thought the the article did a good job as presenting two sides. Lawns relative to agriculture do not use up a lot of water. However, lawns do use a lot of water relative to other household usages.

A properly xeriscaped garden should be very low maintenance; certainly nothing that compares to weekly attention.

What sort of maintenance would that be exactly? The whole point of xeriscaping is low maintenance.

We have a xeriscaped yard. Basically the only cost is hitting it with some water when it is 110F+ and cleaning up some brush.

Do that many people in Southern California really pay someone else to do it? I'm really surprised to hear that.

I live in a fairly upscale community (mostly hobby farms and retired farmers who sold off most of their land) and no-one around here has someone else doing their gardening. If anything, my neighbors are the ones who own lawn care/property management businesses.

I'm sorry I do not have rigorous numbers for you. I can only estimate based on personal observation: in a typical neighborhood of single family homes, about 50% of homes employ a gardening service in Southern California. In my area, it's typical for the gardener to visit once a week and receive $20+ a visit.

Yeah I lived in San Jose, and you had to beat off gardeners with a stick. It was easier to say Yes once than No a million times. Not SoCal but anyway.

If I saw that bar graph in my profiler, I know which section of the code I would be optimizing first: Agriculture.

But aside from that, I look down and see another bar graph for water use by type of lawn, and see that I could probably save 2% of the state's water just by voiding all landscaping covenants for all the HOAs around the state.

Exactly. An outlier like that in any other context would be the #1 priority by a long shot.

But between their lobbyists and how much we all love artificially cheap burgers, it's a hell of an uphill battle...

Alright I'm going to do it. ill tear out my lawn and replace it with California Native species. You actually don't tear out the old lawn, you just put cardboard over it, then mulch on top, from what I've read. Ill try to do some kind of write up for a cost analysis.

"Thank you so much - really - thank you from the bottom of our hearts."

-- industrial Ag and their investors

A yard should be a reflection of a home's environment. If you live in a desert, the surroundings of your house should match that. You can be very decorative without having to use a substantial amount of water.

Then again, I'm from Upstate NY, where nobody waters their lawn because the region is soaked. But that doesn't mean grass is sacrosanct. We removed the entire back yard of grass between our house and the lake because it made more sense to have a stone patio. We also replaced our front yards with gravel driveways because we rent the house out fairly often and have far more bedrooms than parking spaces.

I think in general people should look to more than a flat pane of grass as the answer to the space around their home.

To some extent. But we have a diversity of architecture in California, we're not all adobe mission huts and mid century modern homes. Old Palo Alto for example has a preponderance of 1920s/30s Tudor Revival homes, which really deserve an English garden.

IMO the issue here is really the ridiculously low cost of water. If someone wants to have an extravagantly lush lawn let them. But it's only fair that they pay through the nose for it. This makes it clear to consumers what their choice costs. Hitting people in the wallet is a far more effective way at changing behavior than lecturing people about civic mindedness which happens too often in California.

we also get to see our water rates increase significantly due to this required conservation.

If only humankind had a discipline dedicated to the efficient allocation of scarce resources... Car washing? Absolument pas! Growing rice paddies in a desert? Sure, go ahead.

> Lawn reformists are generally proponents of converting yards over to less resource intensive alternatives like drought tolerant plants or native plants species.

Or we could just build the houses closer together in the first place.

Because less nature is a good thing? Far apart, self sufficient and largely unmaintained would be best IMHO.

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