I agree that the natural watersheds would mean that some places in CA and the Southwest have more water than others and that naturally, some places have plenty and could reasonably grow a bunch of crops even while other areas would be very water-limited.

Where I disagree is:

- Vast infrastructure projects have made it so that much of those water resources are in reality available across wide regions and those uses are drawing from the same connected regional pools of of water.

- The Hoover Dam/associated Colorado River water systems (like the Central Arizona Project that feeds much of AZ hundreds of miles away from the natural river flow) are one example.

- For CA, the State Water Project is probably the largest example but there's many other pieces (like the LA aqueduct), and does mean that from a physical (not legal/administrative) perspective, much of the state is very much one combined chunk of water that can be distributed wherever, not captive to it's natural watershed. You very much could hypothetically redirect that Sierras water to South Central LA from an infrastructure perspective.

- The other aspect is that I don't think the picture of water (mis)use is much rosier within the "natural" bounds of the water in the West, either. Overuse of groundwater pumping in the Central Valley (CA) has led to some areas sinking ~12 feet in ~15 years as they quite literally collapse the aquifer beneath their feet. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/us/corcoran-california-si... And much of that region's natural river flows do drain out to the Bay Area (Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta).

We already have graduated water increases in my town, go above a certain limit and your price will go up 5X.

It seems insane that any place in the west doesn't have a sliding scale since it's a desert and water is a zillion times more difficult to come by.

And we can mostly grow lawns without even watering.. they'll turn yellow for a little bit in the peak of the summer but they certainly won't die without irrigation/sprinklers like the west.

Base consumption hovers around 30€ every 2 months but the price per cubic meter (m^3) increases quite dramatically every 6 cubic meters. Families get cheaper pricing than people living alone.

People with gardens or pools have to pay quite a lot (most of them recycle the water though).

The more you use, the less it costs.

> And she defends the amount of water she and her neighbors need for their vast estates. “You could put 20 houses on my property, and they’d have families of at least four. In my house, there is only two of us,” Butler said. So “they’d be using a hell of a lot more water than we’re using.”

"I have enough land for 80 people, I should get more of other stuff as a reward."

You see this with water rights (residential and agricultural), low property taxes, home values (NIMBYism in a nutshell), business models (environmental regulations would harm the extant oil industry!) and on and on.

This is a phenomenon I've observed anecdotally for a while, but I'd love to hear if there's a name for it, or if it has been formally studied.

I thought plain lawns were falling out of fashion anyway? Everyone I know who has a yard seeks to have a minimal amount of just lawn, aiming instead for shrubbery, flowers, bushes, small trees and other plants.