Los Angeles Homeowners Are Removing Lawns During Drought - The New York Times

Southern California residents are beginning to accept that lush lawns are unsustainable when reservoirs and rivers run low in a drought era.

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.

She replaced 3,100 square feet of grass with high-tech artificial turf.

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.

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 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.

In Hancock Park, a historic enclave in the center of Los Angeles, Bill Newby, 65, said that sloping lawns were essential to his community’s identity.

Newby said he was working to follow the city’s watering restrictions — two assigned days per week — he found them frustrating.

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.

Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, last year pleaded with residents to cut back voluntarily.

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.

According to the district, Southern California water agencies have met and exceeded conservation goals since the rules went into effect.

found that 51 percent of Los Angeles residents said they and their families had done a lot to reduce water use, the highest figure in the state.

Yet 70 percent of Los Angeles residents said people there still weren’t doing enough.

Around the region, landscapers who specialize in drought-tolerant plants and artificial turf say they are scrambling to keep up with demand.

“I feel like an analogy is it’s Covid and we’re the only ones with the masks,” said Mitchell Katz, the owner of Camarillo-based Turf Exchange, which has replaced grass with artificial turf for nearly a decade.

Katz’s customers, a full convert to artificial turf, which she said looks and feels nothing like older versions of fake grass, with no unsettling coloring.

Meyer said he hoped that someday soon, the San Fernando Valley region would look more like the natural landscapes through which so many Angelenos love to hike