You’ve probably come across more stories about water woes in California than you can recall, so you may feel you’ve had enough for a while.
I understand. There’s no easy or permanent fix. The protagonists don’t divide neatly into good and evil. Water in the state often isn’t where the people are — or, as with the recent fires, isn’t there at all. After looking into the subject for years, I still can’t wrap my head around the endless ins and outs.
But there is one indisputable fact that keeps surfacing in the conversations I have about California water that feels like something of a beacon. The first time I heard it, it came as quite a surprise.
Over the last half century or so, millions more people have moved to greater Los Angeles, settling in increasingly far-flung reaches of the desert and in the mountains, requiring more faucets, toilets and shower heads, producing more garbage and more gridlock on the 405 freeway, reinforcing all the clichés about excess and sprawl.
And during this same time, Angelenos have been consuming less water.
I don’t just mean per person, though that figure, according to state authorities, is down by a whopping 43 percent since 1990. I mean, residents and businesses in the Los Angeles area now consume less water in total. The population has grown, yet the city consumes less water.
In 1990, when its population was 3.4 million people, L.A.’s annual consumption was 680,000 acre-feet of water, according to the city’s water authority. (The industry metric, an acre-foot is about half an Olympic swimming pool.)
With a population of 3.9 million, the city today consumes 454,000 acre-feet per year.
The trend extends beyond Los Angeles to cities across California. But it is most striking in the state’s megalopolis. “We still have a lot of work to do,” says Mark Gold, the director of water scarcity solutions for the Natural Resources Defense Council who served on the California Coastal Commission. Gold is a conservationist of the glass-half-empty sort, but even he trumpets the fact that “from the ’70s and ’80s to today there has very definitely been a paradigm shift.”
So, how did this happen?
The answer speaks to a general truth about progress, which, in big, messy democracies, tends to occur not all at once but in incremental, often unsexy ways, mostly out of the news cycle. In this case the shift has involved some simple, practical, boring fixes, like better plumbing, alongside larger transformations in social norms, policies and politics.
Call it generational evolution, a slow but inexorable force.
With Los Angeles, it began after a series of dry spells. For most of the 20th century, through droughts and floods, California clung to its old settler mentality, drinking up more resources, building more dams to justify more growth. Nature was there to be exploited and engineered.
But then a couple of megadroughts, one during the mid-1970s, another that lasted from 1987 to 1992, shook faith in California’s mythos of endless abundance. “Conservation” became part of the popular lexicon. State legislators passed laws commanding agencies and municipalities to save more water. Politicians, public service announcements and elementary schoolteachers all urged Californians to water their lawns less and to take shorter showers — or at least feel guilty about taking long ones.
In time, Los Angeles became more than just mindful. It became an unlikely paragon of urban water conservation.
Its shift still hasn’t solved the city’s water problems, obviously. A recent report commissioned by Gov. Gavin Newsom estimates that, with more severe droughts predicted, the state could lose up to 10 percent of its water supply by 2040. President Trump’s antipathy to the governor and state has further complicated the politics and finances around potential fixes, whose pluses and minuses already divide Californians competing for limited resources. California’s farms, many of them in the state’s Central Valley, help feed the nation by growing food for livestock, like alfalfa, and other crops, like almonds. These thirsty plants gulp four times more water than all of the state’s cities combined.
The region is at a critical juncture. Conservation has been a huge step, but more practical fixes and gradual cultural shifts may not be enough to bring about water security. There are basically two paths forward. One would draw yet more water to the south from Northern California, while the other would build on conservation efforts and create even greater self-reliance in the region. Both would require large-scale infrastructure that is very, very expensive.
Los Angeles now relies for three-quarters of its water on far-flung sources like the Owens and Colorado rivers, which are drying up, and an even more distant tributary of the Sacramento River in Northern California. For generations, Californians have been debating a megaproject called the Delta Conveyance, to hasten supplies south from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. That project, which would shore up infrastructure that is aging and vulnerable, is opposed by many residents in the delta and by some farmers, and it won’t specifically help Los Angeles. Recent cost estimates top $20 billion.
More desalination plants (there’s one in San Diego County) could tap into the Pacific Ocean. The latest plants have become less abusive to sea life and coasts, but they’re energy-intensive and much costlier for consumers than existing water supplies.
The second option is for Los Angeles to recycle more water. Environmentalists all agree it’s the best choice. “The solution is not super complex,” says Bruce Reznik, who runs Los Angeles Waterkeeper, a conservation advocacy group. “It involves recycling, reuse and restraint.” But recycling facilities could end up costing taxpayers as much as the Delta Conveyance, if not more. And selling Angelenos on drinking recycled wastewater has never been easy.
There is at least one thing everyone involved with managing water in the state seems to agree on. As Reznik put it: “We need a new Mulholland moment.”
The Power of Concrete and Steel
In 1913 a self-taught engineer named William Mulholland oversaw the completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct and transformed the concept of a modern city.
Before then, Angelenos banked on the Los Angeles River, a fugitive watercourse prone to catastrophic floods, thwarting downtown development. City authorities decided to send Mulholland north, some 250 miles via mule, to devise a route by which a snow-fed, unassuming-looking river that snaked like an unraveled garden hose through the Owens Valley, could be diverted to Los Angeles. The city acquired properties from unsuspecting farmers in the valley. Mulholland hired laborers to dig tunnels and erect hydroelectric plants powered by the water that gravity pushed through the aqueduct.
As a feat of modern engineering, the Los Angeles Aqueduct rivaled the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge.
The project, which took six years — the blink of an eye these days — ravaged Owens Lake, which had been fed by the river and during dry spells turned into a toxic moonscape. It was a windfall for a syndicate of wealthy Angelenos who capitalized on inside knowledge about where the aqueduct would arrive to gobble up nearby land, and the city expanded so rapidly that it almost immediately had to look for more water.
Over the following decades, Angelenos extended Mulholland’s aqueduct northward — despoiling the otherworldly Mono Basin, just east of Yosemite — and also turned southeast, hoarding water from the Colorado River. Eventually the city began to import from the State Water Project, which taps into the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
What resulted by the 1970s was an upside-down state, with most people living in the south, depending on water from the north delivered by a Rube Goldbergian tangle of reservoirs, dams, sluices, power stations, treatment plants and pipes, not to mention public and private authorities and criminal operations.
Like the freeways, Los Angeles’s aqueduct was a thing of industrial grandeur. It epitomized mid-20th century American know-how and certitude in the power of technology, concrete and steel to overcome any obstacle nature might throw in man’s path. For decades, it allowed millions of Angelenos with green lawns to weather droughts and live another smoggy day in paradise without having to think too hard about where their water came from — or whether it might someday run out.
Until nature started declining to be conquered.
And Angelenos had to start thinking harder.
A New Ethos Is Born
The new Mulholland moment that people now talk about is not, to be clear, a call for yet more rapacious aqueducts snaking through the Great Basin. It’s a desire for some action of equivalent chutzpah and vision — a coming together of politics, ingenuity and resources around a still young century’s growing water problem.
Something like this happened, with relatively little fanfare, after those megadroughts during the 1970s and into the early 1990s moved millions of Californians to reconsider their relationship to the environment. In Los Angeles, a culture of conservation was promoted by fledgling environmentalists and community groups, and city authorities began to restore urban wetlands that had suffered from decades of abuse and neglect. Machado Lake, for example, in the shadow of an oil refinery in the city’s impoverished Harbor district, had become a toxic cesspool. It was given a costly makeover, completed in 2017, that produced a leafy park now popular with birders, who watch snowy egrets splash in marshes of bulrush.
“Places like Machado,” as Gold put it to me, “helped convince residents that water matters. It didn’t increase the drinking water supply. But for Angelenos to care about conservation they first needed to think of water as not just something that somehow gets piped from wherever into their faucets and shower heads. They needed to see it as a part of what they love and want to preserve about the city.”
More prosaically, public officials enticed residents to save water by offering rebates to homeowners who replaced lawns with more drought-tolerant plants. The City of Los Angeles has so far swapped out some 53 million square feet of lawn, exceeding goals set by Gov. Jerry Brown for the entire state back in 2015.
By 2018, this ethos of conservation had come to be so thoroughly ingrained that a two-thirds majority of voters in Los Angeles County approved a measure to, in essence, tax themselves if they owned properties with impermeable driveways or other hard surfaces that prevent rain from replenishing groundwater basins. Measure W, as it’s called, raises some $280 million a year for neighborhood rainwater-capture projects across the county while also incentivizing Angelenos to build more porous driveways and pay lower taxes.
But to be truly self-reliant, the city will still probably need to construct recycling plants, big and expensive ones, two of which are on the drawing boards. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the government agency that delivers much of the region’s water via the Colorado River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, is hoping to complete one of them; the City of Los Angeles is planning another.
The projects would mend an old, broken dream. Decades ago, Los Angeles undertook a project to make drinkable water from recycled, purified wastewater, but a mayoral candidate started campaigning against “toilet to tap,” and voters soured on the concept. Ever since, the city has been treating then dumping millions of gallons a day of its wastewater into the ocean. Orange County, just next door, learning from Los Angeles’s fiasco, developed a public education campaign before it put a recycling proposal before voters. It now boasts one of the world’s largest wastewater recycling and purification systems.
Liz Crosson, who oversees sustainability for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, is philosophical about the “toilet to tap” failure: “Yes, it would have been cheaper and better for Los Angeles to have invested more back then in recycling,” she told me. “But water regulations and engineering are more sophisticated today, and the public is now more aware of the need to conserve water.”
“Toilet to tap set L.A. back,” she said. “But cultural shifts take time.”
“We’ve Come A Long Way”
Last summer I hitched a ride in a helicopter with Anselmo Collins, senior assistant general manager for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which regularly conducts aerial inspections of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. It’s a spectacular flight, over the San Gabriels and Antelope Valley, past Bouquet Reservoir and around Owens Lake.
Since 2000, Collins told me en route, Los Angeles has spent $2.6 billion re-greening parts of the Owens Valley ravaged by the aqueduct, leasing land to ranchers, carving out a new waterway for kayakers, employing teams of biologists and engineers to monitor vegetation in the basin.
The city’s generosity isn’t pure altruism. Three decades ago residents at Mono Lake took Los Angeles to court to force the city to raise the lake’s depleted water level. A messy legal battle produced a landmark court ruling, which established “public trust” obligations that cities in California have to future generations and the environment and which limited Los Angeles’s right to divert water from Mono Basin.
Decades later, the lake still isn’t at the level the city promised, and Los Angeles is again taking the maximum amount of water from Mono that the law allows, after saying it would take less. Even so, Mono Lake advocates, who are pushing for the State Water Board to order L.A. to take less, talk about a changed culture.
“Mono Lake encapsulates the whole decades-long evolution from building huge transverse systems like the aqueduct toward seeing water as a shared, limited resource,” says Martha Davis, who directed the Mono Lake Committee during the 1990s, when it won the landmark lawsuit. “We’ve come a long way from the era of Mulholland.”
The current goal for Los Angeles County is that, by 2045, 80 percent of its water will come from recycling, increased storm-water capture and conservation. That target is now threatened by skyrocketing construction costs, on top of California’s budget deficit at a time when the housing and homelessness crisis consume enormous sums of state money and political capital.
Studies suggest that if Angelenos just stopped watering their lawns, reducing per person consumption to the same amount of water that Western Europeans average, the city would solve many of its water problems. Nearly half of residential water use in greater Los Angeles, it turns out, goes to outdoor landscaping.
Of course, nobody imagines that Southern Californians will collectively turn off their sprinklers tomorrow. “We are going to have less water by 2040, that’s the reality,” says Gold. “We’ve made gains with conservation. But the clock is ticking.”
Hand-wringing over which new infrastructure to build, how to pay for it, and how fast that clock is ticking, will no doubt generate countless more worrying articles about the water crisis in the years to come.
Still, the story in Los Angeles has not been all gloom and doom, with its steady, gradual, meaningful change. Progress has been happening.
The question now is whether it can keep pace with nature.
The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.
Michael Kimmelman is The Times’s architecture critic and the founder and editor-at-large of Headway, a team of journalists focused on large global challenges and paths to progress. He has reported from more than 40 countries and was previously chief art critic.
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