Water
Household Water use in California

Water consumption boils down to simple formula: More land = more water

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

NEWS Water consumption boils down to simple formula: More land = more water SEND PDF Hank Landsberg recently relandscaped his Seal Beach home to include colorful, drought-tolerant plants. STEVEN GEORGES , STEVEN GEORGES, CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER People in some parts of Orange County use more than 10 times as much water as other parts, according to state data. And it’s mostly about how we use our land. In Seal Beach, multifamily apartments – more than half the housing stock – stand across the street from older, tightly packed neighborhoods. Spits of grass are a few feet wide. Houses have, on average, just over four rooms, according to 2013 census data. In North Tustin, sloping lawns give way to expansive houses with more than seven rooms, on average. More than 95 percent of residences are single-family homes. The difference explains why the state is ordering Seal Beach to cut water use a mere 10 percent in the coming year. It’s the only Orange County city with such a low requirement. Golden State Water Co.’s Cowan Heights District in North Tustin, by contrast, will have to reduce use by 35 percent. The mandates are based on water use rates in September 2014. That month, people in Seal Beach used 45 gallons per person per day. In the Cowan Heights district, people used 557 gallons, more than 10 times as much. People in several other small districts in the Anaheim Hills and North Tustin neighborhoods will also have to cut 35 percent: Serrano Water District, which services Villa Park, used 520 gallons per person per day in September, while East Orange County Water District customers consumed 272 gallons. Yorba Linda, Newport Beach and La Habra also face 35 percent cuts, unless the State Water Resources Control Board adjusts benchmarks before approving the plan in May. What those communities have in common is their love of big houses, and big yards. ONE HOUSE, ONE PROPERTY Single-family homes, with landscaping for each property, take more water than multifamily apartments. Bigger lots, like those in North Tustin and Villa Park, use even more. In Villa Park, every property has one unit – the only city in Orange County where that’s true. By contrast, Seal Beach has the second-lowest rate of single-family homes in Orange County, at 44 percent. The only city with a lower percentage? Laguna Woods, which is almost entirely made up of the Laguna Woods Village retirement community. “If you’re using more than 50 gallons per person per day, that water is probably not for cooking and bathing and drinking. That’s for watering gardens and filling swimming pools and fountains,” said Matt Heberger, a senior research associate at the Pacific Institute, an environmental research group in Oakland. Homeowners such as Hank Landsberg, 63, have minimized both indoor and outdoor use. When he renovated his Seal Beach house a couple of years ago, he put in water-efficient appliances and hired Orange County landscaping company The Plant Nerd to install drought-tolerant plants that are fed minimal water through an efficient drip irrigation system buried underneath the mulch. Landsberg’s water use plummeted 60 percent. “We want to completely minimize the amount of water and upkeep since neither my wife nor I really enjoy being gardeners,” he said. Their landscape requires barely any maintenance. “It ended up looking really nice. We have a lot of plants with a lot of different colors in them.” MIX OF HOUSING Sean Crumby, director of public works in Seal Beach, credits residents like Landsberg for answering the call for conservation. He rejects land use as an explanation for the city’s water stinginess. “Seal Beach has a varied mix (of housing) throughout the city,” he said. “We’ve got some neighborhoods that are very traditional and representative of the county at large.” State mandates for water reductions don’t account for difference between small properties in Seal Beach and large ones in North Tustin. Rather than measuring how much water a district or city uses per acre, state metrics calculate how much is used per person. The result? Densely populated areas end up appearing more efficient in water use. And in one respect, they are. They use less water per person. That’s hard to deny. Per acre, it’s a different story. And critics of the state-ordered cuts zero in on that distinction. “This is a policy tool to force people to densify and build high-density style apartment units,” said Keith Curry, a Newport Beach city councilman and a past president of the Association of California Cities, Orange County. He pointed out that Newport Beach used 87 gallons per person per day in January, a 22 percent drop compared with the previous year. WEATHER NOT A FACTOR A handful of small districts in North Tustin, Villa Park and Anaheim have faced criticism for what some consider exorbitant water use. At nearly 300 to more than 500 gallons per person per day, depending on the month, they generally are the biggest users in the county. But those districts – Cowan Heights, Serrano Water District and East Orange County Water District – have only a few thousand customers each. Other districts have neighborhoods just like Cowan Heights, with large lots and high water needs, said Ken Vecchiarelli, the general manager for the Orange County district of Golden State Water Co. But those large districts have apartments and densely packed neighborhoods to balance out the large-lot neighborhoods, he said. Census data bears that out: The Irvine Ranch Water District, a middle-of-the-road user that consumed 92 gallons per person per day in September, services an area that has just over half multifamily residences. Measuring water use month-by-month, as the state water board has done, also doesn’t account for weather, prompting criticism from some water managers. “The measure we are using is absolutely inappropriate,” said Rob Hunter, the general manager of the Municipal Water District of Orange County, a water wholesaler. “Comparing one month to the same month of the prior year – you’re comparing the weather of the two years.” DATA DIFFICULTIES A wet December in Southern California in which more than 4 inches of rain fell in some places contributed to what the state lauded as a 23 percent conservation rate in the region. With little rain in January, that rate fell to 9 percent. Hunter suggests a rolling 12-month average to compare usage from one year to the next. The state could also statistically normalize the data to account for weather, but the public may interpret that as cooking the numbers. Still, Hunter believes state officials will refine their metric to account for weather and other factors. With limited data, determining actual conservation rates can be difficult. “You’ve got a limited baseline for just one year, then you can’t really tell the effects of actions versus the effect of reaction to weather,” said Greg Weber, executive director of the Urban Water Conservation Council. Larger properties in Orange County often abut wild spaces that are more prone to fire. Keeping vegetation from drying out prevents those properties from becoming fire hazards. FIRE HAZARDS East Orange County Water District has about 28 multifamily residences in the district, said General Manager Lisa Ohlund. The vast majority of properties are on lots of a half-acre or larger. “If I have an acre of land in my district, there’s two people on it, maybe three or four people. They’re irrigating some of it, maybe not lawns, but they’re backing up to a fire area and they’re keeping it green and they’re watering it,” said Ohlund, who is also chairwoman of the Urban Water Institute, a nonprofit for water districts. That acre may have a vegetable garden, fruit trees or a pasture – all of which take water. In other places, that same acre would have apartments, Ohlund said, and those use much less water per person. “My customers have done everything else that everyone else has done indoors. They have low-flush toilets and low-flow shower heads. Those are in the plumbing code. Now they’ve got to look outside,” Ohlund said. “These are not greedy people who are just wasting water.” Staff writer Keegan Kyle contributed to this report. Contact the writer: aorlowski@ocregister.com. Twitter: @aaronorlowski