This was a lake. Sorry your lawn isn't doing so well.
As a Californian, I would put our state's wealthiest people up against any others in the entitled asshole department. Most of the enclaves for the well-off in California are small rural, mostly coastal or near-the-coast cities of large houses on large lots carefully manicured by gardeners whose names may or may not ever come up. There are no apartments, and certainly no less-than-desirable neighborhoods, and if there are shops they are of the unnecessarily expensive sort. In short, a wealthy person in a wealthy Californian town may go for years without seeing one poor person who hasn't been specifically tasked with making their own lives easier, and in that environment the residents frequently find themselves baffled when someone suggests the rules that the rest of the population live by
also apply to them.
People “should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful,” [Rancho Santa Fe resident Steve Yuhas] fumed recently on social media. “We pay significant property taxes based on where we live,” he added in an interview. “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”
It was always an understanding, you see, that we would live in the places with lawns and golf and the rest of you would have the decency to leave us alone. We pay very high taxes to live here, and it was always the understanding that those taxes would insulate us from having to be considered part of California, or part of
those laws. California may be in the midst of an historic drought, but Rancho Santa Fe is wealthy, and therefore
not.
This is an actual mindset, by the way. The notion that a lawn might be forced to turn brown can genuinely frightening, as it implies the little people, by which we mean the government, can reach their grubby little peasant-claws even onto the streets of San Marino, or La Jolla, or Rancho Santa Fe. Worse, it implies there are some things which cannot be solved with money—statewide weather patterns, for example—and this is a baffling thought. Put together it's something close to oppression.
“I think we’re being overly penalized, and we’re certainly being overly scrutinized by the world,” said Gay Butler, an interior designer out for a trail ride on her show horse, Bear. She said her water bill averages about $800 a month.
“It angers me because people aren’t looking at the overall picture,” Butler said. “What are we supposed to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?”
Mind you, a quick stroll around
any other part of California not directly visible from this walking stereotype's house would reveal a state full of homes surrounded by dirt fields. The state is in a severe drought. There has been little to no rain, and no snowpack, and anyone who lives in an area rural enough to have four acres around them generally knows what Actual California looks like when the subsequent June rolls around. The rest of the state has managed to soldier on somehow—there are no Mad Maxian battles on the freeways as desperate men commandeer water trucks for their four-acre lawns.
While the gist of this story is that some of America's most out-of-touch wealthy people are baffled by someone asking them to conserve water during a goddamned drought, the measures the town is taking to ensure compliance is the genuinely controversial bit. Not content with the usual piffling fines for water guzzlers, the city is threatening to triple water rates and even install flow restrictors limiting water use by the worst offenders. That is something, and that a city government run by and for wealthy Californians is willing to put the screws to, well, themselves does speak well of them. That's a fine capitalist solution, in fact: stop with the minor fines, and price the water at what the water is worth. You want acres of pristine lawn, fine—but you'll pay into the pot that helps to the rest of the city build better and less wasteful water infrastructure for future years. And while even a steep fine won't deter the sort of freedom-shouters that say they have a perfect right to send however much water they want pouring into nearby gutters, not even the wealthiest and most stubborn Americans can stomach the thought of living in a home where you can't flush a toilet if somebody else is in the shower.
So there's that. Chalk this one up as one part outraged rich person, and two parts feel-good story about even the most tiny of California locales finally getting religion on the severity of the current drought. That's something, right? We can at least feel a little good about that?