In some areas, such transitions will be scarcer. In San Francisco, for example, there seems to be little room to improve. Nancy Hayden Crowley, press secretary for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, tells KneeDeep there is no turf in the city that will disappear with the first phase of implementation targeting government properties.
“We have performed an assessment of the City’s public properties and have not identified any that would fall under this requirement,” Crowley says. “Green space around San Francisco’s commercial, industrial, and institutional properties is also limited and generally provides community benefit.”
Green space in the city tends to be in high demand for recreational use, she notes. Any such use would make the turf technically functional.
Heather Cooley, chief research and program officer at the Pacific Institute, says such shifts in landscaping styles on private and public properties have contributed to long-term reductions in California’s municipal water use, both per capita and on a gross basis — and even with the overall population rising. But outdoor landscaping, she says, still accounts for half of urban community water use in the state.
“There is still more we’ll need to do as droughts intensify and as water supply becomes even more variable and uncertain in the future,” she says. Large areas of useless turf irrigated with potable water, she adds, are “the obvious place for us to make more progress.”