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cheese posted:Sacramento is not as bad I got that far and thought of this:   http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2011/12/28/sacramento-tent-city-warning/ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/us/26sacramento.html http://archive2.capradio.org/168039
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Aug 19, 2013 04:43
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Zeitgueist posted:Aren't a bunch of cities in Orange County named for Klansmen? I don't know about that, but I do know the major streets in the city of orange are named either after it's four founders, or the combination of one of founders two daughters. Kate + Ella = Katella. Also another fun fact, one of the main streets in orange was named after my mothers family because my great grandfather was one of the original civil engineers in CA and we're still getting money from the oil equipment he helped invent as well as rent from some of the land in OC we still own that he purchased back then. Sorry for being part of the 1% guys. 
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Aug 19, 2013 18:29
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A Winner is Jew posted:I don't know about that, but I do know the major streets in the city of orange are named either after it's four founders, or the combination of one of founders two daughters. Kate + Ella = Katella. Also another fun fact, one of the main streets in orange was named after my mothers family because my great grandfather was one of the original civil engineers in CA and we're still getting money from the oil equipment he helped invent as well as rent from some of the land in OC we still own that he purchased back then. Another interesting fun fact is even to this day places in CA such as the LA area have hidden oil derricks.  It's another somewhat less known industry that had a decent contribution from changing LA from from a fairly small city to the massive Megacity type sprawl of today.
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Aug 19, 2013 19:42
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Honestly, I think building a house with a lawn in it in most of California is horribly irresponsible. Such huge loving water issues, and developers just don't give a poo poo.
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Aug 19, 2013 20:34
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Thanatosian posted:Honestly, I think building a house with a lawn in it in most of California is horribly irresponsible. At least some places such as LA are using the carrot incentive to get people to convert to more realistic water conserving lawns. CA is just too arid of a climate to have the american dream lawn without wasting water. From a stat perspective agriculture consumes the most water taking 85% given how places such as Central valley use things such as leaky pipes or irrigation ditches to water the fields instead of using drip irrigation. Doesn't help that many places also grow the more water intensive crops. It's pretty much driven by how commercial type properties can buy water for more lower prices than residential areas, giving a bad incentive to avoid water conservation.
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Aug 19, 2013 20:48
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California is and San Diego was incentivizing solar power not too long ago- they should work to do the same with synthetic lawns; While the early versions were not much better than astroturf, the newer types really are pretty convincing. There are still reasons to have grass- pets and kids, notably, but a drier, browner lawn should be acknowledged as the norm. Edit: Obviously, the best landscaping would be natural drought-resistant plants and rocks, but there's lots of people for whom it would be sacrosanct. Glass of Milk fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Aug 19, 2013 |
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Aug 19, 2013 21:44
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Glass of Milk posted:Edit: Obviously, the best landscaping would be natural drought-resistant plants and rocks, but there's lots of people for whom it would be sacrosanct. I do a little fist pump every time I see a fake-grass or rock lawn in LA. If I could to own a home in southern California(nope), I would definitely get rid of any grass immediately.
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Aug 19, 2013 22:21
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Fake grass is meh. If you're going to use water, might as well water something edible. Pull up your backyard and plant a garden.
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Aug 19, 2013 22:28
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Ron Jeremy posted:Fake grass is meh. If you're going to use water, might as well water something edible. Pull up your backyard and plant a garden. The idea is not to use water, which I don't believe fake grass needs.
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Aug 19, 2013 22:29
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A garden also doesn't serve the same need as a lawn. I can't go lay out in my vegetable beds and my neighbor's kids can't play in my lavender bushes.
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Aug 19, 2013 22:33
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You can pry my lawn from my cold dead hands.
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Aug 19, 2013 22:34
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Sacramento is also offering incentives to do low water requirement xeriscaping on front yards too. I would do this for sure since I hate my stupid tiny pointless front yard and my summer water usage reaches 20,0000 gallons plus per month on a 2k sq foot house on 8k sq foot lot and that only costs me $75 for water...cheap. I will not do the full desert rocks poo poo though because that sucks. The problem is if you also xeriscape the backyard it makes one less place for the avg suburban household's windowlicker kids to thrash about since a lot of schools are now completely gated and the little shits can't go play there like we did when we were kids. This is also why there are 760 individual basketball hoops out on the streets taking up parking spots too. Keyser_Soze fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Aug 19, 2013 |
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Aug 19, 2013 22:40
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Zeitgueist posted:I do a little fist pump every time I see a fake-grass or rock lawn in LA. If I could to own a home in southern California(nope), I would definitely get rid of any grass immediately. AB-1881 is what you can thank for that. That one bill was huge in cutting down water waste from landscaping throughout CA. Too bad it didn't have any effect on farming though since they are the major culprits when it comes to wasting water. The sad part is that with today's weather / soil monitoring irrigation controllers and drip technology they could use like 1/10 of the water they do now if they invested in irrigation infrastructure and save a metric poo poo ton of money on water. Zeitgueist posted:The idea is not to use water, which I don't believe fake grass needs. You would think so, but a soccer park with fake grass I know of still needs to be watered about once a week to wash it all off and keep it clean since it's out in Fontana. Still, it uses next to no water compared to when it was all grass about 10 years ago.
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Aug 19, 2013 22:42
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Also, it is entirely possible to have a house with a green grass lawn and also be responsible with your water usage. It involves drip-line irrigation and not demanding st. agustine.
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Aug 19, 2013 22:48
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Zeitgueist posted:The idea is not to use water, which I don't believe fake grass needs. And I said, "if you're going to use water..." The real solution is density. One park can have a professionally maintained lawn in walking distance of a bunch of medium density apartment buildings. Same thing for pools. And about pools. In my town there is a huge racial divide, almost literally dictated by the train tracks. The old public city pool is on the wrong side of the tracks and nobody can seem to find money to keep it open. On the other side of town, a brand new high school opened with a kiddie wading pool and water slides tacked on to its aquatic facility and opened to the public for $7/person/day. The school district maps are almost comically drawn to keep the gated rich people in one set of schools and the mexican folks in the other.
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Aug 19, 2013 22:51
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Ron Jeremy posted:And I said, "if you're going to use water..." The real solution is density. One park can have a professionally maintained lawn in walking distance of a bunch of medium density apartment buildings. Same thing for pools. ...Torrance? I'd have guessed Redondo but we only have one public high school.
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Aug 19, 2013 22:55
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Trabisnikof posted:Also, it is entirely possible to have a house with a green grass lawn and also be responsible with your water usage. It involves drip-line irrigation and not demanding st. agustine. Or not using grass. Clover lawns are great, but they attract bees so of course that makes them completely unacceptable for a family, from the typical suburban parents' perspective.
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Aug 19, 2013 23:00
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Papercut posted:Or not using grass. Clover lawns are great, but they attract bees so of course that makes them completely unacceptable for a family, from the typical suburban parents' perspective. Well the bee problem appears to be well on it's way to taken care of.
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Aug 19, 2013 23:27
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Illumination posted:It is a cultural and environmental wasteland. It's air quality is the worst in the nation, it's tap water among the most polluted aside from living next to a loving fracking operation, and it features some of the most egregious examples of suburban sprawl you can conceive with nothing but miles of lovely poorly constructed tract housing stacked on top of one another, never too far from some strip mall. It's not Satan's rear end in a top hat, it's the giant oozing carbuncle right next to it. Makes me sad to see this. Parts of Riverside are very nice. Parts of Riverside are very bad. All of Riverside is geographically a scrubby desert unlike coastal OC and LA and so the non-cultivated parts tend to look pretty ragged. A lot of the bad parts are pretty much near the freeway, so you get the nice steady flow of people driving through it on the way to Vegas or Big Bear and taking a poo poo on it. But calling it a "cultural wasteland" - what does that even mean? They restored the Fox Theater that Gone With the Wind premiered in, there's a museum, there's a bunch of nice state parks. There's the Mission Inn where two presidents were married/honeymooned. There's a University of California, there's a local music scene and artists and all that stuff. Have you actually been anywhere else in the state? Do you even know what a cultural wasteland looks like? It's been my experience that a lot of Inland Empire bashing is just OC or LA people chest-beating or, even sadder, self-hating IE people who've internalized Kevin and Bean's loathsome "909" jokes. I've lived in both LA and OC and no poo poo they are nicer. No one is debating that. They also cost 2x - 3x as much for a house and they are usually old as hell - and having lived in old houses, the quality may be better but there aren't less problems. High OC and LA prices mean that you will have to enjoy living in a 1500 square foot condo until you're 40 years old, which is why so many people move east (and contribute to the awful traffic problems). And let's not pretend that OC isn't a vast kingdom of tract homes and strip malls, because it absolutely is. It's just 8 degrees cooler, there's some corporate headquarters, and it's more upscale. By the way, lest you think I am viewing the city through smog-colored glasses: It certainly does have problems with air quality (that's getting better) and sprawl and traffic but that's pretty much endemic to every Los Angeles exburb east of Pomona and traffic is literally part of living anywhere populated in California. Having kids in Riverside doesn't make them asthmatic or give them health problems - rates of asthma diagnosis is 1% - 2% higher than the rest of California. Yeah, I'm a Riverside defender. 
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Aug 20, 2013 00:03
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Native plant gardens are the best! My wife and I went on an open-house self-guided tour this spring, sponsored by a native plant garden organization and a consulting company. Basically fifty or so homes in the local area (east bay) where the owners let you wander around outside their houses checking out their native plant landscaping, some of them have talks, and a couple of reps from the consulting company try and gently sell you on their services (setting up custom landscaped native gardens). Pretty much all of it can be done DIY, though, and they're not shy about giving you the info to do that, too, so it never felt like a hard sell (and you can just not bother chatting with the reps at all, if you want). Native plant gardens are perfect because they are adapted to the local climate so they don't need a lot more water than what comes out of the sky; they attract native species, in particular insects and birds, which is actually good because a lot of those species are scarce and providing habitat helps out with survival. They are actually mostly really pretty (although I'm sure you still have to take care of them), lots of flowers and stuff. And you can still have a chunk of space for your kids to play on; there are native grasses that tolerate being cut short, for example, and ground cover options that can somewhat handle kids stomping around on them. Right now I still have a lawn out front (although I'm trying to seed it with some dutch clover a bit, which is actually good for the grass) but when we have the cash to put towards it we intend to get rid of the lawn and do a native garden ourselves. We don't have kids, though. Our back yard is more of a dead disaster zone, but eventually we'll get to that, too. I hate pouring money on the ground to keep grass alive, especially grass that naturally grows tall and then goes to seed and dies, but I have to do this artificial cutting and watering thing to trick it into staying short and green.
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Aug 20, 2013 02:59
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Ron Jeremy posted:Fake grass is meh. If you're going to use water, might as well water something edible. Pull up your backyard and plant a garden. And then your HOA confiscates your house. Ron Jeremy posted:And I said, "if you're going to use water..." The real solution is density. One park can have a professionally maintained lawn in walking distance of a bunch of medium density apartment buildings. Same thing for pools. Street View your way around Tucson a bit to see what SoCal SHOULD look like.
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Aug 20, 2013 03:13
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A Winner is Jew posted:AB-1881 is what you can thank for that. That one bill was huge in cutting down water waste from landscaping throughout CA. Too bad it didn't have any effect on farming though since they are the major culprits when it comes to wasting water. The sad part is that with today's weather / soil monitoring irrigation controllers and drip technology they could use like 1/10 of the water they do now if they invested in irrigation infrastructure and save a metric poo poo ton of money on water. It would also not be that hard minus the funding side, just increase agriculture water rates and also provide government help to overhaul the whole irrigation system to something more adapted to the dry climate.
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Aug 20, 2013 03:26
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Leperflesh posted:Native plants The problem with this is that the native ecosystem of the Inland Empire is chaparral. It's dry, dusty shrubland. It works fine as a front yard, but is no substitute for a lawn. I'm not saying that lawns are right, but telling families in the IE to convert their lawns to native gardens is not going to be too convincing. 
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Aug 20, 2013 03:57
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Leperflesh posted:Native plant gardens are the best!
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Aug 20, 2013 04:04
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Hog Obituary posted:Are Southern California native plants a fire hazard in the summer months? (serious question) I really like the idea of a native garden, but I wonder if I'd actually put my house at greater risk. I'm not sure if they are as a lawn fixture but they are explosively volatile natively. With that in mind you guys should read the John McPhee piece "Los Angeles Against the Mountains". It's about fires and the futility of stoping landslides in California.
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Aug 20, 2013 04:34
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My uncle owns a house with a small front and back yard. He fought his neighborhood's HOA for years because they would not let him rip out the grass on his front yard and replace it with native fauna. Their reasoning: it would ruin the look of the neighborhood. He eventually convinced them. Result: over $3000 per year in savings from not having to water anything.
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Aug 20, 2013 04:43
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Native plant gardening isn't really about faithfully re-creating a particular biome. You pick and choose from plants that are native to the area, but you can exclude the ones that are ugly, explosively flammable, or whatever and just go for the ones that you like. It's also usually the case that Plant x is found in a large area of California (or even "Western North America") so you tend to have a larger number of plants to pick from than are, strictly speaking, native to the exact location of your house. It's OK, they work out. So for example, that particular photo of chaparral is scrubland, but chaparral can have trees - manzanita and madrone do quite well in hot dry climates, for example. You can pick some of the clumpy native grasses as accent plants, but you can also pick a ground cover that is nicer for walking around on, even if it's not really a chaparral plant. You don't have to plant creosote or something if you prefer ceonothus, and there's a bunch of ceonothus to pick from. And you don't have to go 100% native. On the tour we went on, gardens were rated on % of native plants, and none were 100%. Most were somewhere between 50% and maybe 80% or so, but often with a fruit tree or rose bush or even a small clover lawn in the mix. Just shifting a third of your property over to drought-resistant native plants can really cut down on the water usage, as well as attracting butterflies or hummingbirds or whatever. e. here's an example of one of the yards we looked at. That grass you see is native, and this family had kids and a big dog. It's a small lawn, no-cut, with terraced beds above it on their sloped property. Lots of trees for shade, etc. Concord isn't IE but it does get hot and dry through the summer here. They had in-ground drip irrigation put in, if I remember right. It was really nice. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Aug 20, 2013 |
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Aug 20, 2013 04:44
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Yeah, if you live in Southern California there's pretty much no reason not to grow citrus.
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Aug 20, 2013 04:46
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Oh yeah, these guys had a pond. Two ponds actually, linked, with koi. And a huge rose tree, and citrus. But also tons of native plants. It was loving gorgeous. No room for kids to play soccer or anything, mind you, but a really amazing garden. Their pond attracts native frogs.
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Aug 20, 2013 04:49
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Here's a house in my hood with a succulents lawn; I think it's beautiful.   
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Aug 20, 2013 05:35
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My mom converted about 900 sqft to native plants with drip irrigation at her house and it looks amazing. We don't have a ton of space so we just do citrus and succulents, they are a great SoCal plant and use basically no water because they're CAM plants. Succulent chat itt.
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Aug 20, 2013 06:07
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Dusseldorf posted:Yeah, if you live in Southern California there's pretty much no reason not to grow citrus. Citrus can be a pain in the rear end if it freezes where you are (which is actually most of inlandish CA). It doesn't cause death every time or even most cases, but to prevent it you have to be fairly proactive. Big growers in the IE use smudge pots, which basically burn raw oil, in the winter to save the orchards every year. Great for the air. You as an individual can do simpler things like wrapping the tree in christmas lights and covering it with a blanket if small enough, but eventually it won't be enough. Thanks to climate change the freeze snaps are getting more frequent and colder -- my parents lost a 50 odd year old (if not older) orange tree a couple of winters ago to freeze.
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Aug 20, 2013 07:24
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nm posted:Citrus can be a pain in the rear end if it freezes where you are (which is actually most of inlandish CA). It doesn't cause death every time or even most cases, but to prevent it you have to be fairly proactive. My family had a lemon tree and a orange tree in the Hollywood Hills, and while I am sure there was plenty of fruit loss when it got really cold they never were really close to dying. Most of SoCal is going to be a similar climate, of course the issue with citrus is from the dead zones caused by the acidity but there is worse looks than citrus trees on plain dirt. Granted, beyond lawns there is the issue of golf courses, even if they recycle their water they lose a ton from evaporation.
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Aug 20, 2013 07:44
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Papercut posted:The problem with this is that the native ecosystem of the Inland Empire is chaparral. It's dry, dusty shrubland. It works fine as a front yard, but is no substitute for a lawn. I'm not saying that lawns are right, but telling families in the IE to convert their lawns to native gardens is not going to be too convincing. GIS for "xeriscape" or "xeriscaping" and you will see some attractive area-appropriate landscaping.
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Aug 20, 2013 07:52
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FRINGE posted:GIS for "xeriscape" or "xeriscaping" and you will see some attractive area-appropriate landscaping. And if you really want to see the huge range of options for low water use plants follow this link then google the botanical names of the ones that look interesting. Start at page 70 on the site, 62 in the PDF. This is literally the plant guide that every landscape architect in CA uses now after AB-1881 came out to figure out plant water usage zones for the maximum allowable water allowance (MAWA) calcs that can be found here under water budget calculator (requires excel) which is what every landscape plan now requires to be approved. For the love of god though, don't plant any society garlic or ficus trees since the former smells like poo poo and the latter destroys foundations.
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Aug 20, 2013 08:19
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Makes me sad to see this. Parts of Riverside are very nice. Parts of Riverside are very bad. All of Riverside is geographically a scrubby desert unlike coastal OC and LA and so the non-cultivated parts tend to look pretty ragged. A lot of the bad parts are pretty much near the freeway, so you get the nice steady flow of people driving through it on the way to Vegas or Big Bear and taking a poo poo on it. But calling it a "cultural wasteland" - what does that even mean? They restored the Fox Theater that Gone With the Wind premiered in, there's a museum, there's a bunch of nice state parks. There's the Mission Inn where two presidents were married/honeymooned. There's a University of California, there's a local music scene and artists and all that stuff. Have you actually been anywhere else in the state? Do you even know what a cultural wasteland looks like? It's true I'm being a bit hyperbolic. I've definitely been around the state enough to see some real shitholes. Its just I've been here my entire life and I have seen enough different places to know this is not where I want to be, so I tend to exaggerate its negatives.
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Aug 20, 2013 13:00
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:By the way, lest you think I am viewing the city through smog-colored glasses: It certainly does have problems with air quality (that's getting better) and sprawl and traffic but that's pretty much endemic to every Los Angeles exburb east of Pomona and traffic is literally part of living anywhere populated in California. I missed this the first time. I think LA-area traffic is worse than anywhere else in the country. Basing that on having driven there a handful of times. I've never been anywhere else where you can have horrible traffic jams at 2 in the morning, and there's no accident. The Bay Area has freeways that jam up during rush hour, but the rest of the time they're generally fine. The bay bridge toll plaza can get backed up on weekends sometimes too, when they have to turn on the metering lights, but part of that is the construction on the bridge that slows everything down. LA has freeways with like six lanes each direction that are parking lots all the drat time, it's completely insane.
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Aug 20, 2013 16:53
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If traffic was better in LA then people would have nothing to make conversation about when they finally arrive at their destination.
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Aug 20, 2013 17:02
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Leperflesh posted:LA has freeways with like six lanes each direction that are parking lots all the drat time, it's completely insane. You get phenomenons like the 10 freeway which is inexplicably heavy traffic at basically all hours. I've come to a stop at 4am on a Saturday. withak posted:If traffic was better in LA then people would have nothing to make conversation about when they finally arrive at their destination. True that.
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Aug 20, 2013 18:06
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withak posted:If traffic was better in LA then people would have nothing to make conversation about when they finally arrive at their destination. That's actually a good point. If you want to make a list of things that unify Los Angeles area residents, it's like: 1. traffic 2. earthquake readiness 3. In-n-Out burger Which would put horrible congestion in both the asset and liability columns of the city's ledgers. Which is pretty loving depressing. But everyone from the WB exec down to the taco stand cook has to suffer the same hellish fate on the Ventura Fwy.
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Aug 20, 2013 18:16
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