By Dave Owen
. . .
The popular mythology of water management often treats cities as the bad guys. We tend to condemn those cities–often in colorful terms–for their avarice, arrogance, and power, and those narratives have policy consequences. But they often miss the mark.
One of the oldest truisms of western water is that cities—particularly big, desert cities in the southwest—are villains. Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, for example, famously chronicled how Los Angeles “employed chicanery, subterfuge, spies, bribery, a campaign of divide-and-conquer, and a strategy of lies to get the water it needed. In the end, it milked [Owen Valley] bone-dry, impoverishing it, while the water made a number of prominent Los Angeleans very, very rich.” Los Angeles was Reisner’s primary target, but it was not alone. Phoenix was a “make-believe city;” San Francisco’s landscaping was a “fraud;” and Las Vegas was a “tawdry mirage.” (Los Angeles, for good measure, was also a “fake.”)
Many other authors have picked up on these narratives, which are conventional wisdom in much of the West. And the narratives have policy implications. Fears of predatory urban water users drive legal doctrines like area-of-origin protections and more general fears of water transfers. Though the effect is hard to measure, they also probably contribute to water-management complacency in other parts of the West, and a distorted sense that water righteousness comes, not from using water carefully, but from using water that is piped from somewhere nearby. As suburban northern Californians water their lawns, they can happily remind themselves that at least they aren’t like those profligate water hogs in LA.
In a recent paper, I ask whether perhaps these narratives might go a bit too far. Cities, western and otherwise, are hardly perfect in their water management, and the stories of past chicanery didn’t come from nowhere. In recent decades, though, the story is quite different; cities have helped improve water management in many ways. Los Angeles has spent decades reducing per capita water use. Orange County is a world leader in water recycling. Las Vegas has some of the nation’s most aggressive programs for reducing outdoor water use. The term “xeriscaping”, which describes the kinds of outdoor water-use efficiency practices that Las Vegas and other cities have pursued, is a creation of the city of Denver’s water department.
Beyond these innovations, cities provide a variety of other water benefits. Dense development patterns have less landscaped area per person, which explains why urban residents tend to use less water—sometimes much less—than their suburban counterparts. Cities’ density also makes building water and wastewater infrastructure more affordable. And cities also are good for water quality. That claim might at first seem counterintuitive—water quality in urban waterways is often lower than in less developed settings—but the per capita impact of urban residents on water quality is smaller. It would be much harder to have high-quality waters in remote areas if urban development were spread out and those areas were not so remote.
The equity stories of water management also are often unfair to cities. In western water debates, we often observe—or lament—that water flows uphill to money. The money we’re referring to is, of course, urban; water flows over mountains to reach cities but rarely climbs much to farms. The implication is that cities are the wealthy Goliaths taking on the poor rural Davids. But cities are filled with poor and middle-class people as well as the wealthy. Urban water districts usually have lots of money because they serve lots of people, rich and poor alike, not because they selectively cater to pockets of wealth.
Of course, cities also present water-management challenges. Urban water often must come from somewhere else, and sometimes cities have made regrettable choices about where to source their water. Hetchy Hetchy is the iconic example. Many cities also have been, and sometimes continue to be, resistant to calls for using water more efficiently and for better managing their waste. And, often through no fault of their own, many cities are struggling with affordability challenges in delivering water to their poorer residents. There probably is no city that could not improve its water management practices, and some improvements could be big. But that is true of nearly every class of water users, and it is often even more true of water users in suburban or exurban settings.
In other policy fields, the virtues of cities are well established. People who are concerned with habitat protection, air pollution, energy efficiency, housing affordability, or government service provision all widely discuss the value that dense, urban development provides. Water debates, however, can sometimes seem stuck in the rhetoric of earlier eras. As a field, we might do well to move on.
About the Author
Dave Owen is the Albert Abramson ’54 Distinguished Professor at UC Law San Francisco, where he teaches water law, among other classes.
Further Reading
Owen, D. 2025. Water and the Western City. Stanford Environmental Law Journal 44:261.
Ayres, A. et al. 2023. Water Use in California’s Communities. https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-californias-communities/ .
Kimmelman, M. 2025. For the Future of Water Conservation, Look to… Los Angeles? N.Y. Times.
Kiparsky, M. et al. 2021. Groundwater Recharge to Address Seawater Intrusion and Supply in an Urban Coastal Aquifer: Orange County Water District, Orange County, California. Case Studies in the Environment. https://doi.org/10.1525/cse.2021.1223118.
Reisner, M. Rev. ed. 1993. Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water. Penguin/Random House.
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