Does a Synthetic Lawn Help San Diego Homeowners with the Water Drought and Would You Buy One?

I was out a few days ago previewing properties and I came across a home that had a synthetic lawn and pondered if a potential home buyer would be okay with that.

If you were buying a home here in San Diego, and it had a synthetic lawn, would you still consider purchasing it?  Would you replace it with live plants even if it’s not a lawn?  I myself would probably replace it with real plants even if they were drought resistant.  In California, especially San Diego, because of the water shortage, people have been installing these lawns and saving immensely on their water usage.

San Diego Lawn?

That’s great for the environment and San Diego home owners but, how does that feature affect the home when it comes time to sell it?  I’ve had mixed reviews from clients when it comes to synthetic lawns.  I guess, like most of the time, it falls in the lap of the person interested in purchasing the home.

The interesting part of all of this is that you may not save as much on your water bill as you might think.  I was walking in my area, Mission Hills in San Diego a couple of days ago and was talking to a home owner who opted to plant drought resistant vegetation instead of having a bare front yard or planting a natural lawn. She began conserving a considerable amount of water and this lead to a substantial decrease on her water bill.

Of course she was ecstatic about this and was very happy, till the City of San Diego did something she didn’t expect. Due to her tremendous drop in usage the City sent her a letter informing her about a rate increase for water. Apparently the City has resorted to this policy in order to recover loss of revenue from people conserving water.

Does this make sense?  I understand that San Diego has gone through some difficult financial times in recent history and we’ve had a continuing budget shortage but, is this the right approach when it comes to maintaining revenue by the city?  Why should we bother conserving water if they’re just going to raise our rates to even out the loss as a result of our prodigious water conservation efforts?  This makes no sense to me at all.

Furthermore, not too long ago I was walking in one of our many city parks and observed the irrigation system wasting vast amounts of water. The sprinklers were irrigating parts of the sidewalk and water was literally running down into the street and into the storm drains.  How is this possible?  The City of San Diego has water police, as they’re called, to patrol our neighborhoods and warn, end eventually fine, residents that misuse water in this sort of fashion. I remember seeing announcements giving us guidelines when it came to setting our spinklers, not over watering, not washing our cars, aiming our irrigation system properly so as to only water the lawn and not the sidewalk, etc, etc.  So who’s keeping an eye on the city?  Why do they waste water when they demand we conserve?  This seems like a double standard to me on the part of our city goverment.  The City should also do its part when it comes to water conservation. If they expect us to do our share we should expect them to do theirs.  After all we wouldn’t want to go to Balboa Park per say and have our picnic on a synthetic lawn because our city wasted so much water that they replace real grass with synthetic.

Do we?

So in the end I guess we’ll have to just come up with a better solution than this. So before you go and install a synthetic lawn read this and consider the options. Maybe a real lawn with proper irrgation is cheaper than a synthetic one?