We’ve heard all about California homeowners adapting their households to help meet the 25 percent statewide water cut mandated by Governor Jerry Brown. After tearing out their lawns and #droughtshaming free-sprinkling neighbors, they actually exceeded the Governor’s goal in June.
Yet renters, who make up nearly 17 percent of the state’s 38.8 million residents, have had few opportunities to put the mandate into action. Here’s why, and what can be done about it.
Yes, there is a problem
Alongside Governor Brown’s statewide 25 percent target, the State Water Resources Control Board assigned local reduction targets to each of the state’s urban water districts. These ranged from 4 to 36 percent. (Palm Springs, famous for its verdant golf-courses and poolside oases, found itself on the higher end of the scale.)
But renters are largely in the dark about local conservation goals. In a recent statewide survey by the Public Policy Institute of California, homeowners were more than twice as likely as renters to say that they knew how much of a reduction their water district was required to make. Homeowners were also more likely to follow news related to the drought, and to say that they thought water supply was a problem in their community.
California homeowners are more likely than renters to follow news related to the drought.
There’s clearly room for a conservation campaign specifically geared towards renters in urban areas. Slogans and advertisements may rarely influence behavioral change, but they can certainly raise awareness, which much of the renting community seems to lack.
Individual meters in new buildings
It’s not too surprising that renters are disconnected from drought issues. After all, most don’t pay directly for their water, since it’s often included in the price of rent. That’s because most multi-unit buildings use a single meter to track the entire building’s water consumption. Without a monthly bill reminding renters, in dollars, of how much water they used, they aren’t really incentivized to use less. That sucks for the environment, and it sucks for landlords, who have little room to pass rising water costs onto renters, especially in rent-controlled buildings.