**3.1 Hydrology and Geography as prologue – A Los Angeles and New York overview**

So, what can the experiences of Los Angeles and New York teach us about water stress and large cities? Conventional wisdom might suggest that being located in highly-developed societies both are far better in managing water supply and quality than their counterparts in less-developed nations. In reality, however, their longer-standing experience as large urban conurbations makes them instructive cases for other megacities. This is so for three reasons.

First, early in their histories, both cities faced many of the same challenges to public health and wastewater management that their Third World counterparts face today. These challenges included confronting the role foul and unhealthful water plays in the spread of infectious disease (a particular problem for New York City which, in 1832, suffered a severe cholera epidemic attributed to contaminated drinking water, Koeppel, 2000, 2001; American Museum of Natural History, 2011). Another includes the need to take decisive, yet adaptable, action to upgrade public works in order to provide residents with abundant water, and determining whether satisfying the need for safe, secure, and dependable supplies was best left to the "efficiencies" provided by private sector investment, or better suited to management by governmental entities. Los Angeles and New York confronted this latter challenge early in their histories, as we will see (Glaeser, 2011: 99; Mulholland, 2002). To a large extent both challenges drove these cities to divert water from outlying regions.

Second, in diverting water from outlying hinterlands, Los Angeles and New York generated well-documented, but vastly different, environmental and social impacts upon these adjacent regions. In the case of Los Angeles, diversion of water imposed reductions of both in-stream flow and groundwater in Owens Valley. These reductions, in turn, degraded local fisheries and wildlife habitat (McQuilkin, 2011), while acquisition of adjacent lands overlying aquifers deprived Owens Valley communities of the ability to pursue real estate development for commercial and residential use (VanderBrug, 2009).

For its part, by acquiring much of the open space surrounding its reservoirs in the Catskill and Croton watersheds, a positive economic outcome generated by New York City was retention of low-density residential development that preserved the region's rural character

Cities and Water – Dilemmas of Collaboration in Los Angeles and New York City 323

locally-available resources through collective effort. Second, when these sources proved insufficient to support further growth, they acquired more distant sources. Acquisition of these sources was predicated on concerns with water security, safety, and plentifulness.

> Croton Watershed = 10% Catskill watershed = 40% Delaware watershed = 50%

Croton Reservoir = 201 km

(1.2 billion gallons approx.)

3792.9 million liters

(125 miles)

Metropolitan WD = 71% Groundwater = 10% Recycled wastewater = 1%

Mono Lake = 544 km

million gallons approx.)

Metered water rates1 \$2.92 - 5.19/hundred feet3 \$3.17/hundred feet3

\*In recent years, the LA Aqueduct from Owens Valley has supplied upwards of 35% of the city's water supply. However, mandated restoration of Mono and Owens Lakes has resulted in a reduction of

1 New York charges a flat water rate while Los Angeles has a "tiered" or increasing block rate system wherein customers are charged a lower "base" if they stay within a designated conservation allotment. If they exceed that allotment (typically 79,287 liters or 2800 cubic feet/month), they are charged at the

In the event, there is one major way their quest for regional dominion *differed*: Los Angeles sought external sources of supply mostly because its regional access to water was always precarious. After its first full century of settlement (c. 1880) the city suddenly aspired to grow, but found that its semi- arid region simply had few ground or surface water supplies available nearby. By contrast, New York was impelled toward the Croton Watershed in Westchester County, some 64.4 km (40 miles) to its north, by the poor quality and inadequate volume of its local supplies. A cholera epidemic in 1832, caused in part by degraded water quality and poor waste disposal, drove efforts to build a Croton Aqueduct. Declining well levels, which made fire fighting capacity inadequate, was also a factor (Koeppel, 2000: 6). Each city's respective quest for regional dominion reveals these intricate

From its founding in 1781, and for nearly a century afterwards, the Los Angeles River was the city's major water source. The first families who founded and settled the "pueblo" almost immediately set about constructing a brush "toma" or dam across the river, diverting water into a so-called "Zanja Madre," or mother ditch, which fed homes and irrigation canals into fields that, at first, were closely adjacent to the plaza - the civic center of the early

Number of storage facilities 114 (reservoirs and tanks) 19 (reservoirs)

**Water supply characteristic Los Angeles New York** 

(233 miles)

(338 miles)

Customers 9 million 4.1 million

Major supply sources LA Aqueduct/E. Sierra = 18%\*

Water supplied/day 1998.7 million liters (528

higher rate (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (2009b).

Table 1. Water Supply Systems of Los Angeles and New York City

settlement (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (2010b).

Distance from source to city Owens Valley = 376 km

supply of approximately half that annual delivery.

**4.1 Los Angeles – Early water development** 

patterns.

(Westchester County Department of Planning, 2009). Later, sewage plant outfalls and nonpoint pollution around these same reservoirs released contaminants into the city's water supply which generated further, less popular land acquisition measures to avert pollution through eminent domain and condemnation suits - a strategy that continued through the early 1990s (New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, 2010a, 2010b).

Finally, although these cities have very different hydrological features, New York and Los Angeles share *two* remarkably similar water problems. First, both cities have experienced an outracing of available supply as a result of locally-generated demands. Second, while the former is located in a wet and humid region, while the other is dry and semi-arid, both cities have needed to look outside their political boundaries for additional supply. They have also employed similar strategies to acquire water and land rights to ensure control over the watersheds from whence their water comes. By their wide range of conditions, we might suggest that these cities bound the impacts faced by most of the world's large urban centers.

That both cities share these problems in common underscores an important point about water stress: the traditional distinction between arid and semiarid regions on the one hand and more humid areas on the other, as a means of maintaining that arid regions' water problems mostly revolved around inadequate water quantity while humid areas' problems are water quality related, is not a valid claim. Water scarcity can occur in any *urbanized*  region if demands cannot be attenuated (Feldman, 2009).

Los Angeles is located in a flat, triangular-shaped semi-arid basin bounded on its north and east by mountains and on the west by the Pacific. Its Mediterranean climate experiences some 39.54 cm (15.58") of average annual precipitation, all in the form of rain, which is collected by two major streams that rise in the San Gabriel portion of the Transverse Range dividing Southern from central California - the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers. The Los Angeles River was the city's major source of water for nearly a century, providing drinking water and serving as the irrigation source for local vineyards and orange groves - both through an elaborate system of ditches and channels called *zanjas* (Gumprecht, 2001: 3; Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, 2010b).

New York City, by contrast is located on the Atlantic Coastal Plain in a slender portion of land bounded by the outfall of the Hudson and East Rivers, and referred to as the Atlantic slope drainage. The humid continental climate, fed by the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic weather systems, produces some 127 cm (50") of precipitation per year, some 63.5 - 76.2 cm (25 - 30") of which falls as snow. In its initial period of settlement, local water supplies were provided through ponds, streams, and springs located on the island of Manhattan (American Museum of Natural History, 2011; New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, 2010b). These hydrological differences help explain how both cities initially managed water supply, while their phenomenal demographic growth helps us understand the remarkably similar path both took in seeking hegemony over regional supplies. Table 1 depicts major features of the water supply systems of New York and Los Angeles.
