Anna Genoese here at Tor tells me the same thing has been going on in covenanted communities in New Jersey. Apparently only the little people are expected to conserve water.

I'm a gardener. That pisses me off.

Gee, this puts Portland's problems in perspective.

Things here turn green whether you want them to or not.

Edited by author 06-17-2002 01:57 AM
Sighofrelief, you mean the Ogallala or Oglala Aquifer, not the Oklahoma Aquifer, and anyway the Denver area doesn't draw its water from that source -- the western part of the state is outside the aquifer's boundaries. Nevertheless, your point is substantially correct.

Highland Ranch was built on grasslands, but not the kind of grasslands they have in mind. They're at the edge of the high plains, and don't get much rainfall. Their natural grass is tough, clumpy, and drought-resistant. Basically, it's green when it rains. During the rest of the year it turns yellow and dry. The only way to get that covenant-green faux-genteel lawn is to water the bejesus out of it; and even then you're not going to have the right look unless you seed (and fertilize, and aerate, and re-seed) non-native species.

If you're from the Intermountain West, you probably know the term for this stuff: water porn. It's why all those Las Vegas hotels just gotta have big fountains out front, and why so many expensive houses from Boulder to San Diego have swimming pools that rarely get used. Water is money, water is power; water is the ability to indulge vulgar brainless fantasies about the perfectly-cropped turf of your estate grounds: suburban tract housing as miniaturized English country home.

(Phoenix is worse. In Phoenix, even if you do all that seeding and watering and fertilizing, the only time you get really green lawns is in midwinter. The rest of the year it's pretty much bermuda grass or nothing: a harsh, unlovely South African species, so viciously allergenic that many kids with allergies can't go near it. And yes, in dry seasons some people really do spray-paint it green. I first saw that done in the Phoenix area thirty years ago. They claimed it was a green-tinted fertilizer, but everyone knew it was paint.)

The other thing that's going on is that nonsense about maintaining property values. Do you need all those covenanted rules to keep your property from being devalued? Of course not. It's enough if you keep your neighbors from throwing trash in the street and parking three cars in a state of partial repair in the middle of their yard, which comes under normal civic statutes covering littering and eyesores. And do you really think you can get a $5,000 reduction in the price of a house you're negotiating to buy, on the grounds that the neighbor one block over has painted his house a funny color? No? Neither do I.*

A mortgage is the single biggest investment most households will ever make. Property values are something to worry about. Highland Park was a leapfrogging development. Those always look best when they're new, before all that pretty open space between the development and town gets filled in. It's a worry. So's the nature of the development. If subsequent building in your area turns out to be high price and low density, you win. If it's cheap little houses on pinched quarter-acre lots, and trashy strip malls, it's not so good. Do you have any control over this? Nope. None at all. So you worry some more.

On top of that, some big segments of Denver's economy are uncomfortably fragile. There needs to be a city there, but it's less obvious that there needs to be one that size. Nothing will protect your property values if your city hits hard times.

These lunatic covenants are comforting, in a cargo-cultish way; an attempt to control the uncontrollable: If we do everything just right, our property values won't collapse. It makes no more sense than urban homeowners in the 60s panicking and selling at a loss, because blacks were moving in and property values were sure to drop: Better sell out now, while you still can.

"Fetish" gets used metaphorically so often. Hear the word now, literally: Those lawns are fetish objects. Of course Highland Park is unrealistic about them. Their semiotic function outweighs any other use or characteristic they could have.

---

*I don't know the current prejudices in the Denver area, but I know what they were when I was a kid growing up in the Southwest. Painting your house an excessively bright or intense color meant you were a recent Mexican immigrant. Doing major machinery repairs in your front yard meant you were poor white trash. And having an oversized statue in your yard meant you were Italian -- unless the statue had a southwestern theme, in which case you were a retiree from some midwestern state that starts with a vowel.

this is precisely why colorado isn't going to have any water for anything shortly...too many people + semi-arid climate + rapidly depleting oklahoma aquifer + no other place to get water from = some very unhappy former californians and texans

- native who had to move off the front range

We had a drought here in town a few years ago, and they passed a law making it illegal to water your lawns. So a company sprang up which would paint your dead, brown lawn green. It was a spray-on, water soluble, bio-degradable paint. Problem solved. Free enterprise in action.

Here's a story on Highland Ranch's "covenant cops": http://westword.com/issues/2001-10-18/feature.html/1/index.html and the h

I lived in CO for a couple of years, and the Denver area is notorious for the ungodly amount of Kentucky bluegrass lawns mandated by local subdivisions. This practice is rampant not only in CO, but in Southern California as well. I lived at an elevation of about 9000', so growing a lawn wasn't an option for me even if I'd wanted one; I had to xeriscape by default.

Pavers. Screw this grass stuff (and lawngrass doesn't belong in that part of the world anyway.) If I buy a house with a lawn, that lawn's going away, and getting replaced by pavers. Those lizards pavers would work.

yeah my parents live in Colorado and their Home Owners Assoc. does everything from tell them which flowers their allowed to plant to what kinds of cars are suitable for the driveway.

it's to keep a "certain type of people" away from owning homes in that neighborhood which makes me think it's either racist or people are afraid of living next to folks who like cacti and VW vans.

I think they don't want rednecks living there, but the people they don't want there couldn't afford the homes, so what's the point?

Hasn't the state issued a ban on lawn-watering? If they haven't, then they should - no valid contract can require you to break the law, thus rendering the (sane) non-lawn-waterers immune. Why the hell would anyone in Colorado want a lawn, anyway?

Why don't they just require astroturf?