You can’t currently bring the water to L.A. or bring L.A. to the water, as Jake Gittes was told. The severe California drought has transformed the city’s ubiquitous swimming pools from oases into threats. From Rory Carroll in the Guardian:

“Some cities have turned off fountains and rationed water until – unless – rains come. California has given local agencies the authority to fine those who waste water up to $500 a day. Environmentalists are depicting green lawns – another symbol of the middle-class dream – as reckless.

Against that backdrop, private swimming pools can appear indulgent, if not selfish. The average uncovered pool in LA loses about 20,000 gallons to evaporation per year.

Those with leaks can lose an additional 700 gallons daily, according to [UC Santa Barbara media studies professor Dick] Hebdige. His essay for the 2012 Backyard Oasis exhibition on southern Californian pools was entitled, ‘HOLE … swimming … floating … sinking … drowning.’

Christopher Hawthorne, the Los Angeles Times architecture critic, said private pools represented a bold 20th-century effort to cleave the metropolis from the natural world, specifically the Pacific.

‘Increasingly that brashness looks misplaced or antique; instead we seem at the mercy of forces beyond our control when it comes to water,’ he noted last month. ‘The swimming pool – like the surface parking lot, the freeway, the lawn and the single-family house – is rapidly fading as a symbolic and cultural marker of Los Angeles.’

As you descend into LA, arguably the second most striking thing about the city – after the endless, concrete vastness – is the number of turquoise pools. Big and small, rectangular and square, round and oval, thousands glint in the sun.

There are an estimated 1.1m pools in California.”