If there’s one thing most outsiders know about Los Angeles, it’s that water is often scarce in the drought-stricken region.
Fights and political jostling over water rights have shaped much of Southern California’s history, and water availability has been at the center of a century of development and industry in what is now the nation’s most populated county. As population and development pressures grew in the early 1900s, the once-wild Los Angeles River was channelized in concrete, private landowners constructed dams to keep more water for themselves and entrepreneurial developers sold off access to private lakes.
But a recent purchase of a natural water source in a wealthy corner of Los Angeles bucks this trend. Instead of grand plans to make a profit from the rare spring, a local conservation group purchased the site just to leave it alone…