California’s Affluent Ecotopia Squeezes Water to Its Last Drop

Welcome to the future in Marin County, one where a $2 million house with an ocean view doesn’t necessarily come with a reliable water supply.

Water managers are taking extraordinary measures to keep faucets flowing should the state enter a third year of a punishing drought this winter. That this affluent redwood-studded ecotopia faces such a possibility, though, is a harbinger of a climate-constrained destiny that is fast arriving.

“These droughts are now on a new timeline,” says Newsha Ajami, a hydrologist and director of urban water policy at Stanford University’s Water in the West program. “There used to be at ...