This Week on DnA: Can the Southland Grow in an Age of Drought?

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The state of California is severely short of water. And the dwindling supply is coinciding with yet another building boom. Can the Southland keep on expanding if drought is the new normal?

The state of California is severely short of water. And the dwindling supply is coinciding with yet another building boom. Can the Southland keep on expanding if drought is the new normal? Hadley Arnold of Woodbury University’s Arid Lands Institute explains that with an imaginative blend of conservation, recycling and reclamation, Los Angeles could grow and grow, in new architectural and urban forms.

Also on the show, art and culture critic Dave Hickey returns to LA with a new book of critical essays, Pirates and Farmers: Essays on Taste. Maura Lucking tries to find out if he’s a nostalgic curmudgeon or a sage.

And Gideon Brower examines another kind of nostalgia: an effort to preserve an entire neighborhood. He finds that community efforts to make Carthay Square, below, into a Historic Preservation Overlay Zone (HPOZ) hit some bumps in the road: the uglier history of pretty homes, and budget cuts that stall years of work and do not stop development.