The easy explanation for the failure of the anti-lawn movement is that change is hard. People have been trained to expect lawns, and this expectation is self-reinforcing: weed laws are all but explicitly about maintaining property values. When Haeg installed an “edible estate” in the front yard of a Salina, Kansas, resident named Stan Cox, passersby kept asking Cox whether his neighbors had complained about it yet. Everyone “claims to like the new front yard, yet everyone expects others not to like it,” Cox writes. For a developer, meanwhile, putting in turfgrass is by far the easiest way to landscape; what is sometimes called “contractor’s mix” grass seed is specifically formulated to provide a fast-growing—though not necessarily long-lasting—green. (Lowe’s, which sells 7 kg of contractor’s-mix seed for $23.52, advertises it as an “economy mixture that provides quick grass cover.”) The lawn may be wasteful and destructive, it may even be dangerous, but it is, in its way, convenient. This is perhaps the final stage of the American lawn. What began as a symbol of privilege and evolved into an expression of shared values has now come to represent expedience. We no longer choose to keep lawns; we just keep on keeping them. In the meantime, the familiar image of Dad cutting the grass and then, beer in hand, sitting back to admire his work, is, in many communities, a fiction: increasingly, lawn care has become another one of those jobs, like cooking dinner or playing with the kids, that’s outsourced to someone else.

Americans and their lawns. A dumb idea on the way out. Imagine all the time saved as millions of schlubs no longer have to mow lawns:

front lawns cost Americans $40b a year to maintain, and are spread over ~129K km2—the land area equivalent of the entire state of Alabama.

and another effort

This Article examines the trend toward sustainability mandates by considering the implications of a ban on lawns, the single largest irrigated crop in the United States. Green yards are deeply seated in the American ethos of the sanctity of the single-family home. This psychological attachment to lawns, however, results in significant environmental harms: conventional turfgrass is a non-native monocrop that contributes to a loss of biodiversity and typically requires vast amounts of water, pesticides, and gas-powered mowing.

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