Comment by jeffbee

What a great article. Definitely bookmarking this for reference. People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets. The last couple of charts really highlight that trend.

Something else worth considering is that many uses at least in California are non-rivalrous. Reducing one water use does not necessarily create free supply of water for some other use, since water is a physical good that must be transported, refined, stored, and delivered. The best example of this is flood irrigation for rice in northern California. Bad optics, perhaps, but the fact is the rice is grown there because it was flooded in the first place. You can stop growing rice, and that will change one of the cells in your spreadsheet, but only because the spreadsheet model isn't quite right. You can also stop feeding cattle entirely and that isn't going to help cities with chronic supply problems, like Santa Barbara, nor will it benefit large urban systems like San Francisco and EBMUD who rely on dedicated alpine supplies.