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There's a finite amount that can be done about agriculture, though you can do covered agriculture.
But we still have lawns, which is a significant chunk of water use.
Way back when the British colonists showed up in North America, they brought with them the tradition of the grass lawn. That was predicated on an England-like climate. That kind of works on the East Coast, but is a terrible mismatch for the American Southwest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn
Having lawns in the middle of the desert kinda requires pulling enough water out of aquifers and constantly dumping it on the ground to produce an English biome, which isn't really sustainable -- the aquifers recharge much more slowly than our present rate of extraction.
Maybe it's possible to do something like mass desalination and transport from the ocean, but that's gonna cost more...and even if we want to do that, there probably still has to be a reduction in lawn area at some point.
Permanently Deleted
Trying to have a green lawn in a desert is pretty fucking stupid, you ask me.
Rock gardens are low maintenance.
But it’s even dumber trying to grow water ~~intestines~~ intensive crops in a fucking desert
intensive, unless you're growing some kind of laxative.
They do grow a lot of fruit, just saying. (Thanks, I missed that auto incorrect,)
So, there's probably always gonna need to be some watered, grassy fields. Grass is rapidly self-healing, grows quickly. You want to play sports on a sports field, you probably want to do it on grass, and AstroTurf is kind of a disappointing alternative.
We have the water available to do small parks, even in the desert. We can let people have access to a grass surface.
But doing it all over an entire suburb is really water-intensive. And a lot of people aren't actually out walking on their yard's grass and tearing it up, so they don't need the rapid self-healing that it offers.
California in particular -- with large population centers in arid landscape -- has seen some movement on xeriscaping, doing landscaping that still looks nice -- even if it's not as tolerant of being walked on. But it's still really not a norm.
EDIT: And one perk of doing something other than lawns is that lawns are really maintenance-intensive. Because they grow so quickly, the same thing that lets them repair damage from being walked on quickly, they also have to be mowed all the time to keep them short. Most plants that are okay with less water usage don't require nearly as much upkeep.
Even if someone really wants the sort of "meadow" look that lawns provide, as long as it doesn't have to tolerate the kind of foot traffic that typical lawn grasses do, you can get grasses and grass-like plants that are okay with a lot less water.