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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.
FWIW, lawns aren't the problem. Take Colorado for example. 97% of the portion of Colorado River water (the rest goes to downstream states like Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Wyoming, and also to Mexico) that Colorado gets to use is agriculture.
Of the remaining 3% that isn't used for inefficient ag, that whole 3% includes industrial, residential, businesses.
Of the subset of that 3% that covers residential, that subset includes some percentage of lawn water use (your references mentioned 50% to 70%) for the months that irrigation is turned on (in Colorado, late May to mid October.)
Lawns are very far down the scale of concern, but media and industry like to make the problem about the individual instead of admitting responsibility for their inefficient and wasteful processes.
Yes, lawns in desert environments don't make any sense, but there are entire industries to fry before it becomes necessary to be concerned with that with any amount of alarm. Wet land around homes also helps mitigate wildfire spread, although hopefully plant type, object placement, and technology help mitigate that in the future as xeriscaping and zeroscaping become more common. It also helps slow dirt erosion.
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.
Colorado and large parts of Texas join California in this. In Colorado it's especially galling to see huge lawns of grass because a.) native flora are very attractive and b.) it is so god damn dry most of the year that it makes California look like wetlands, which exacerbates the issue since grass doesn't shade the ground as effectively from the harsh sun as native plants do, resulting in the need for more frequent watering. And this is on top of summers that regularly reach the hundreds, and winters that regularly get down into the negative double digits.
This is somewhat mitigated by two things: there are of course fewer people in Colorado than California, and much more importantly, fewer celebrities.
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.