system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If water is so scarce in some areas, why isn't it prohibitively priced?

Here on Reddit I constantly see people complaining about almond farms, golf courses, and Lake Meade. I've been discouraged from moving to the Southwest United States, because of their water crises. I currently live in Utah, where we have a water crisis of our own. In my area, I see a lot of PSAs about conserving water, but never any notifications/complaints about "high water prices" (people in my city complain about everything).

My economic question is, if there's a shortage, why aren't they raising the prices substantially?  No one wants to be price gouged, but this is a long-term crisis and price increases will generate behavior change signals to people who are not using water economically, and force badly behaving companies out of business.

Are there barriers in the way of keeping drought-stricken areas from raising the price of water? Or are we already in equilibrium and people are just fear-mongering because this is Reddit?
gpt
This opens up all kinds of questions. Water is ultimately really cheap. As far as monthly expenses go, it's a blip on the radar for most people.

So the question is, how much more expensive do we have to make it to discourage its use enough.

Which leads us to the next point. We *want* people to have easy and cheap access to water, because we desperately need it to survive. Of course we also want to conserve water, because we desperately need it to survive.

You could say "well, households that consume less than X gallons get the cheap price and everything above that is really expensive", which works fine in principle, but then you gotta think about enforcement. How do you make sure people actually stick to this, does the law even allow such restrictions, etc. And what about companies, who probably use way more water than households anyway?

These are for the most part solvable issues, but it's not really that easy to implement a "good" water conservation policy. Not to mention that you need the political will to implement it.