As with living in a crowded bug-hive apartment building instead of a house, reducing water consumption by making showers, toilets, washing machines, dishwashers, and other appliances function poorly is just masking a real decline in standard of living by clipping coins.

“We’ve reduced water, power, meat, and space consumption by XX%” is not good news. That just means we’re getting poorer. Good news would be “we’ve halved the cost of water, power, meat, and space, so everyone have a good time”.

The contradiction here is that, overwhelmingly, the most effective way to decrease the price of space (in terms of square mile per person of land) is to increase unemployment -- which basically nobody actually wants.