It amazes me that this isn't considered a full blown emergency. This feels as bad as a nuke slowly descending onto a city of millions. Yet everyone continues to consume water like nothing is happening. The time for extreme water rationing and banning of certain industries in the desert is years ago.
If I lived anywhere near there I would have been desperately trying to sell my property before it became worthless.
A market based solution (not rationing) would work well, you just need to do it. I would not be worried about drinking water access if I lived in CA, but I would worry about dumb politicians imposing additional draconian restrictions on residential water use while continuing to do nothing to agricultural use.
This causes two problems for California residents:
1) Forest fires. This is not solvable without addressing climate change, which Washington DC keeps blocking.
2) Dire food shortages, and price hikes. California is expensive, and raw food ingredients are a smaller fraction of household budgets than in othet places. This is going to hit poorer countries and poorer states much harder.
There's almost nowhere to move to avoid either of these problems. Here's a map for of which parts of the US are likely to be uninhabitable soon. California is less screwed than most of the US. In fact the California coasts are some of the more heavily populated areas that'll be OK moving forward.
If I lived anywhere near there I would have been desperately trying to sell my property before it became worthless.