I completely agree with you.

The people in power don't care, and they don't intend to spend more money on main replacement. And they'd rather spend a few million here and there, so they can put off spending a couple billion until they are no longer in office. At the end of the day, recycling wastewater would be cheaper than replacing the mains, especially when you add in the fact that many cities have to buy their raw water from an outside entity. In Texas, we buy raw water from water districts. There are cities here that built reservoirs before the water districts ever existed, but now they have to pay for raw water coming out of their own lakes. Recycling wastewater means you pay for it once, and use it over and over. If I discharge it into a river and then pick it up again downstream, I get to pay for it all over again.

Another thing to add perspective to the main replacement thing: Chicago alone has over 400,000 lead service lines. These lines are an active, major health risk and they are only removing dozens of them per year, when they should be doing thousands. If death and lawsuits aren't bringing replacements, they definitely aren't going to go replacing mains over some water loss.

Lastly, forcibly reducing irrigation is the lowest hanging fruit, as we can see on the west coast right now. Irrigation use is much more than 10% of the treated water in the south. Eventually, I'm hoping we will get on board with mass-scale desalination, hopefully powered by nuclear power.