Land use equals water use

I was thinking, yes, a dangerous thing for someone who has more questions than knowledge or answers, about a comment I heard Todd Jarvis give a long time ago about land use planning being water use planning.  I know enough to be dangerous about our land use system but from my personal history in Oregon I am aware of how my family's farms in the Hillsboro area were gobbled up by the tech industry when Tektronix moved in.  My childhood memories of berry field and fruit orchards are just that, memories.  I still grieve when I have the misfortune to travel those roads these days...but living in another part of Oregon now, I can move on.  I don't live a traditional agrarian lifestyle, I am very much an urbanite and relish the opportunities provided by that environment.  But, true to my forebears, I grow my tomatoes, potatoes and carrots...I have my laying hens...and I really enjoy my urban farmsteading and find that, pardon the pun, it grounds me.  So what does all this have to do with water?  I keep thinking about the environmental impacts of paving our farmlands and about providing all the things that development in suburban areas needs to continue...electricity, sewage management, trash (or more hopefully recycling) service, roads, schools, police, fire, and water.  While I list water last, so many of the previous things need water to exist or affect water: 

• sewage wouldn't exist if we didn't have flush toilets, although I think that having indoor running water at sinks and showers is probably a really good public health deal ... so we need at least some kind of sewage management
• a lot of our electricity comes from hydroelectric sources ... how different would it be if all the big boxes had solar arrays covering their flat tops?
• trash maybe doesn't take a lot of water to deal with but I have read that there can be nasty stuff leaching out of landfills
• recycling probably takes water to clean materials or reprocess them - I posted the little report from DEQ of the lifecycle costs of recycling vs. reusing water bottles.  Interesting stuff and it makes you wonder if that is a good example of other parts of the recycling industry.  The gut says it probably is...
• roads are interesting to think about - not knowing a whole lot about how they are constructed I will hazard a guess that the water related impacts come after they are there - rain runs off them and picks up whatever cars, animals or leaking trash trucks leave behind.  I've heard of roads causing local changes to groundwater flow by creating an underground dam - all of a sudden, someone floods that never flooded before... 
• schools and police equal people in my mind and people are, to pull a quote from a Star Trek episode "bags of mostly water."  We need water to survive, duh.  But do we take more than we need?
• fire services are also people but the service, by definition, uses water but probably not something I begrudge.

I think the bone I'm picking is the "bags of mostly water" part of the equation.  People have to live somewhere and work somewhere and here, in the opulent, plush, US of A, people always assume they will have water when they turn on the tap or flush the toilet.  And because of that assumption, yes, land uses that support people, homes, businesses, roads, schools, sewage services, electricity services, ad nauseum, are water uses...farms are water uses....but what's the life cycle cost of paving farmland and growing people instead of berries?  I don't know.  Yet again, I think about things and am left with more questions than ever.