Showing my age, but back in 1976, where I lived, water was being brought in by tanker day and night during the hottest summer on record.

I'm not saying privatisation has been a glowing success but supply issues were much worse in the days of nationalisation, especially when you factor in the population growth over the past few decades.

There is the huge confounder that everywhere in the developed world - and even in the less developed world like East Germany, where I grew up, a lot of infrastructure was added and improved over the decades after WWII and it has nothing whatsoever to do with private vs. government (or, in the case of Germany mostly, for water and energy) municipal ownership. Many houses had coal stoves and privies a few decades ago, that is simply how it was, not a question of "we need to privatize water and heating".

Here in Germany especially water is usually operated and owned by local municipally owned enterprises, and I'd say it's a huge success. Even my home district in East Germany (GDR) build a huge water infrastructure project with a dam, many kilometers of large pipes, and one or more (don't know exactly how many) water processing plants, definitely nothing privately owned there. People including those in power just put a very high value on having enough and reliable supply of water in Germany, and it has nothing to do with private vs. government, given what we have now with mostly local and state governments providing. In recent years a lot more private companies entered the picture, but I'm not sure about ownership (municipalities also operate their own companies), in the end it's an attitude question more so than blaming it of "private better". You can have success or failure with either model.

There are still houses in the US being built right now that have zero water and all must be delivered by tanker.

No wells to be dug, no neighbors to beg from, and now that the Colorado River is dangerously low they are stopping the delivery trucks.

This means people will have to move eventually, and good luck selling your 1.5 million dollar home with no water access.

Lol, California has 'severe drought conserve water' as all the businesses keep watering their 100% unnecessary grass, Nestle bottles it up and sells it back to us, we have almonds being grown to make fucking almond milk, and we have strained power grids warning of high power consumption while every fucking business leaves their signage and parking lots lit up like fucking Christmas.

But it's we the people taking showers and running the AC that is the problem.

None of this makes any sense!

There have been precisely zero new reservoirs brought into service in England over the last 30 years while the population has as you say grown considerably. There has been relatively little infrastructure maintenance, leading to high-levels of leakage, and over-extraction from once healthy rivers. I'd agree that things weren't perfect in 1976 but privatization has failed to noticeably improve things either while totally failing to prepare for the changes required by a growing population and worsening climate.

Water leakage is not a problem. The water goes back into the aquifer, where it should be anyway. It's a minor waste of energy and treatment chemicals, since it's drinkable water, but the water itself is not lost.