Ross Ramsey, the managing editor of The Texas Tribune, writes a regular column.

In big Texas cities, the state’s water shortage can seem like someone else’s problem.

Drought has been in the news a long time, but rates haven’t gone up. Water still comes out when you turn on the tap. The golf courses are still green, and so are the lawns.

Some places do have restrictions; the state keeps a long list of them. El Paso residents pay fines if the sprinklers in their front yards accidentally water the streets. Austin restricts watering to one or two days per week, depending on the level of concern over water at any given time. West Texas towns and cities operate at high levels of alert, and one medium-size city, Wichita Falls, is on a list of cities that could run out of water this year.

In the suburbs, where a lot of voters live in houses encircled by grass, and where that grass is sometimes a measure of how well or how poorly the Joneses are doing, water restrictions are a touchy subject.