Wall Street Journal article "How Zoning Ruined the Housing Market in Blue-State America"

While there is no question that "legacy" residents tend to disfavor changes to their neighborhoods, including the addition of housing, and that's worthy of criticism, there are a number of other arguments that anti-zoning advocates espouse which are facile.

1.  Most residential housing in center cities was built before 1940, when the US population was 132,164,569.  Today's population is about 311,000,000, an increase of 2.35x.

2.  And many of those cities--not the rowhouse dominated cities--didn't use land very efficiently.  For example the rowhouse type common to Mid-Atlantic cities, packs a lot more units into a typical block, maybe 32 single family detached houses versus 64-72 rowhouses.

Neighborhoods built later use land even more inefficiently, with almost uniformly large(r) lot development--until the 1980s when land costs rose.  Our house lot in Salt Lake City could easily accommodate 4 rowhouses instead of one ranch style house.

3.  Furthermore, the average household size is shrinking, requiring more housing to house the same number of residents.

4.  Today land is a lot more expensive making "American Dream" style houses--detached homes with a yard--unrealistic in center cities and inner ring suburbs.

5.  But a significant number of people still want an American Dream style house, not the multiunit apartments now being built in cities.   This forces them to move much further out, where property is relatively cheaper.

6.  Related to (2) inefficient use of land, owner occupied housing is almost impossible to re-assemble in order to build new housing with more units on the same amount of land.  I am familiar with only a couple examples, one in Fairfax County, Virginia in the late 1980s, the 200 block of K Street NE in Washington, DC, but that block was zoned half industrial to begin with, making land consolidation much easier, and a block in Ann Arbor near the Michigan Stadium ("Land Use intensification in Ann Arbor," 2022).

7.  One key flaw of zoning is that it tends to be pretty homogeneous in intent, in that single family detached housing is in one zone, attached housing in another, multiunit in a third, when in pre 1940 times it was common, at least in the core of the center city, to include apartment buildings in the mix, mostly small but of varying sizes--bigger in the core.

Armistra Apartments, Salt Lake.  Photo: Jonathan Mauer.

8.  It doesn't help that zoning rules also militated against carriage houses/accessory dwelling units, English basements, etc.  E.g., my DC block of 32 detached houses could accommodate almost that many carriage type houses.

Architects Melissa Shin, with dog Maya, and Amanda Shin enjoy the outdoor area in front of the ADU affectionately called “Mouse House.” (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

9.  Salt Lake City is interesting in that on residential arterials and corners of blocks, it's common to have duplex/triplex housing, and buildings with even more units depending on lot size.  

This type of housing, along with rowhouses, is often referred to as "middle housing" in that it is smaller than the larger SFH.

So this expands the variety of housing demographics able to be accommodated with different housing types.  E.g. a single tenant doesn't necessarily need a large house.

Another type of this housing is courtyard housing.  Salt Lake has a couple great examples including Boulevard Gardens.  A beautifully written book on creating modern courtyard housing is Pocket Neighborhoods by Ross Chapin.

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As the article describes, it is absolutely true that segregated neighborhoods were a desired outcome from zoning.  

The author of the piece, Yoni Appelbaum, has written Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, from which this is excerpted.  The book will be released by the end of the month.

For example, in the 1920s, parts of Upper Northwest DC were zoned against rowhouses, then the city's predominant housing type, to reduce the opportunity for racial mixing.

This isn't a blue-red state phenomenon per se.  The fact is that "red states" building more housing today is more a matter of timing than anything else, they are beneficiaries of having lots of land to develop still, because their growth has occurred after 1950.  And-- in response to demand for workers by the defense industry --the Sunbelt was really the Gun Belt (e.g., Anne Markusen).

One sign of this is how production home builders, such as Kaufman and Broad, originally based in Detroit, moved to Los Angeles.

Conclusion.  We are stuck.  Unless people gladly change their preferences to multiunit housing, it will be impossible to provide housing in central places, people will have to move further and further out from the core.

While zoning is one of the issues, market conditions (cost of land in particular) and people's housing preferences are the dominant forces.

Note that the movement to change single family zoning classes to include duplexes, and sometimes triplexes and quadraplexes as a matter of right could change the equation on this ("Planning Board recommends changes to allow more housing options in single-family home zones," Bethesda Magazine, "The YIMBY movement has a major win in Cambridge, even as many neighbors cry foul," Boston Globe), but only over very long periods of time.  Studies so far show that about 3% of housing tenure forms change per year in such situations, and that's pushed forward by the most motivated.

Mostly, individual property owners don't have the expertise to do this themselves, and will likely sell to developers to do so.  Whether or not properties sell at a premium to a straight up SFH house will be interesting to watch.