"The people who like suburban density went ahead and made zoning codes to basically prevent building anything but sprawl"
What, exactly, qualifies as "sprawl" to you? Houses with yards? How do you propose we build those to make them "non-sprawly?" Most of your statement is true, though: "People who like suburban density went ahead and made zoning codes to basically prevent building anything but" that density. So?
Those codes exist in SOME areas. They give people a choice of what kind of area they live in. Yes, yes, they were all racist and evil back in the day. Today they serve a valid and non-nefarious purpose: giving people a choice.
"the few remaining places that don't require a car are rare and super expensive." Do you have specifics on that? Are you saying there are no small towns to live in? That condos and apartments in the downtowns and city centers and town centers and boroughs of United States cities are more expensive than houses?
Take L.A. for instance. It has become very popular to piss and moan about "single-family homes" and to pass craven developer handouts in the guise of sham "housing reform." Meanwhile, dead or dying malls sit with boarded-up anchor tenants (there's an abandoned Macy's a few miles from me) and vast empty parking lots growing weeds.
Also, downtown L.A. is not "full." Nor are other high-density areas across the county, if you look at vacancy numbers. And then there are the tracts of disused, formerly commercial or light-industrial parcels all over the city and county. And yet already-residential areas are targeted for destruction.
And I do mean destruction. In a drought- and heat-plagued area, there is no excuse to promote the wipeout of every last tree and the paving-over of every last yard for the construction of 10 units where a single house stood. Yes, recent state legislation allowed just that, WITH NO REVIEW REQUIRED OR POSSIBLE. A developer's dream.
Meanwhile, vast tracts that have already suffered these effects of "density," the aforementioned malls and parkingn lots, sit empty.
And on top of all this, nothing is being done about the corporate buy-ups of entire neighborhoods. This is even worse than the "shortage" itself, because it takes what housing does exist off the market PERMANENTLY. Corporations don't typically die and leave their homes to their kids. But people do, and corporations are scooping up those houses as fast as they can, exacerbating a home-ownership crisis that deprives Americans of their best way to build wealth.
American sprawl at its core, I think, is driven by single family residential-only zoning with parking minimums. In combination these rules force everything to spread out.
Single family homes can exist in non-sprawling configurations (e.g. old streetcar suburbs), but in combination with the other rules you wind up with businesses that are required to be far away from homes, to have large parking lots, and therefore be mostly hostile to anyone arriving outside of a car.
I look at the nice rural town I grew up in and the city brownstone neighborhood I live in now, and see two places with lots of real estate demand that could not, in much of America, be built today. The very nature of why these places are appealing comes from the fact they were built before these zoning codes. The businesses and schools are in walking distance of houses and have far too little parking.
I don’t see why we can’t relax some of the rules in some places and let people have a choice.
The purpose of many parking minimums is to protect the type of neighborhood you report living in. I lived in a pleasant neighborhood on Chicago's north side (Lakeview), which was a mix of SFH away from main thoroughfares and apartment buildings where they made sense. A real demonstration of what's possible, and (I think) what you're championing. I do believe it's possible. But it does require specificity and planning, instead of a blind, statewide trouncing of local laws (which CA is attempting).
My neighborhood was an example: A defunct theater behind our multi-unit house was sold to a developer, who built a massive residental building there. Our alderman had promised that new residential developments would be required to include parking with the sale of a unit. That was a lie.
As a result, many of the new residents decided that instead of buying a parking space in their building (where they WERE available), they'd just park on our streets... where we HAD to park because we had no other option. So now our standard of living took a huge hit, because we could no longer come home from work or the grocery store or other trips, and park and go into our homes. We had to circle the neighborhood in ever-larger radii for hours per week looking for parking. Real fun at 1 a.m... in the winter.
In Chicago at least, parking minimums were generally enacted as a package of policies to keep Black and Latino families out of neighborhoods. The Supreme Court struck down explicit racial zoning in 1917, which drove the creation of single-family zoning. Properties in Chicago were further "protected" by racial covenants, contractually preventing them from being sold to Black families. Those covenants were struck down in 1947. Immediately thereafter, Harland Bartholomew and his acolytes sold municipalities in Chicagoland (and around the country) on a package of parking minimums, setback requirements, and minimum lot sizes, all designed to address the prevailing concern at the time: that large single-family houses would be covertly converted into two-flats and rented to Black families.
Not 80 years ago. Into the 1980s and 90s. I can give specific examples.
A thing to keep in mind: sweeping zoning changes don't happen that often! Once every 20 years --- not exactly, but roughly --- is about right. And over the last "80 years", they've tended to ratchet. Most major metros have never had a period of pronounced housing deregulation (like other industries did in the 1970s and 1990s), so insane decisions made in the late 1940s remain in effect today, but get retconned as if the quality of live protections they promise were part of the original deal, and not a knock-on effect of a system of residential apartheid.
There is no question that restrictive zoning (and its constructive equivalents, like setback requirements) satisfy real, valid preferences of some existing homeowners. That's not the debate. The debate is whether states and localities owe those homeowners the satisfaction of those preferences, and at what cost. The existing residents advocating for density are essentially free-riding. I don't have to blame them for doing that to see that it's not something to valorize.
What, exactly, qualifies as "sprawl" to you? Houses with yards? How do you propose we build those to make them "non-sprawly?" Most of your statement is true, though: "People who like suburban density went ahead and made zoning codes to basically prevent building anything but" that density. So?
Those codes exist in SOME areas. They give people a choice of what kind of area they live in. Yes, yes, they were all racist and evil back in the day. Today they serve a valid and non-nefarious purpose: giving people a choice.
"the few remaining places that don't require a car are rare and super expensive." Do you have specifics on that? Are you saying there are no small towns to live in? That condos and apartments in the downtowns and city centers and town centers and boroughs of United States cities are more expensive than houses?
Take L.A. for instance. It has become very popular to piss and moan about "single-family homes" and to pass craven developer handouts in the guise of sham "housing reform." Meanwhile, dead or dying malls sit with boarded-up anchor tenants (there's an abandoned Macy's a few miles from me) and vast empty parking lots growing weeds.
Also, downtown L.A. is not "full." Nor are other high-density areas across the county, if you look at vacancy numbers. And then there are the tracts of disused, formerly commercial or light-industrial parcels all over the city and county. And yet already-residential areas are targeted for destruction.
And I do mean destruction. In a drought- and heat-plagued area, there is no excuse to promote the wipeout of every last tree and the paving-over of every last yard for the construction of 10 units where a single house stood. Yes, recent state legislation allowed just that, WITH NO REVIEW REQUIRED OR POSSIBLE. A developer's dream.
Meanwhile, vast tracts that have already suffered these effects of "density," the aforementioned malls and parkingn lots, sit empty.
And on top of all this, nothing is being done about the corporate buy-ups of entire neighborhoods. This is even worse than the "shortage" itself, because it takes what housing does exist off the market PERMANENTLY. Corporations don't typically die and leave their homes to their kids. But people do, and corporations are scooping up those houses as fast as they can, exacerbating a home-ownership crisis that deprives Americans of their best way to build wealth.