Correct me if I'm misrepresenting you here, but are you claiming that the reason that something is invented is always the reason why it continues to be used?
Now it's probably because people don't like "traffic" outside their homes, but basically yes, that's why single-family zoning is still in place. It's extremely silly to want to ban eg corner stores in your neighborhood.
In SF where people have discovered "left-NIMBYism", people will now argue that keeping it is fighting racism, but then if you go into the suburbs they'll still happily argue the original position.
Luckily we don't have to argue about abstractions since we can just go look at land use.
I do think a lot of people want to keep single family zoning because they think it makes their properties more valuable but 1. historical segregation is part of that and 2. if your home price goes up, that only makes you richer as long as you don't want to buy any other homes that've also gone up.
People want single family zoning because they enjoy it more. People wanting single family housing is what makes it valuable not the single family housing itself.
But also people want single family housing because US made apartments are complete shit. They're poorly insulated to heat and sound which means all sorts of unnecessary interaction with your immediate neighbors, making apartment living that much worse, driving the demand of single family housing up.
People want single family homes in neighborhoods of single family homes, though; the value is highly contingent on the neighborhood those homes are in.
You might be fine with a given backyard in a suburb, but not with a highrise next door that can see right into it.
Zoning handles this in the same way that it handles preferences about people not wanting to live next to industrial shops or giant supercenters. It does this by restricting what can be developed, even if someone moving away doesn't care what happens to their old lot, and could make more money on the sale otherwise.
Whether we should respect those preferences is a fine question, but zoning is pretty much the only tool to enforce these kinds of commons-oriented preferences.
Yup. The anti sprawl people should understand that "densifying" and "building up" in neighborhoods of single family homes will just create a demand for new neighborhoods further out that don't have to deal with these issues. I currently live 25ish miles from a major city downtown. I've noticed a lot of interest from developers in building 3-4 story apartment buildings around here even though there doesn't seem to be much demand for that type of living situation. I will gladly move 15 miles further out, I work from home, in 10 years if this area becomes too dense with apartments.
That's fine, that's the whole point of relaxing zoning restrictions. Nobody is trying to ban single-family housing developments. The point is, the majority of the US now forces you into a single-family housing development even when you have a different preference.
In Japan, as discussed upthread, you often have single family homes next to 3 story apartment buildings close to the city and the further you go out, the more they become single family homes. There's space for all preferences.
Nobody wants to densify the outskirts of Kankakee. They want to densify SF and LA.
