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Condo + strata fees = single family home mortgage payment, so they're not actually cheaper.
The reason detached single-family units are important is because they deliver the ability to personally develop. With a condo you're not actually doing anything; you're not doing maintenance on your mechanical devices (unless you're fortunate enough to have a garage or driveway, of course), you're not really able to store anything, you can't do anything loud (no instruments, etc.), it's more difficult to entertain people, etc. The same thing applies to townhouses to a lesser degree.
You don't get Apple Computer (to name a particularly famous example) without a garage to work in, and condos don't usually have those.
Sure, but (and as "bullets instead of dollars" downthread mentions) that's also balanced against solutions that might be less than democratic (if the dominant voting bloc is smart enough to understand the issue they can avoid that, but they seldom are). Gerontocracies tend to be relatively bad at defending themselves simply because the average 70 year old tends to be an inferior soldier no matter how high up they believe their elbows might go.
This led me down an interesting rabbit hole - I am aware of the importance of the myth of the garage startup in Silicon Valley, but also that the main lines of mentor-mentee and exited founder-investor-founder genealogy run back to Fairchild Semiconductor via companies that were not founded in garages or, mostly, by garage tinkerers. A quick fact-check finds Wozniak denying that Apple was actually founded in the garage (the tinkering that led to the Apple I happened inside the house - it sounds like the garage was just used to store inventory), that pictures of Jeff Bezos founding Amazon in his garage show a room that had not been used to store motor vehicles for a very long time, and that the Google garage was commercially rented space which happened to be a converted garage. It looks like the last significant tech company founded in a space which was primarily designed to store motor vehicles was HP in 1939. Nvidia is often referred to as founded in a garage, but it was actually founded in a spare room in Curtis Priem's townhouse.
In other words, the point of the Silicon Valley garage isn't the idea of the garage as marginal space - it is that it was normal for middle-class Americans to have more square footage than they actually needed, giving space to work in. A spare room, something it is perfectly possible to have in a townhouse, or even in a condo if you live like middle-class Continental Europeans or super-rich New Yorkers do, works better as a home office/workshop than an unconverted garage. And the surplus of square footage is something that you don't get by insisting on sprawl zoning in a place as rich as Silicon Valley - nobody thinks that the next generation of Silicon Valley founders can afford SFHs with garages in the Valley, and it is notable that the only reason that the Apple founders had access to the garage in the first place was because Job's parents had bought the house it was attached to before Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley.
The even more important point is absence (or, in the case of California, lax enforcement) of laws against running businesses out of private homes. The canonical place to found a 21st century startup is a Stanford dorm room. Under UK charity law, that is illegal in a Cambridge College room.
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I’m not suggesting doing away with SF housing entirely, but I think it’s important to increase urban density if you want to solve the housing crisis. It’s not meant to be for everyone, but to provide enough housing stock that it’s reasonably affordable to live in the city within a reasonable commute of your job. For most people, that’s fine.
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