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YIMBY sentiment on this forum has (I think) been mostly focused on increasing the density of existing residential zones. However, it may be worth noting that there is an alternative: converting existing agricultural or unused land to low-density residential use (i. e., continuing to "sprawl"). In this article, a former employee of the libertarian Cato Institute accuses that organization of focusing exclusively on high-density housing, and of smearing as racist people who are not interested in long-term high-density living and clamor for more single-family houses. (In his view, upzoning imposed from the top down is not libertarian, because the existing owners have a sort of property right in the zoning of their neighborhood as a substitute for deed restrictions that could or should have been used instead of zoning codes.)
Removing restrictions is unlibertarian because....people have already benefited from them? I can't help but wonder if he holds welfare, defense, and health spending to the same standard.
He may be on to something with institutes pushing high-density, but I'm not sure that reflects the actual development market. The impression in my area (North Texas) is that developers will shit out entire subdivisions, freeways and shopping outlets before stooping to landlording. Frontage roads get somewhat more dense development after the fact. Mixed-use happens occasionally, usually with luxury branding. We're firmly in the "sprawl" strategy.
I tried to find what fraction of development was single-family but didn't have much luck with the census site. There's far more units being started for sale than for rent, but I'm not sure I fully understand the terminology.
Overall, it sounds like this guy has arrived at either the least effort approach or the most ladder-pulling one. Whether he got there from first principles, I don't have much confidence that it's the optimum solution.
In the opinion of the author: People who owned urban houses many decades ago had two options that, at the time, seemed roughly equivalent in expected value—use deed restrictions to maintain neighborhood integrity, or use zoning to maintain neighborhood integrity. They had the democratic majority, so they picked the second option, especially since the first option would be cumbersome to apply to existing neighborhoods rather than new neighborhoods. Now, they are angry that the new democratic majority (consisting of people who don't live in their neighborhoods, or in the case of California don't even live in their cities) is threatening to destroy their neighborhood integrity from the top down. The author thinks that the first exercise of democratic power was just, and the second exercise of democratic power is unjust—as he states at the top of the article, "Yes in Other People's Back Yards (YIOPBY)".
This PDF shows that there were 1,005,000 single-unit buildings (i. e., single-family houses) and 550,000 multi-unit buildings started in 2022 (preliminary figures)—that is, 65 percent of new housing starts were single-family houses.
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