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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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