The real issue was the usage of the term free market. Having been proselytized to by free marketers constantly for basically 50 years. While personally witnessing its constant failure. Combined with how those of us in the Americas are reflexively conditioned to always refer to it reverently. It’s a big pain point. Because it’s simply is impossible to exist.

Here’s the thing I’ve often noticed, as an urbanist who gets into arguments on this topic fairly often (both online and in IRL local politics): a lot of people are so used to the North American status-quo of the last 50+ years, and I guess so used to thinking of North America as “free,” that they just sort of assume that the way things are now is the result of a “free market.” Or maybe they think the only kind of housing that’s not a result of the “free market” is government-subsidized housing or government-owned housing (the proverbial “projects”).

But in reality, that couldn’t be farther from the truth: zoning law in the United States¹ didn’t start until the Euclid v. Amber Supreme Court decision in 1928 and didn’t really become the widespread norm until the '40s or '50s, and the timeline in Canada was broadly similar. Before that point, there were basically no rules (i.e. a “free market” – or at least, a “free-ish” one²), and the result was traditional development: human-scaled design, walkable distances, and a fine-grained mix of uses. It was only after the widespread imposition of zoning regulations that the development patterns shifted to the low-density suburban sprawl we have today. And lest someone thinks it’s just correlation, nope: the entire point of the regulations was to impose that new development pattern by force. The car-dependent suburban sprawl we have today throughout North America is a direct result of laws (both US and Canadian) literally requiring it while prohibiting everything else.

The point is, so. many. people. will fervently claim that the reason such a huge percentage of housing in North America is single-family detached houses is due to the “free market” building what people want, but that’s blatant, Bizarro-world, pants-on-head-stupid, utter nonsense. Their entire lifestyle – their entire worldview – is shaped by zoning regulations and they don’t even realize it. And what’s worse, a lot of especially the right-wing ones think the “free market” entitles them and everybody else (with the possible exception of “those people”) to live in a single-family house, and can’t even see the inherent contradiction!

That’s my objection to this article: what we’ve been witnessing for the past 50 years isn’t an example of the constant failure of the free market; it’s an example of the almost complete absence of it. That doesn’t mean I’m so naive as to think repealing zoning laws without doing anything else would create some sort of housing utopia or that I’m a libertarian zealot completely opposed to public housing or other “socialist”-as-a-dirty-word ideas, but it does mean I think repealing the prohibition on traditional development would be a vast improvement over the current disastrous system that’s pretty much purpose-built to subsidize the wasteful lifestyles of upper-middle-class white people at the rest of society’s expense.

(¹ Yeah, I’m a USian posting in a CA community; sue me. For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure Canadian and US zoning work similarly enough that it’s reasonable to argue about them collectively.)

(² Point taken about housing being necessary, thus coercive, and thus impossible to really be a “free market.” Moreover, there’s also an argument to be made that the popular liassez-faire interpretation of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is incorrect to begin with, and that the true “free market” Smith had in mind was one that is regulated to approach the conditions of perfect competition. So yeah, the term is definitely problematic.)