I always want to push back against the narrative that people's natural state is to want a single family home. Out of control zoning makes single family detached

I always want to push back against the narrative that people's natural state is to want a single family home. Out of control zoning makes single family detached homes the only possibility apart from some specially designated urban cores, so it can easily seem like people only want detached homes. It's easy to look at our current housing stock and think it's what people want, but it's the work of a small group of people enforcing their choices across decades of zoning. There are plenty of people who want a single family home and that's fine. What I'm not fine with is their choice being encoded into city law as the only choice. There is also a knee-jerk reaction across north america to any density beyond single family homes automatically being glass and steel high rises that block the sun. What we really need is missing middle properties, like tri- and quad-plexes. Low and mid rise apartment buildings with plenty of 2, 3 and 4 bedroom units. A lot more density than we have in suburbs now, but not crowded or packed. Montreal is one of the few cities in north america that actually has that missing middle housing. It's also the only metro region in Canada that has both mostly contained sprawl and been relatively unaffected by the housing crisis. This is not a coincidence since people have all sorts of choices about what type of housing to live in that fits their budget and lifestyle instead of ones forced by extremely limited zoning options.