You probably know what it costs to rent an apartment right now. You’ve either felt it firsthand or watched someone you love do the math on their kitchen table, moving the numbers around until none of them add up. America’s housing shortage stands at 3.78 million homes, according to the most recent national count, and rents have climbed sharply across the board since 2017. That’s not a glitch in the market. That’s a decade of compounding consequence. The gap between what housing costs and what people can afford to pay has become one of those facts you file away because there’s nothing obviously useful to do with it.
Some people encounter the contrast in photographs. Others notice it on a trip, or through a friend’s travel photos from Bologna or Vienna or Amsterdam: buildings four stories tall, a bakery on the ground floor, laundry on the balconies above, an old woman leaning out the third-floor window to yell something at the street below. The whole block feels inhabited, the way a good neighborhood should. There’s no parking lot in frame. No setback. Just life stacked up against itself, cheerfully, in a building that was probably built a hundred years ago and will probably stand another hundred.
Then you come home to a neighborhood where the law says there is one house on that lot. One. A detached single-family home on its own little rectangle of land, sitting at a regulation distance from the sidewalk, with the required number of parking spaces, in a zone that doesn’t allow a corner store or a coffee shop anywhere within walking distance. Europe isn’t doing something architecturally magical. America isn’t failing to copy it hard enough. The real explanation is a policy choice made about a century ago, and it has been quietly shaping every city, neighborhood, and rent bill since.
The Law That Made Apartments the Enemy
The case that changed American cities is Euclid v. Ambler, a 1926 Supreme Court ruling that handed cities and towns the constitutional right to ban apartment buildings from residential areas. According to NAHRO, zoning became more widespread after the Supreme Court ruled in Euclid v. Ambler (1926) that Euclid, Ohio could ban apartments in areas of single-family housing. The court’s own reasoning described apartment buildings as “coming very near to being nuisances” when placed among single-family houses. That logic – the idea that density itself was a kind of contamination – became the legal foundation for nearly everything that followed.
Traditional “Euclidean” zoning, named after that 1926 Supreme Court case, provided the legal foothold for separating residential, commercial, and industrial land uses, and has long dominated urban planning in the United States. What came out of that ruling wasn’t a minor procedural change. It was the legal framework for sorting American land into neat, separated categories: here are the houses, here are the offices, here are the shops, and none of them shall mix. That sorting is so deeply embedded in American planning culture that most people have never once questioned whether it needs to be there.
The first single-family zoning law in the country was passed even earlier – by Berkeley, California in 1916 – and it was promoted by the developer of the Elmwood neighborhood, who wanted to preserve home values in his development by preventing Black families from moving into adjacent areas. That’s the origin story. Not a planning theory. Not a public health insight. A developer, a racial agenda, and a city council that went along with it. The Supreme Court subsequently blessed the arrangement, and here we are, a hundred years later, still living inside its logic.
What “Single-Family Zoning” Actually Means on the Ground
Single-family zoning is a type of planning restriction applied to residential zones in the United States and Canada in order to restrict development to only allow single-family detached homes. It disallows townhomes, duplexes, and multifamily housing – apartments – from being built on any plot of land with this zoning designation. That’s not a fringe rule. Approximately 70 percent of residential areas in major US cities restrict or ban apartments entirely, according to NAHRO’s analysis. So when you wonder why there’s no three-story walk-up near you with a yoga studio on the bottom floor and six affordable apartments above it, the answer is: it’s against the rules. Not because nobody would build it. Not because nobody would rent it. Because the code says it cannot exist.
Single-family zoning laws – one house per lot – predominate in the residentially zoned areas of many American cities and surrounding communities, according to Harvard Magazine’s analysis of the housing crisis. These laws effectively constrain the supply of new housing, precluding the possibility of greater urban density, by preventing the construction of multiple homes, apartment buildings, and residential towers. Every lease renewal letter that lands in the mailbox with a number higher than the year before is a direct readout of that constraint. Housing runs on supply and demand like everything else, and decades of artificial supply suppression have done exactly what you’d expect.
Restrictive land use regulations and zoning laws have been linked to higher housing prices, reduced construction activity, and a decrease in the elasticity of housing supply. That’s the official framing. The lived version is that the home expenses many families carry today trace back not to the market but to a legal architecture built to keep certain people out of certain neighborhoods – and the long tail of that original purpose is everyone paying more for less.
Europe Doesn’t Have This Problem. Here’s Why.
Go to Paris, Rome, Vienna, or Amsterdam and look for the residential equivalent of American single-family zoning. You won’t find it, because it essentially doesn’t exist. According to Wikipedia’s entry on mixed-use development, in most of Europe, government policy has encouraged the continuation of the city center’s role as a main location for business, retail, restaurant, and entertainment activity, unlike in the United States where zoning actively discouraged such mixed use for many decades.
The differences are specific and structural. France gravitates toward mixed-use, with much of Paris simply zoned as “General Urban,” allowing for a variety of uses. Even zones that house the mansions and villas of the aristocrats focus on historical and architectural preservation rather than single-family zoning. Germany’s approach is equally instructive: single-family zoning is absent in Germany, where zoning codes make no distinction between different types of housing. The result is those neighborhoods that look so impossibly livable to anyone visiting from a US suburb – ground-floor cafes and pharmacies tucked under four stories of apartments, everything mixed together in a way that American zoning codes have spent a century explicitly forbidding.
In many US cities, zoning laws restrict 70 percent or more of the city’s land to detached single-family homes. You can’t walk to the bakery because the bakery isn’t allowed to exist within a mile of your house. You can’t live above the dry cleaner because the dry cleaner can’t be in a residential zone. The architecture of European streets isn’t some accident of age or charm. It’s the physical result of land use rules that allowed those streets to develop organically, one generation of building at a time, rather than being sliced into separate-use boxes before anyone broke ground.
The “Missing Middle” and What It Would Take to Fix Things
Urban planners have a term for what’s absent from most American cities: “missing middle housing.” The term refers to options in between renting apartments and buying a single-family detached home on an entire lot – duplexes, triplexes, small walk-up apartment buildings of five or six units. The kind of building your grandmother may have grown up in, the kind that gets photographed in Brooklyn and sold as aspirational content, and the kind that is currently illegal to build in most American residential neighborhoods.
The gap this creates isn’t abstract. According to the Up For Growth 2025 Housing Underproduction Report, the United States is facing a housing shortfall of 3.78 million homes, and between 2019 and 2024, median home sale prices rose 60 percent, with single-family homes hitting a high median price of $412,500. More than half of renters in this country are spending more on housing than is considered financially sustainable. That’s not a personal budgeting failure. That’s a supply problem with a legal cause.
Some cities have started to reckon with this. Minneapolis was the first major American city to fully end single-family zoning – in 2018 – allowing duplexes and triplexes in every neighborhood. The results were instructive: the supply increase appears to have helped keep rents down, with rents in Minneapolis rising just 1 percent during this period, while they increased 14 percent in the rest of Minnesota. (This is observational data, not a controlled study, but the directional finding has been consistent across researchers tracking the city.) Berkeley, the city that started the whole thing in 1916, voted in June 2025 to repeal its single-family zoning ordinance entirely.
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States are moving too, though unevenly. Oregon passed legislation requiring medium and large cities to allow duplexes and small apartment buildings in residential zones. Montana passed what housing advocates have dubbed the “Montana Miracle” – a package of bills removing barriers to apartment construction statewide, including allowing duplexes and ADUs by right on all single-family zoned properties and permitting six-story buildings everywhere in the state. But these are exceptions, and the broader picture is that restrictive local zoning preventing builders from meeting housing demand remains the fundamental cause of America’s housing shortage. The reform is real, and it’s slow, and the housing shortage is not waiting for it to catch up.
The NIMBY Problem Is Part of the Law, Too
You can’t have this conversation without talking about the residents who oppose new housing at every turn – the people who attend city planning meetings to argue that a four-unit apartment building will ruin the character of their street. It’s a classic case of NIMBY politics – Not In My Backyard – one that plays out across the country as residents protect the status quo in their neighborhoods. The Euclidean zoning framework gave these residents legal standing to fight new development, and the political structures of American local government have amplified that standing enormously.
US zoning codes restrict development, throttle the housing supply, and prevent the construction of walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. The people who benefit from this arrangement are largely those who already own single-family homes in neighborhoods with good schools and rising property values. The people who pay the price are renters, first-time buyers, young families, and anyone whose income doesn’t stretch to a $412,500 median-priced home with interest rates where they’ve been. It’s a transfer of wealth from people who want to live somewhere to people who already live there and prefer the street to stay exactly as it is.
Some states have started to limit how much power NIMBY opposition can have. Wisconsin passed legislation in 2023 requiring housing opponents to demonstrate personal damages in order to challenge a land use approval in court. Others are following. But the entrenched interests are old and well-organized, and the people who would benefit from more housing are, by definition, not yet in the neighborhoods where they want to live.
What the Research Finds When Cities Actually Build
The evidence from cities that have loosened their zoning is fairly consistent. Houston, often cited as the closest American analog to European mixed-use development, reformed its minimum lot sizes in the late 1990s, allowing houses on lots as small as 1,400 square feet. Houston built approximately the same number of apartments as the significantly larger city of Los Angeles in 2019. This significant growth was attributed to the zoning reforms implemented in 1998, enabling the construction of over 25,000 townhouses, predominantly in urban areas. The city has consistently outbuilt similar markets and kept rents lower as a result.
The infrastructure argument against denser development – that it strains roads, schools, utilities – doesn’t really hold up either. A report from Smart Growth America found that creating walkable, well-connected communities lowers initial infrastructure expenses, cuts ongoing service costs by an average of 10 percent, and generates significantly more tax revenue. Denser development isn’t harder on public infrastructure than sprawl. It’s considerably easier. The cars-and-roads model of postwar American urbanism is far more expensive to maintain than a walkable block with a corner store and six apartments above it.
What Isn’t Going to Change Overnight
None of this resolves quickly. The legal architecture of single-family zoning is woven into local ordinances, state codes, and the institutional preferences of thousands of planning departments across the country. The housing shortage will not be solved in a single legislative session or by one city council’s vote to allow triplexes. The median price of a home will not drop back to something a median income can afford before the end of this decade, barring something extraordinary.
The more useful thing to understand is that the gap between an American suburb and a Parisian arrondissement isn’t cultural or aesthetic. It’s legal and political. The European apartment building with the wine shop below and the blue shutters above wasn’t built because Europeans have better taste in architecture. It was built because no law told anyone it couldn’t be. That’s the whole story. A century of telling builders what they cannot build, in service of an ideal that was racially motivated from the start, has produced the housing market Americans are living inside right now.
Zoning has moved from the domain of city planning offices and niche interest groups to become a hot topic at local, state, and national levels, as policymakers grapple with the rising cost of housing that is straining most American households. That is, at minimum, progress in the right direction. The conversation that could have happened in 1970, or 1990, or 2005 is finally happening. It just came at the cost of a generation of renters who paid more than they should have for less than they deserved.
The Part That Doesn’t Have a Tidy Answer
The frustrating truth is that knowing the source of the problem doesn’t fix the problem. You can understand perfectly well that roughly 70 percent of American residential land in major cities is legally reserved for detached single-family homes, that this choice was made for explicitly exclusionary reasons, and that it has produced the housing crisis you’re currently paying rent inside – and still have no clear path to doing anything about it from where you’re standing.
What you can do is recognize that the policy debate about housing isn’t abstract. Every zoning meeting, every ballot initiative about upzoning, every state bill allowing duplexes in residential areas is a direct attempt to chip away at an arrangement that was never actually about public health or neighborhood character or any of the things it claimed to be about. The walk-up apartment building you saw in Italy or admired in a photograph isn’t some European cultural artifact. It’s what happens when the law doesn’t prevent it. Americans built things like that too, before the law caught up with them, and they can again. The archive of a hundred years of restricted land use doesn’t disappear in a single legislative session. But knowing what’s in it is the only reasonable place to start.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.