I didn't say that single family residences were idiotic. I said zoning for single family residences is idiocy. It keeps the housing market from efficiently responding to demand and building what people want. Just zone residential and let people build what people want to live in.
If someone bought a couple adjacent houses in the neighborhood where I grew up, knocked them down, and built an 10-unit apartment building in it's place, it would have certainly rented, but it would have imposed unwanted change (traffic, appearance) in the community in which it sits.
I could see replacing "single family" with some sort of density restriction (people per acre?). What a home entails is not simply a dwelling + piece of land to its borders, but the community in which it belongs. Communities have generally decided that a predictable nature here is desirable, and thus have enacted zoning restrictions.
Communities use zoning restrictions as a way to purchase rights they don't want to pay for up front. The people who first move into a neighborhood could bargain for and purchase the air space around surrounding properties to ensure they continue to have a view. Instead, they achieve the same result without paying for those rights by implementing zoning requirements that have hight restrictions.
I largely agree, even though I don't like the decisions overall here (in my own opinion, the Peninsula could benefit from more high-density areas of housing, especially near Caltrain and BART stations). I think it's actually not even that far from what the market would produce without zoning, at least under some circumstances. If you abolished zoning today, then lots of things would change, but if the area had been initially developed without zoning, private-sector zoning workalikes would likely have taken its place.
If you look at Houston, the largest city with no zoning laws, the private sector has effectively re-implemented zoning via contract law in huge sections of the city, in the form of subdivisions where the initial developer set up a homeowner's association, empowered via deed restrictions, that implement similar rules about not only density, but even things like what color you can paint your windows. People clearly seem to like living in that kind of community-managed neighborhood. At least doing it via the actual government, rather than these weird quasi-governments, is more transparent and democratic.
