Zoning law and housing code were enacted across the nation in response to the crowded, unsanitary, and unsafe tenements of the industrial revolution. But, we’ve gone too far and allowed too much local control of housing. Now in 21st century American boomtowns, you can’t convert your single family into a duplex or small apartment building, you can’t convert the first floor of your building into a small business, you can’t have organic growth in your city the way cities had grown up until the early 20th century. Far from just outlawing tenements, we’ve outlawed our cities from adapting to change, which is why we see such absurdities as in the bay areas cost of living.<p>For decades now we’ve been surviving off technical debt. Cars and roads allow us to survive even when our cities are absurdly inefficiently organized. But as the nation changes more and more, our top cities’ roads and street layouts don’t adapt to the change, so we have unbearable traffic in every major city. On top of that, we continue to ignore the needs of a more efficient method of organizing ourselves - relaxing zoning to allow organic growth in the city, and construction of mass transit between the dense regions that develop under this system.<p>That’s how we developed cities before we started relying on cars, and what we need to do to continue scaling American cities. Or we can just accept as every house in the Bay Area reaches multimillion dollar price tag.