Comment by marssaxman

It doesn't matter what most Americans want, because most urban land is zoned in such a way that single-family houses are all that is legal to build. The extremely high prices of housing units in central urban areas suggest that demand for dense cities, public transit, and shared spaces greatly exceeds the artificially-restricted supply.

Here in Seattle, you can basically see the zoning boundaries as you drive around the city, because development always goes right up to the edge, as hard as it can. Without the arbitrary limits imposed by the zoning code, there would be a whole lot more condos built (and lived in!), and those edges would be a lot softer, shaped by ebbs and flows of market demand rather than the sharp lines of law.