1. This chart is about cities

No, that chart is about metro areas. In the case of (for example) Atlanta, it includes places fifty miles away!

2. Having a home with an address and a bed and a shower is a much better step towards getting a job than being on the streets in the city center

I didn’t say it wasn’t. But dumping homeless people in some run-down cottage halfway to Alabama, without even sidewalks, let alone transit, is only barely better when the only jobs they could actually get to without a car are “gas station clerk” and “meth dealer.” And I’m not sure they’d have walking access even to those.

3. Let’s put the “housing crisis” energy into fixing our transportation

The transportation problems are caused by the housing problems! The thing that makes walking, biking, and transit stop working is too much space between destinations (and too few people close to transit lines), and that happens because of zoning.

6. How many single family homes are taking up space in the city centers?

You’d be surprised. North American cities – not metro areas, cities proper – average about 75% of their land area zoned for single-family housing. San Jose, California is the worst, at a whopping 94%.

4. Single family house buyers aren’t the problem, it’s companies like Blackrock and the laws that encourage that. That won’t be solved by multi family developers

First of all, Blackrock is fucking irrelevant. The only reason its REIT bullshit is profitable in the first place is because the zoning laws stop supply from meeting demand. It’s a symptom, not a cause!

Second, the bottom line is that every single-family home in an in-demand area physically displaces dozens of families that could’ve lived in that space if it were zoned for multifamily instead. Consider this example: Atlanta has a lot of “R1” (single-family on a minimum 2-acre lot) and “R4” (single-family on a minimum 9000 ft² lot) zoned parcels. Even just going from R1 to R4 (staying in single-family, just on smaller lots!) would let nine times more families live in the same space, and that’s before considering that R4 also allows ADUs. Upzoning from R4 to actual multifamily would multiply it even more.

For every Buckhead mansion like this, eight families are forced out into the suburbs that could live there if it were zoned like this instead. And hundreds of families are forced out compared to what both of those parcels should be, which is more like this. (All three of those are within a mile of each other, damn near the center of population of metro Atlanta, BTW. They’re a couple miles north of the nominal city center “Downtown,” but that’s because more sprawl has happened going north and “Downtown” isn’t in the middle anymore.)

Why is Atlanta’s traffic so bad? Because every single Buckhead mansion forces dozens, if not hundreds, of people to commute past it instead of living there!

5. You think single family home buyers are getting undue subsidies but not the probably more wealthy developers who will directly profit from the endeavor?

Yep! The zoning code distorts the market (obviously–that’s the entire fucking point of it!). Multifamily developers are paying artificially inflated prices because zoning makes land they’re allowed to build on more scarce than normal supply and demand would allow. Conversely, single-family homebuyers are paying artificially depressed prices because zoning stops them from having to compete with multifamily developers for land whose highest and best use is a fuckton more dense than one measly goddamn house!

The “subsidies” most people think of developers getting are the explicit ones, like tax breaks in exchange for building rent-capped housing and such. But those are absolutely dwarfed by the hidden subsidies built into the zoning code itself that I’m talking about.

7. We clearly don’t need to be developing multi family units based on the chart that is this post

That’s because the chart doesn’t tell you the whole picture. Location within metro areas matters.