[happyopossum]

> The US is pretty bad from this point of view from what I recall, compared to other places where it's generally legal to build a broader variety of housing in cities.

It's really impossible to make generalizations about the legalities go building in the US, as there is no federal control over such things. There are some state-level laws in some states, but for the most part zoning is left up to cities and counties, leading to literally thousands of disparate sets of laws and regulations.

My city has historically heavily restricted high density housing (until the state stepped in), while the city literally next door has added enough high density housing for ~20k people in the past decade.

[davidw]

People study this stuff and have written about it extensively. By and large, in most US cities and towns, it's not legal to build anything but detached single family units in most of the city. So while each locale may have its own zoning code, they're rarely all that unique. There are some exceptions like Houston.

This is an interesting book about the history of it all: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801479878/zone...