For sure, and I agree with you that it's possible. But replacing actual houses with tracts of these would be a sad, regressive mistake that's just not necessary. Replacing these with better ones, and even slightly taller ones, would be reasonable and useful.
To build more housing, you have to destroy the old housing. This still displaces people, and likely pushes them into smaller apartments where they would have been in a house
Sure, but those have been going on for many decades already. It is very hard to think of something new that can get such an economy of scale - once something is invented you can't invent it again (unless it didn't work the first time - but in that case most reinventions don't fix any of the original problems and so it doesn't work the next dozen times either). We can do some improvements, but those are chasing diminishing returns.
It doesn't help that people want to live in a house that looks different from the others in the neighborhood. One reason there are so many small builders is each specializes in about 3 houses, and just builds 1 in each neighborhood. They get good at building those houses while never building the same house twice in any neighborhood. If everyone was willing to live in exactly the same house we could scale a little bit more, but not very much.
Sure, but what the article is suggesting is that older houses should be torn down and replaced, by another single family home. So it doesn't really add to the housing stock to do that.
There's also a kind of preservation of the culture of the town. Which I kind of agree with.
Then there is also the fact that a lot of these places aren't used for housing, they're used as play houses or AirBnB's. So just adding more houses will likely mean more empty stuff in the town, probably making the problem worse.
Well, its not like building tiny homes are going to make most people who would normally purchase a normal/large size home switch to a tiny home. It would probably net increase the amount of construction work because you've now expanded the available market (lower income people can now purchase a home).
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