Apartments are fun when you are young and want to live downtown and enjoy the restaurants and the night life. When you get older and want your home to be a refuge and raise a family, apartments really suck.
Re "apartments really suck" - I beg to differ. I live in a 1920s apartment block in an inner-city neighbourhood, it's 50m from a school where my neighbours kids walk every day (high school is further, but they'll take the trolley or tram), there's a cafe on the corner, a couple of local pubs on my street, and a supermarket 5 mins walk away. I don't hear neighbours through the walls, we have a shared garden with an apple tree and grape vines. I walk ~10 minutes to meet friends at my local cinema, and walk my dog in a handful of different parks which are between 5 and 15 minutes walk away. Can you please explain what part of any of this "sucks" because I am personally struggling to see it.
I suspect you'll suggest that my situation is exceptional (it's not, this describes most accommodation where I live) and counter that it's possible to make a bad apartment. But really it's possible to fuck up any kind of housing development - the UK has some spectacular examples of both shit tower blocks and shit single-family dwellings last century for starters. So the difference is that those single home developments also incur a pretty stiff cost to cities, society and the environment that you cannot handwave away unless you just want to say “well I don’t mind if the rest of the world sucks, as long as I get to have a big garden”
People do not prefer sharing a house with roommates to having their own apartment.
Also the idea that people's preferences should be encoded into bans on certain housing types is completely absurd to begin with.
Also please see the price increases in single family homes also historically outpacing inflation in major metros.
Build more of something, and dare I say it, maybe let's let the market decide what and where.
What I remember most about living in a flat was my wife and I being able to walk to work and our son being able to walk to school. Didn't hear the neighbours and we had access to really nice private gardens.
There is nothing fundamentally sucky about apartments/flats.
Edit: Of course, a lot of flats/apartments suck - but then again so do many houses. If you have flats built with proper construction and sensibly planned then they can be very pleasant.
And there your argument falls apart; vast majority can’t afford it. Policy you advocate has caused a housing shortage.
The suburbs got built because people wanted them! The zoning laws exist because the voters wanted them! It's a big mistake to think that most Americans secretly want denser housing arrangements and the zoning laws are preventing it.
and of course it is possible to have a refuge while being in shared housing. Like big apartments do get built! Not for everyone and like you said people want a nice refuge. But it’s possible to build large apartments with good insulation where people have their privacy, while simultaneously offering (for example) huge shared parks and close access to commerce or schools. every shared housing thing doesn’t turn into Manhattan.