We need to do all of the above, and more.
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SFH-zoned land is 10X more plentiful, and 10X cheaper, than retail-zoned land. It’s unrealistic and unfair to continue exempting the 70% of land that’s SFH-zoned from inevitable change – especially when we’re getting so little of societal value from all that land. Low-density SFH-zoned land produces only houses that are unaffordable, unsustainable, and even do a terrible job at meeting our actual 21st-century population’s housing needs. Most of the changes that are legally allowed in SFH-zoned areas (McMansion teardowns, fix-and-flips, illegal rooming-houses) are socially harmful, and that policy failure demands a policy response. There’s little that can be done to make SFZ more sustainable without, well, upzoning it or abandoning it.
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Getting us to a place where all places are changing slowly, rather than a few places changing quickly, requires casting the widest possible net for redevelopment. Redevelopment happens slowly: <10% of properties change hands every year.
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The streetcar suburban fabric (e.g., Hillsborough by NCSU) was always low-rise or even single-story retail in front, with low-rise multifamily behind. The 1990s planners’ consensus of shoving apartments onto arterials to placate SFH-owners (a) is patently ahistorical and (b) hasn’t worked - note that most of Raleigh’s strip malls and office parks have already been zoned for mixed-use for 10+ years, and yet here we are still talking about it as an eventuality.
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That consensus focuses on the two costliest housing types: corridor apartments (with high construction costs) and large-lot SFHs (with high land costs). The “missing middle” types that economize on materials, labor, and land, were left out of that consensus, and therefore we’re facing both an overall housing shortage and more specifically a mid-priced housing shortage.