Even analysis on a city-by-city basis is much too coarse.<p>Most of the residential area of San Francisco <i>is</i> houses with “lots of living space, a yard, plenty of parking, that sort of thing”, for generous definitions of “lots” and “yard”. Though some of the folks I know who live in such houses are sharing a 2–4-bedroom house between 3–5 roommates, which might not be quite what you have in mind (and many of them would vastly prefer to have their own apartments in a larger building if possible).<p>If you count by population instead of land area, of course, a large proportion of the people live in neighborhoods zoned for low-rise buildings, e.g. your “rickety wooden apartment in the Mission”, because such neighborhoods by definition have much denser housing.<p>With even modest portions of the city re-zoned to allow housing denser than one unit per lot, with less space spent on parking, we could relieve much of the housing pressure.