If someone wants a house that doesn't have one of those things - one with a smaller lot, or less setback, or a smaller driveway, or no garage, etc. - and starts to build one, do you think they should be arrested and hauled off to jail? If so, why? If not, then please join us in voting for land use reform in local elections, since that's how things currently are in 99.9% of the US.
I don't know what you mean by "land use reform", but I'm a reluctant supporter of zoning laws. One of their redeeming features is that they tend to be enacted at the most local level. So the people affected by them are in a better position to change them if they don't like them, or they don't have to move far if they can't tolerate them and absolutely have to get out from under them.
Unfortunately, that is often not the case, because people who work in a place don't get a vote, even if they far outnumber the residents. The most extreme case I know of is Vernon, California, where just 112 people lived in the city (all new housing construction having been banned), while 46,000 people worked there. The city government, running unopposed, voted to pay itself luxurious salaries and benefits, with one person having an annual salary of over $1 million.
The solution I can see for this is to reform the tax code.
Tax income tax based on where someone's office is; given them the right to vote there accordingly.
Tax someone's property where they live/own/rent it (property tax should be built in to the rent, but as this will be passed on to renters, they too deserve to vote on local issues).
> So the people affected by them are in a better position to change them if they don't like them
This is an oversimplification. If you look at the bay area for example and its housing crisis, the people who are most impacted are the people who haven't moved there yet but might do so in the future (and will pay higher future rents if housing supply does not increase). But potential residents obviously don't get to vote.
And that's how you get into a situation where people can't afford to settle down in their hometown area, even when they have good jobs.
The other thing you're missing is that you can easily end up with a tragedy of the commons type situation when local government is sufficiently fragmented. Again, this happens in the bay area: if the bay area was one city with one government, people would probably be fine voting for more housing supply across the whole area, but since it's split into dozens of cities, each one tends to suppress housing supply to boost local property values, instead arguing that some other city should be the one that provides more homes.
