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Actually, it is the people with single family homes on 5 acres .... with acres of roads and other tax paid infrastructure that is killing the single family home dreams of other people. People who can't find a single family home on 5,000 square feet of land that reasonably close enough to work so that they don't have to commute for 4 hours a day. Because there the options in home ownership are becoming increasingly narrowed down between higher density apartments and "townhomes" and 2-10 acre spreads, people who have enough money for a single family home but not one on 5-10 acres are not only priced out of the market, they are marketed out of the market becasue increasingly, there are fewer middle range single family options available, affordable or not.

In cities with older, what are called close-in suburbs, (those built between 1920-1950), those older single family in traditionally planned "suburbs" are in such demand that most mid-income people cannot afford them. For example, in Portland OR where I used to live, the older close-in traditional neighborhoods the homes start at $300,000 (and thats for a pretty small home). The prices in my neighborhood with 5,000 square foot lots were average $500,000. These are people who could easily have afforded 10+ acres in the hinterlands with a Mcmansion built on it. But instead, they chose to live in single-family homes in traditional neighborhoods, with straight grid streets, shops and schhools in the neighborhood etc. The homes were in high demand even though many were 75 years old and had single car garages or no garage. Why is that?

Why didn't these people want to "spread out" when they could easily afford to do so? Why don't they move out to the expensive new larger lots with new homes and leave the older suburbs with smaller lots and old houses to people with less money who want single family homes but can't afford the new large-lot subdivisions? Those people in the middle, who have more money thant to live in an apartment, but not enough to live in new large-lot subdivisions, have no middle choice because even the smaller lots in older areas have been priced out of their reach by wealthier people who CHOOSE to live in them (aka gentrification). They can't even afford many true urban housing which is also priced out of their reach by people who could afford to live in large lot subdivisions but choose to live in the city instead.

It is the middle income people, and young people who are just starting out and would like to buy a single family home, who are left with fewer single-family home choices that they can afford. Yet we keep on annexing new areas to build large lot subdivisions.