Yes. And today they don’t work great. I’m living in today, and hope to plan to live in the future. I don’t plan to spend any more time living in the past, so I don’t advocate policies that might have worked in the past if they don’t also work in the future.

That said, the large single-family homes that dominate America and my own home country of Australia actually didn’t work “just great”. They created an over-reliance on the automobile, and by extension the fossil fuel industry. They ramped up rates of health problems relating to the fact that people get less exercise when they can’t walk or ride a bike to do basic errands. They isolated people from their sense of belonging to a community, and they stunted the growth in independence of children who now require to be driven by parents everywhere, rather than getting on their bikes and riding. The lawns that are synonymous with houses are also terrible ecologically.

So yes, if you look narrowly at it from a housing affordability standpoint, in the past, single family homes worked “just great”. But that’s not true today, and it was never true if you look at it from the broader societal impact.