Dodd Frank made speculative financing so difficult, that the industry either scaled up, as was mentioned in the article, to make it worth the trouble of pacifying HUD, or scaled down and run a business that essentially relies on clients to finance the projects. Most builders (and others in the industry) were forced to scale down.

These were the builders that might have considered 4-plex or other small multifamily projects, but they've essentially been barred from the market.

They should have pulled their heads out of their butts and respected people's property rights 20, 30yr ago when the problems were becoming obvious. But they didn't so they're gonna have to pay up.

Repealing some zoning is a small step in the right direction but they're gonna continue hemorrhaging money until they start tackling the other ideologically driven inefficiency (of which the person you are replying to has named a few types) before they really start seeing improvement.