There is no such thing as pure “choice” in development. What you can do with your property is always contingent on the building codes and permitting processes that define the rules of the game.
So the rise of suburbia does not reflect a free market operating in a vaccum, but a rule-bound system that makes suburban sprawl easy and high-valuable apartments hard.
Every neighborhood reflects the codes of its time and place. Ancient Rome had rules. Medieval towns had rules. Houston, Copenhagen, Plano, and Queens, NY all developed under specific legal and regulatory regimes. The question is never whether development is regulated, but what kind of civilization the regulations produce.
If America wants to mature as an urban civilization, it needs better code and regulations
The American Dream has become a suburban dream because we’ve chosen this path