Most "sprawl" is new developments built in places where there are none of these zoning laws - no zoning, no setbacks, no parking requirements, nothing of that sort. After the sprawl is built, sometimes those rules are added, to keep it sprawly.
But no, zoning does not cause sprawl. Sprawl is farmland or forest land that has to be rezoned to be residential at all. Since you're far out from "the city", the property must be attractive to buyers to induce them to live there. Since land is cheap there, this inducement takes the form of large houses and expansive stretches of land.
If you built tiny, expensive, inner-city studio apartments that were ALSO 60 minutes away from "the city", who would buy them?
> Many people think that sprawl is a free market phenomenon, and they are exactly wrong.
People but their exurban houses, forgetting that everyone else also buys an exurban house and they don't get the idyllic pastoral life they imagined. Instead they sit parked on the highway.
But no, zoning does not cause sprawl. Sprawl is farmland or forest land that has to be rezoned to be residential at all. Since you're far out from "the city", the property must be attractive to buyers to induce them to live there. Since land is cheap there, this inducement takes the form of large houses and expansive stretches of land.
If you built tiny, expensive, inner-city studio apartments that were ALSO 60 minutes away from "the city", who would buy them?
> Many people think that sprawl is a free market phenomenon, and they are exactly wrong.
You misspelled "exactly right".