No one wants to go back to the days of tenements, but we need to relax these zoning rules. We need more housing stock at every income level except ultra-luxury.
In a true tenement, you'd easily have a flat with no windows and no bathroom. You'd share a toilet with several other flats and your shower would be in your kitchen, with no door to separate it from the rest of the kitchen. If there were a fire, you might not have any access to a fire escape other than the front door.
I used to live in a converted tenement in Lower Manhattan. It was incredibly clear that the entire apartment building had been rearranged twice to comply with the new laws. (This is why dumbell style apartments exist). I certainly would never want to live in an actual tenement. There's a very good reason they're illegal now.
2) Better than living under a bridge, no?
A New York tenement at its worst has windows on the front and back face only, which are the main room of the appartments since they're the only one to get any light. The building covers the maximum buildable surface of the lot. It is rather narrow and very long. The bedrooms are in the middle of the building with no windows. You don't need light. There's no bathrooms in the building, you use a latrine in the back of the lot.
Most of them got renovated to at least have internal windows, a sink (and therefore plumbing) in the kitchen and toilets on every floor after the code was improved.
Here's a sample floor plan that's representative of early tenements: https://www.nygeo.org/tenement.jpg
Later you got the Dumbbell tenements with windows to the outside in every bed room and, often, an actual bathroom. They've often been renovated to be quite nice today but originally it was about minimizing cost and maximizing rent revenue extraction from the working poor.
My current apartment has similar a railroad layout from your picture. I absolutely love it. I keep the "parlor" area neat and clean (which is where front door is). When I have people over, they usually don't come further then that.
Like the monarchs of old, the deeper I allow you in my residence, the more I favor you. From the parlor, a door leads to the kitchen. Most people don't have business there, so I can leave dishes in the sink and what not. And behind kitchen, a door leads into the holiest of holiest, the bedroom. You're a lucky devil if you made it all this way, nudge nudge.
My apartment before this had a more contemporary layout, was even a little bigger, with open kitchen-living room, bedroom/bathroom organized around central hallway. It kind of stunk. Everything sort of was the same, it was difficult to compartmentalize, so when I ended up cleaning I ended up doing the entire thing. There was no progression, no differences in "formality", so the entire thing gave itself away the moment you walked in.
It must be fiendishly hard to design commodious living spaces within a small square footage, but I've become a fan of those shotgun layouts, it works well IMO!
The bathroom will be "in the kitchen" often as a closet with only a bathtub and toilet, no sink. It's not uncommon for the kitchen sink to be on the same wall as the bathroom and this is the only place with plumbing in the flat (a retrofit, same with electricity and gas.)
Living room will often be right before the kitchen and a "double room" with a large archway separating the two. Meanwhile the front room will often also be a pair of double rooms and normally they're bedrooms with a curtain for privacy or a built up wall.
Usually you only see this layout in older rental units where "renovated" is code for replacing the 1950s gas furnace with baseboard heaters halving heating costs, painting and 100 amp electrical service with breakers instead of 15-30 amp service with a fusebox (my brother's old place had only two 15 amps fuses for the whole apartment. If the fridge's compressor kicked in while the microwave was cooking, pop!)
This was still quite common in the 1960's in the East Village. I wonder if those buildings have been renovated since, or if those conditions still exist today?
I live in the "large rooms, high ceilings and ornamental details" kind of Scottish tenement here in Edinburgh - only major downside being the impossibility of charging a electric car/hybrid.
NB And yes, we do have a garden although we're on the 2nd/3rd floors... ;-)
The dumb part, I think, is the tendency for humans to huddle together in ever-greater masses in the corners of our vast continents, like Emperor Penguins.
Penguins, of course, do it so that they don't freeze to death. But many of the people who live in New York seem to just want to live in New York so they can live a New York lifestyle because that's what looks cool on TV.
Of course I don't mean /literally/ every employer or employee. But I've certainly been offered jobs in remote locations and turned them down because the locations only had one employer who needed someone with my skill set.
I'd be much less surprised to see impacts in more distributed areas where I could easily imagine people becoming much more tolerant of very long commutes. Especially if, at the same time, there's a greater overall acceptance of sometimes-remote work in some professions, it's not hard to imagine people doing a 2-3 hour commute a couple of days a week.
Edit: Built too many luxury apartments and those come down I price and are the new middle class apartments. It's the developers loss. Built tons of tenements and either people are happy over cheap housing out no one moves in and they get upgraded or even cheaper. It's magical!
sorting that out is no easy task. saying "that would improve overnight" sounds like an embrace of oversimplification, which I think is an inappropriate position for an issue like this with so much complexity and uncertainty.