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Because there's a severe shortage of affordable housing in every city in the US and Canada which is worth living in.
Somebody needs to build the walkable equivalent of a thousand Levittowns, starter housing which can be easily paid for on the salary of a single working-class adult - and not a highly-paid one, either.
There's plenty of housing available in the existing "levittowns". The problem is that there are a small number of cities in US and Canada that you and many others consider "worth living in", and a relatively small amount of housing within those cities, hence high prices. Eliminating commercial development in the suburbs and building housing there only makes nearby suburbs less desirable (because people need places to buy things); it does nothing about the cost of housing in the places you consider "worth living in".
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Without onerous zoning regulations, the office buildings could simply be built outside those cities, making the cities superfluous.
Dense, expensive urban centers are dead. The true vision of the future is an unending low-density sprawl of cheap single-family houses interspersed with office-building complexes.
Well, no, the evidence is clear. The richest people in the world, who could live and conduct business from anywhere, choose to live disproportionately in expensive urban centers rather than in sprawling suburban or exurban estates. They would rather a five bedroom penthouse over central park than a hundred-room gilded age mansion on Long Island or in Westchester. When they ski, they have chalets in dense, walkable, chocolate-box little towns like Gstaad and Courchevel. Even many of the most 'elite' warm destinations, like St Barths and Monaco and Cannes and even parts of Miami, are pretty dense. One of the great innovations of the American upper class - in Newport in the late 19th century - was building their mansions close together, not because they had to but because it seemed to make more sense.
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