I don't think we need to "rid the City of single family homes with yards", but I do believe we need to open those neighborhoods up to allow apartment buildings, including subsidized for poor people. Besides alleviating the need for affordable housing, this would help middle-class folks to understand that working-class people are real. Maybe they would get used to it. Maybe our local politics would change to reflect reality. Segregation, racial or economic, was never a good idea.

As for "driving miles and miles to show our kids what nature looks like", a yard is not nature and if you live in single-family home suburbia you will in fact have to drive miles to find nature. The more suburban sprawl, the farther you have to drive to get out of it. When I lived in Orange county in southern California I recall driving for around 2 hours to get out of the urban area. The last time I visited, a lot more of the former spaces between cities had been filled in. There were no limits on sprawl.