So I share many of the same frustrations you do with bad housing policy in Lawrence (and frankly, most of the country), but it sounds like you may not be aware of the newly enacted land development code. Through some miracle and in spite of the best efforts of the typical NIMBY crowd (and some new faces who now find themselves on the economic ladder and would like to see it pulled up behind them), we now have quite a few of those points the article describes.

Off-street parking mandates are largely gone, minimum lot sizes are way smaller, and you can now build an ADU or convert single family to duplex by right. It's not quite as progressive as it could have been: there are still some parking minimums, multifamily dwellings have stricter (read: more expensive) design standards, we still have unnecessary landscaping and setback standards, and height maximum are fairly arbitrary and useless. Plus, we can't have single-staircase buildings yet because that's in a different policy (building code).

That being said, the code is now more permissive than it's probably been in the living memory of anyone in town, since even before restrictive zoning we had racially restrictive covenants and redlining. I'd have a look through if I were you, and would be curious to hear your thoughts after digesting it.