Zoning would help primarily in the highest-cost areas. The blog post doesn't specify it, but the problem is mainly in a few major metropolitan areas, not country-wide.
Voting has the possibility of changing zoning laws. For some reason it's just not happening. If these few areas in California and North-East had similar density to cities in other countries it would help a lot.
In the Nordic countries we have 2 factor authentication with your bank used as means of authentication. See for example BankId in Sweden. Tools like this reduce the use of SSN to a username instead of a password like it should be.
The main use case for rebase for me is to add automatic rebases on pull to the git config.
Normally if you pull from the remote and have local commits not in the remote, you'll have an "extra" merge. Automatic rebase on pull takes care of this, to avoid those useless merges.