maybe you misused the words, but are you talking about renting whole HOUSE in largest city & capital of a western europe country? Places like that I've been, normal people (not on minimal wage, rather average salaries) cannot afford renting a proper house in the city even if they give out full single salary. Edge if the city yes, but anything usable in the city - nope.

Depends which Western European country you mean. In lots of countries you can rent a "whole house" (whole appartment I mean) quite easily in the city if you're employeed and not on minimum wage.

In Berlin, for example, rents have been notoriously low (something like €500 would get you an appartment: http://berlin.en.craigslist.de/search/apa ), but also in many other cities.

Also in some cities the "city center" or parts of it has low rent because of many immigrants or things like that, and more wealthy people live for other parts/suburbs.

I believe the poster above is simply confused about the usage of the word "house". At least in the US, my experience has been that "house" is usually synonymous with "detached single family home." Pretty typical American example:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Small_Si...

The next step down is a townhouse:

http://media.point2.com/p2a/htmltext/a2c4/c0e3/62d9/4e6d5930...

These are all but nonexistent outside of cities in the US, though.

Not all capitals western europe countries are the same.

In Madrid I'm paying less rent for a studio in the center than what I was paying for a room in a shared flat in London Zone 3.

Yeah, here it's still possible to find 1-bedroom apartments inside the city for ~400€/m (our average salary is ~900€/m, by the way). Rarely in the centre, but still inside the city proper. If you're willing to commute 20km or more, you can get something decent for <300€/m.

Of course, this is just the rent, not utilities & etc.

EDIT: Yes, by "house" I mean "apartment".

A "house" in many (older) european cities is often just a small slice of the buildings on a road - more or less the size of a flat, just a vertical slice instead of horizontal. So renting a full house is not exactly uncommon and does not necessarily indicate a large and spacious accomodation.