Sure, but imagine a stereotypical American family with three kids, two cars, maybe a dog, and both parents working professional jobs. I don't see how you could consider it abnormal for them to spend $2000 a month to rent a house in the suburbs. If you're talking "globally normal" that's one thing, but by that standard nearly everyone within a thousand miles of me is in abnormally large and expensive housing.

> Sure, but imagine a stereotypical American family with three kids, two cars, maybe a dog, and both parents working professional jobs. I don't see how you could consider it abnormal for them to spend $2000 a month to rent a house in the suburbs.

That's a massively expensive and large house for the stereotypical American family in the majority of the country.

(They're also not going to be paying 2K to rent a house in the suburb, they're much more likely to be paying off a 200K mortgage, looking at the median US home price as well as the median in areas like Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte...)

If you're paying a lot more than that you're either abnormal in terms of "spending way more than most / you have to" way or abnormal in the "you live in a super expensive area" way.

Let's suppose the median monthly rent in America was $1000. (It's actually $959 as of 2015, according to google.) Would you be shocked to find out someone was paying $500 a month? I mean, that's on the cheap side, but I wouldn't exactly call it weird, especially when they're probably living in rural Nebraska or something. Given that, why is it so shocking for someone to go the other direction, by the same factor?

> but by that standard nearly everyone within a thousand miles of me is in abnormally large and expensive housing.

Speaking from another side of the ocean, it's really true.

According to the statistics about energy used per capita, it's some oil producing lands and the US. And that even doesn't count all the stuff that ends on the US landfills.