What Armenians should know about life in America (2014)

Re:What Armenians should know about life in America (2014) by throwaway894345 on Saturday April 04, 2020 @11:11AM (#22778664)

I think the you're largely observing the difference in purchasing power of a dollar between the US and eastern Europe. If you spent $200K to build a stone house, it would be much smaller (for example, in Western Europe where the purchasing power is more similar to the United States and stone construction is more common, houses tend to be much smaller than the US). This isn't to say that large houses are ideal, but Americans in general certainly tend to value living space more than Europeans.

Further, the American model might be more susceptible to damage, but the damage is more cheaply repaired. It also lends itself to remodel as trends change (e.g., central heating and airconditioning, innovations in indoor plumbing [like removing lead-based plumbing], computer networking, as well as changes in interior layout trends), which allows a property to hold more value for longer.

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Re:What Armenians should know about life in America (2014) by Iv on Saturday April 04, 2020 @11:19AM (#22778728)

The difference in purchasing power comes from the difference in labor cost mainly. I think that in a construction project, labor costs are going to outweigh material costs by a lot. In such a case, it makes little sense to prefer cheap materials.

Maybe it has to do with competitions. Many old European houses are made of stone. New houses have to compare to that.

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Re:What Armenians should know about life in America (2014) by GordonS on Saturday April 04, 2020 @01:42PM (#22779947)

I considered getting a house designed and built here in the UK some years ago, and quickly found that the biggest cost wasn't labour, it was land.

Land anywhere you'd want to live, that has planning permission for buildings, is very expensive.

There is a lot less land in the UK than there is the US, and planning regulations can make things difficult.

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Re:What Armenians should know about life in America (2014) by kazen44 on Saturday April 04, 2020 @11:38AM (#22778857)

Also, many european cities are build quite dense because of their age. Especially medieval town centers are build dense because building large buildings was very hard to do.

This results in many requirements for living being close together(shops, markets etc).

Also, the automobile made it possible to create large suburbs in america. In many european cities the focus on the car didn't happen because spending money on a car was not a reality for many people. (americans own considerable more cars then most europeans, and have so for decades, even compared to western european countries).

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Re:What Armenians should know about life in America (2014) by avmich on Saturday April 04, 2020 @04:37PM (#22781322)

Many Europeans are lazy. They don't want to have to repair damages. They prefer to build so that damage doesn't accumulate for decades. Don't see the point in easy repairing.

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