I wanted a large house because I don’t enjoy outside activities. It’s especially come in handy post COVID. I have one bedroom that I converted into an office, another that is a gym with cardio equipment and my wife converted our (unused) formal dining room into an exercise studio where she both teaches and takes online fitness classes.

We live in a relatively low cost of living suburbs of a major metropolitan city - $2200 month mortgage for a 3000 square foot home.

After we got married, I moved from my house that was about the same size in a good neighborhood but horrible school system and moved to an apartment for my (step)children. Between rent going up constantly (went from $1200 to $1700 in 4 years, it’s now $2100 4 years after we moved), noisy neighbors, horrible WiFi and being forced to pay for Comcast, I would never want to live in any type of shared housing.

I live in a condo for $1775 in an area where a mortgage would be $3500 a month + $150,000 down. I have a spare bedroom as an office and I get gigabit internet. I'm walking distance to shops, restaurants and a grocery store which likely wouldn't be true of any SFH I could even remotely afford. I have zero repair costs and anything that breaks gets fixed by the homeowner or the HOA.

I'm sorry to hear that your experience has been bad but I'm very happy with my shared housing and there are a lot of people who feel the same way.

FHA is 3.5% down payment. I paid a grand total of $16500 down payment (5% down because of the builder).

It doesn’t matter how fast your Internet is when your WiFi is unusable because all of your neighbors have the same service. We had to run three 100 foot Ethernet cables from my office where the cable modem was to three bedrooms - along the floor. It’s not like we could wire the rooms with Ethernet. I made sure to wire every room in our house. We do have gig e now.

I don't think they meant to imply "only", just inserting a particular personal want. Insert your own favorite noise-making activity, like how I wish my living situation let me have a drum set.

The comment was edited considerably after I posted.

I don't think they meant to imply that these things are requirements for everyone. More like highlighting and discussing the reasons a person might feel pushed to prefer a particular type of home.