If you want to live an hour outside the city and drive everywhere, you can rent a 3-bedroom detached house of a similar size as a US house reasonably easily, for about the same price. The difference is that when you give people a choice - which they don't have in much of the US - many apparently choose not to do that.
Nonesense. I just checked on rightmove for a three bed in Wallingford (a tiny town in central England a km across that consists entirely of suburbs and is an hour's drive from the edge of London). It's about 30% smaller than the average US residence while costing just under a million dollars.
Heck, Ramsey is in the middle of bloody nowhere and its still >$400k for a three bed half the size of what you can get inside Chicago city for the same price.
Brits struggle to comprehend just how much worse off we are than the Americans. Similar housing (similar type of location etc) costs 3x-6x as much despite Brits earning less.
Imagine trying to raise your kids to be independent human beings when they can't walk to the shops, can't visit their friends without mummy or daddy driving them, and can't take the bus to the local swimming pool/cinema/library/whatever.
Anyway, try not looking around London, it's not the only city in the UK, believe it or not. And I mentioned rent rather than purchase price. Nobody in my social circle can buy in either the US or the UK.
Ramsey is in North England.
> Nobody in my social circle can buy in either the US or the UK.
I could afford to buy a decent place in over 90% of the USA. Not here though (budget of £300k).
However you both have points. But I expect that the houses you’re looking at on rightmove are not affordable, new builds, which typically are not clustered around the kinds of places you used as examples.
And a lot of USA houses are built so very cheaply. You don’t get many thatched houses stateside, right?
Not to say that English new-builds in the last 20 years are stellar examples of construction, but you do generally get a lot more house for your money.
Hopefully things have substantially improved since I last lived in the UK 20 years ago, but all the places I've lived in the UK where pretty bad. Single pane windows that rattle in the frame when it's windy, drafts from everywhere, damp everywhere, people arguing that a bit of mold in the bathroom is normal, no insulation, 150 years old houses with 120 year old plumbing, no central heating...and no one seemed to see any of this as a problem
So is energy. So is food.
So those are some very primary inputs into the cost of living, which means we live 'expansively' in North America.
In Europe people are super concerned about 'cutting back' that mentality hasn't quite hit in North America.
I suggest Americans will be more interested in aggressively increasing energy production, rather than learning how to live with less, except in some circumstances where I'm sure European advances in 'water saving dishwashers' etc. will be welcome.
There is plenty of affordable land in Europe, but instead we're seeing even people who do not need to move to more expensive cities for work still do so because we willingly choose smaller houses.
That is not to say that there aren't plenty of people who would like more space, but I've personally worked with people who "wanted" more space, but only if they didn't have to move even one fare zone on public transport further out, because they liked to be dead centre of a major metropolis.
My example of a French castle was not random - I'm considering retiring to France eventually, and for the cost of my house in London, I can literally buy a castle 10x the size of my house, on huge grounds.
Yet today I would not swap my house for a castle even though I work 100% remote and could do so if it suited my lifestyle, because my location currently matters more to me than more space.