Absolute footage is the wrong metric of the average per household is also larger. You want to look at the number of units. One thing that can happen is a single family home split into multiple units

I believe the US is near the top in second homes per capita as well, and near at the top in owning additional homes on wheels (RVs).

I'd believe that, there's also a trend towards Airbnb over long-term rentals adding to the problems

US houses are very large.

I don't think it's realistic to expect that multiple families will start living in houses intended for one, so the amount of sqft doesn't help as much.

> I don't think it's realistic to expect that multiple families will start living in houses intended for one

That is common in other countries, though it is usually a single extended family.

It’s more common in the US than many think, at least in some communities.

The US contains also huge mcmansion-style houses that are actually only classified to hold a single family. I think if you speculated more for the average person, housing is less and less available to them all the time... Although the above poster attributes it to a lack of housing, the actual cause of housing shortage is likely far more complicated. The crash in real estate in 2008 froze construction for over a decade arguably, and also, real estate is considered a commodity/investment as opposed to something like a car. So people plan their financial futures assuming their assets will go up in value, ignoring that this means their assets will by necessity price out their own economic band.

The section about housing being an investment in your comment can't be stressed enough.

We were turned down for a mortgage at the first bank we tried because we refused to finance enough to improve the landscaping. The bank wanted to see what the ROI on the home was. We were buying a forever home. Increase in value is someone else's problem after I'm dead.

It was. Well. Fascinating.

This is in the USA? I have never heard of anything like that.

The bank would just be tasked with handling the paperwork (underwriting) of ensuring it is a conforming loan by getting an appraisal done and verifying your income/assets so they can get paid by the US government (fannie mae/freddie mac/ginnie mae/etc).

Not to mention that a lender does not get a piece of the collateral's sale price, so why would they care what improved landscaping would do to the price of the home if and when a homeowner wants to sell it?

Your scenario only makes sense if the lender was also getting a piece of the equity.

That’s wacky, I’ve never heard of that in the USA. You mortgage is a commodity that is packaged and sold off within a month or 2. It just need to meet the checklist of requirements and it gets sold off as a CDO or some other financial instrument. The mortgage writer just needs to make sure you meet the checklist and don’t default while they do the transfer.

Sweet spot is houses go up by wage inflation. Paying the mortgage off being a big source of the benefit.

It is quite common to have 1-2 retirees living part-time on a quarter acre of urban land in a premium location.

Not saying we should evict random people, but it is objectively a terribly inefficient allocation of societal resources.