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A comment on I Bought A Firetruck. Parent comment

Re:I Bought A Firetruck by ivix on Monday March 25, 2013 @06:33AM (#5436342)
The sense of scale is noticable even in this article. The author is parking a fire engine on his driveway. Here in Europe a driveway is one or two car lengths of gravel or paving blocks.

In the US, everyone's driveway is more like something approaching a major civil engineering undertaking, being the size of a tennis court, consuming several cubic metres of concrete, steel reinforcing, etc.

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Re:I Bought A Firetruck by GFischer on Monday March 25, 2013 @09:53AM (#5436931)
Most millionaires here in Uruguay don't have a house that large.

I can't believe how big U.S. houses are. A quick Googling shows they're much larger than the average house in my country:

Average House Size By Country Australia - 214.6 sq m (2310 sq ft), 2.56 people per household (pph) USA - 201.5 (2170), 2.6 pph New Zealand - 196.2 (2112), 2.6 pph Canada - 181 (1950), 2.5 pph Japan - 132 (1420), this year the pph in Tokyo dropped below 2 for the first time (1.99) UK - 76 (818), 2.1 pph

and those are averages, I'm sure median shows a different picture (small flats for Europe and urban Latin America, large houses for suburban U.S. and Australia).

The median for a flat here in Montevideo is about 60 square meters (the one I rent is 55 square meters, and most new ones are even smaller), and the median house is about 100 square meters (and forget about the humungous driveways and stuff the U.S. suburban house has).

http://notbuyinganything.blogspot.com/2012/03/average-house-...

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Re:I Bought A Firetruck by nollidge on Monday March 25, 2013 @08:37AM (#5436639)
They're really only that big out in the exurbs.
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Re:I Bought A Firetruck by adestefan on Monday March 25, 2013 @11:57AM (#5437697)
There are a lot more middle of nowhere locations than there are exurbs in the US.
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Re:I Bought A Firetruck by nollidge on Monday March 25, 2013 @11:58AM (#5437698)
Yeah, I should've said "exurbs and beyond".
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Re:I Bought A Firetruck by adestefan on Monday March 25, 2013 @12:05PM (#5437747)
I wonder what the stats on that are. I can only think of a hand full of US metro locations that would actually have areas that I would think of as exurbs and most of them are on the coasts (sans Chicago and maybe Dallas/Fort Worth).
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Re:I Bought A Firetruck by nollidge on Monday March 25, 2013 @03:12PM (#5439003)
Since I'm not a researcher I can really only speak to my experience around Milwaukee. Basically any town within Milwaukee County doesn't (as a rule, there are exceptions) have that kind of space. But further than that, there's quite a bit of space. Probably still not fire-engine-storage space, but at least riding-mower-recommended space.
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