Housing! USA vs UK!

[S.Peelman]

It's not really a secret that Europe's housing is very expensive.

Especially Western Europe. For the price of the house I live in, you could buy mansions in other parts of the world. My house has three bedrooms, one bathroom and a living room/kitchen as well as a yard. That's pretty standard here. 120 square meters, so 1300 square foot I guess. That's big enough for most Europeans. We've lived in smaller homes (compared to the rest of the world excluding East Asia) for thousands of years, because there's no space.

There's been a big discussion already, but it's the absolute truth; what we lack in space we make up in built quality, hence the price.

No amount of normal natural forces except the apocalypse will be able to destroy our houses. They're all built with heavy, high quality materials. My own house has structural, load-bearing walls made of reinforced concrete 30cm (1 foot) thick on top of a reinforced concrete pile foundation! You could built a whole skyscraper with that. Interior walls are highly compressed sandstone for which you need heavy power-tools to make any kind of dent and the exterior walls are all bricks, high quality and very thick insulation with windows of multi-layered glass in hardwood or steel frames.

This is all standard for newer houses in most Western European countries, whether you live in the rural areas or not. Building in heavy stone materials, plaster and cement and even steel has been the tradition since the Romans. They must've done something right, even after numerous earthquakes that hit Rome, most of it still stands two-thousand years later.

When a quarter of my country, parts of Belgium and a good chunk of England was covered in over 20 feet of water in 1953 you didn't see any houses floating by. They all survived.