In America the latest building craze seems to be a veneer of beauty over bad functional design, and a strong mentality of "fuck you pay me" from the seller.
Also: It's illegal to build multi-storey housing in large parts of America. You know, the kind where you have stores on the ground floor and apartments above. Illegal and actively NIMBYed against.
A grocery store for a neighbourhood, within walking/biking distance? Illegal, against zoning laws.
Yep, the flippers and the cash-hungry are riding this high as long as they can. It's bred quite a bit of entitlement but with the bonus that their poor attitudes are rewarded with large sums. This will happen (and has been happening) as long as housing is an investment vehicle with profit potential.
I can live with flippers and the cash hungry, since they mostly just do cosmetic repairs and they take some considerable financial risk.
But I absolutely despise big corporate builders who hire junkies as laborers and conmen as project managers. They will cut every corner, deliver late, charge a gigantic premium, and not answer your calls after you've taken delivery.
Some houses used to be built on nice plots of land with non-shoe-box design, but I would argue that paying 1.5M for a "new" home depot material house on a postage stamp of land that will literally collapse when the particle board that supports the drywall gets wet... is not very good value for money.
>>Some houses used to be built on nice plots of land with non-shoe-box design,
Yes, but I feel like even "back then" that was an exception rather than the norm. There is a LOT of very poorly built houses around, and it's not just the problem with modern construction. Modern house prices and scarcity has made it worse, sure, but it feels like "built to the cheapest possible standard" was always a thing.
A grocery store for a neighbourhood, within walking/biking distance? Illegal, against zoning laws.