[bryanlarsen]

And that support was a family of 4-6 in a 1200 sq ft house, eating out <6x a year, vacations were picnics at the local beach, one car that you did your own maintenance on, one tv, only one set of good clothes (your Sunday outfit), et cetera. Most places in the US can still support a family at that same level of expenditure on an average income.

[jimbokun]

The difference is the social structures supporting that kind of life have disappeared.

[CalRobert]

In many cases it's illegal or commercially unviable to build said 1200 sqft house.

It's kinda funny that this is considered small, though. 110-120 sqm is perfectly normal for a family of 4 where I live, and in many cases they do it with 1 or 0 cars. But I live somewhere that isn't horribly designed (the Netherlands)

[sfink]

Outside of the city cores in the US, homes are built as castles. We have large refrigerators and freezers so that we can amortize our trips to the grocery store by maintaining our own inventory. In my family, we plan the menu a week ahead of time and shop for it in advance. Missing an ingredient means a minimum 1 hour round trip to the big box grocery store by car when it all adds up, which is enough to scuttle an evening's plans. There is 1 smaller store, but it's barely closer -- the main savings is less time walking across a giant parking lot -- and it's absolutely pointless; the only things they can afford to carry are sugary trash and stimulants and intoxication-related supplies. The big box stores use their scale to monopolize the lower profit margin "actual food" category.

When I briefly lived in Paris, we had a laughably small refrigerator. But it was about a 5 minute walk to a neighborhood grocery store, so we effectively used their fridge instead. Which also provided human contact in a way driving to and shopping at a big box store really cannot.

Some of this is just the difference between living in a city vs the suburbs. But not all: even in the US cities, my impression is that you'll have a large fridge and shop at the big stores, even if you take public transit to get there, because the small stores can't compete on staple items.

We're in a path-dependent hell where losing a parking space is felt as a mortal insult, while losing the need for a parking space feels pie-in-the-sky, an unobtainable fantasy. There's an entire synergistic system of dependence on scale and cars and "self-sufficiency" (that masks the infrastructure dependency that it requires).

</rant>

[CalRobert]

Indeed, this is why I moved to the Netherlands. But the US has a severe sickness at its heart that puts life behind an increasingly difficult paywall.

[esikich]

That exact same 1200 sq ft house is now 300k in the Midwest, if it's even for sale at all, and it's likely a rental for $2.5k/month.

[bryanlarsen]

You can't get the same 1200 sq ft detached house in the suburbs on an average single income because suburbs have urbanized. But you can usually get a 1200 sq ft apartment in an urban area or a detached house in a rural area.