Doesn't mention a very important factor: the amount of stuff Americans own. All that stuff needs to get put somewhere. Over the decades, Americans have decided that it goes into garages (pushing parked cars out onto the street) and bedrooms (increasing the demand for "spare" bedrooms).
It's a real eye-opener to walk through residential neighborhoods and notice that most garages with open doors can't actually be used as garages anymore because of all the stuff crammed into them. Oddly enough, this phenomenon seems most pronounced in poorer neighborhoods, where hardware parked on the street (boats, RVs, and even derelict cars) leads to a "wall of vehicles" effect.
The flourishing self storage market is further evidence that even supersized houses aren't enough to satisfy demand to store ever more stuff.
The less wealth and income you have, the more likely you are to have anxiety about needing something in the future and possibly not being able to acquire it or replace it if you once had it and disposed of it.
If space is cheap (ie most of the US outside of expensive urban areas), this is the optimization you’d expect to occur.
Another question as a visitor: why are American houses so shoddily built, basically wooden frames with thin wooden (or plastic sometimes?) planks for walls?
Cheaper houses allow more people to own houses. Wood frame houses take less wood than full timber houses, and are safer in a earth quake or hurricane than stone or brick.
Because most of them are built on spec, by a builder company that doesn’t have any buyers lined up for them, and they need to squeeze them out as quickly and cheaply as they can, so that the builder can turn around and sell them as quickly as possible for maximum profit.
Of course, the people hired to do the work are intentionally pushed to cut as many corners as possible, and frequently paid criminally low wages.
Which means you tend to get younger, less experienced workers who are willing to do the back-breaking labor for really long hours per day, because they are in terror that their jobs will be gone the next day.
And you can’t keep up doing that kind of heavy labor for those kinds of hours for long. You age out rapidly from that kind of a job. And then you get replaced by a younger and cheaper and much less experienced version of you.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 24.4 ms ] threadIt's a real eye-opener to walk through residential neighborhoods and notice that most garages with open doors can't actually be used as garages anymore because of all the stuff crammed into them. Oddly enough, this phenomenon seems most pronounced in poorer neighborhoods, where hardware parked on the street (boats, RVs, and even derelict cars) leads to a "wall of vehicles" effect.
The flourishing self storage market is further evidence that even supersized houses aren't enough to satisfy demand to store ever more stuff.
If space is cheap (ie most of the US outside of expensive urban areas), this is the optimization you’d expect to occur.
Of course, the people hired to do the work are intentionally pushed to cut as many corners as possible, and frequently paid criminally low wages.
Which means you tend to get younger, less experienced workers who are willing to do the back-breaking labor for really long hours per day, because they are in terror that their jobs will be gone the next day.
And you can’t keep up doing that kind of heavy labor for those kinds of hours for long. You age out rapidly from that kind of a job. And then you get replaced by a younger and cheaper and much less experienced version of you.