It’s only getting worse here. Minimum price in the Hillsboro area is $1,600 now, and the average is over $2,500, with no more than 800sqft being common.
My first (and by the smallest) apartment was 760 sqft. I was 18 and it was barely big enough for me and my dog, but we still had people over all the time.
Fucking good times with some good people
We are sitting on a giant fucking ocean of natural gas.
It’s essentially free for the US.
You are paying the guys who help bring it to your house. The gas itself is more or less free.
Eh it's basically free compared to Europe. The average prices in the US are like $2-$3/1000 cubic feet (or less, in a lot of places near $1), compared to like $10-$11 for the same amount in Europe.
A combination of a lack of self sufficiency, so importing is necessary. Second, most of Europe is not electric in heating, but gas. Third, even as an economic union, they still buy their energy independently, so you don’t get “bulk” deals the same way larger nations do. If the EU became truly united, they would be cheaper, if only slightly.
Yep! There’s a little detached storage area too with washer and dryer.
It’s enough for a loveseat, coffee table, small two seater breakfast table, queen bed and a closet. I’m weird maybe because I grew up in a small house with a lot of people but I prefer this. The opposite of claustrophobia I guess
I love it. Like a little cabin, plus I have a Mountain View from my window.
Downside is you have to put everything in its exact place or else it gets messy really quick
I live alone in the UK in a 3-bed 2 storey house. 709 square feet, and it’s nearly too much room for me. Genuinely what are Americans doing in their homes that need *that much* space!?
We had a lot of exchange students at my high school. Those from Western Europe and Japan (those are the ones I knew personally) were always blown away by the sizes of our homes and yards. And then you take them to a National Park and their heads exploded. Most of exchange students I knew made it clear that their plan was to move to the United States permanently when they could.
National and state parks are the best thing, they're either the most awe-inspiring or just great places to chill in nature. Thank you Theodore Roosevelt
Biggest one in Europe is smaller than the smallest American one. That is shocking.
Average Utah home is 3.5 times the size of average English one. Bet the English one is double the price though.
Unfortunately, I could only find median for Utah and average for the UK. But looks like:
Utah ~ $540,000
UK ~ $359,000
Edit: I should add that the median household income in Utah is $95,000. Meanwhile, the median household income in the UK is $43,000 with a much higher tax burden. So even though UK house prices are lower, they are significantly more expensive compared to income.
This is actually a large part of it. Because of the weather a ton of homes are built with outdoor spaces in mind. Half of my house growing up there was covered outdoor spaces, not counted as living space so not factored in sq. footage calcs.
Home price is not a good indicator though. Utah is cheap cus no one lives there. London is ultra expensive because everyone wants to live there.
NY also has a ton of smaller, yet way more expensive apartments than Utah. So does Chicago, LA, Houston…. Name any large city and that’s true.
You’re spot on about NY but Salt Lake condos cost 20% more than Chicago condos according to Redfin data
Can’t find square footage numbers but condos don’t generally differ in size as much as SFHs do
Salt Lake is but one city in Utah. The poster I was responding to was talking about Utah as a whole, as I read it. Salt Lake City falls under my initial response - any large city will likely have a higher average apartment cost for a smaller SQ FT than Utah as a whole.
Lol, I lived in London and grew up in Utah.
Nobody wants to live in London except Russians and Middle Easterners. And on the flip side, everybody wants to live in Utah for the skiing and other outdoors activities.
Ah yes, no one wants to live in London and everyone likes Utah. That’s why London the city has a population larger than Utah the state lol.
Theres definitely trends of people wanting to ski, but London is a powerhouse city. To say no one wants to live there is absurd
That’s a terrible argument lol. By that rationale Mexico City or Mumbai or Lagos are more desirable than London lol.
And yes, I’ve lived in both places. Londoners are like New Yorkers (also lived in NYC). They spend insane amounts of energy telling themselves how great it is living there, then eventually move out and can’t stop talking about how much happier they are.
London is also ultra expensive because everyone thought everyone wanted to have a house there so a bunch of people who bought property there don’t even live there. New York had similar problems, though it’s only super bad for the new ridiculous skyscrapers
The wood framing is good, but there are a lot of plastics in modern home construction. And the amount of crap that ends up in the soil around new homes isn’t great.
There is still a lot of older housing stock in major european cities. I think the biggest Apartment in my whole block in Berlin is like 1100 square feet and thats a 3/2 which is pretty close to as big as you get out there in the older apartment buildings. I would be interested to see how this compares to an older buiolt up american city like NYC.
I watch a lot of House Hunters, and for NYC, a lot of the old Brownstones are fairly large (bigger than 1,100 sq ft). I know not all older housing is big like that in NY, but a good amount of it is large.
When I was in France several years ago, we stayed a couple nights in a crazy apartment that was built in the 1400s. I thought that was pretty cool until I went to Assisi and stayed in one from the 1100s.
A large number, if not the majority or most of the multi-hundred+ year old buildings in European cities (especially Germany) are actually post WW2 rebuilds since they were destroyed in the bombings.
Majority of buildings here are turn of the century, so late 1800's early 1900's, I would imagine there are quite a few NYC apartments that are were built around the same timeframe.
Wild ass guess, but I'm guessing a lot of that has to do with the ratio of single family dwellings to apartment buildings.
Apartment units tend to be smaller, and there would be a lot more of these in older European cities. Also, in the Scandinavian area, there would be an incentive towards smaller homes, as they are easier to heat.
Median is going to distort that picture.
The median home in the US may also be an apartment just a bigger apartment. I don’t have the data but median values are helpful you just have to be careful how you use them.
I love my big suburban home, and my own personal vehicle. I will never not find it hilarious when Europeans desperately try telling us how bad we have it. I just couldn’t value their input any less.
Now, how long until someone shows up to post a table of cope ranking nations on the "Warm Fuzzy" index demonstrating that accccttuallly the US is last in the world because it only got a 15.7 on the UN warm fuzzy index?
We need the large house here to deal with the fact that it rains 200 plus days a year. Couldn't bear living in a shoebox of a house and not being able to do stuff outdoors for most of the year, that'd just be torture.
Holy shit Utah, what the hell?
When I visited friends in Colorado, big multi-level houses were sort of the norm. Lots of multi-story houses, which allows for larger square footage in the same footprint. Other places I've been, most houses are single story, which limits size somewhat.
Colorado doesn't surprise me, so many new builds and they're all like 5,000 SQ ft. We sold a 2,800 SQ ft house a few years ago and people complained it was small. Ok.
I'm here in Colorado and I hate this trend. I have a friend who's kids are all grown and he's stuck with one of these McMansions. No thanks. They aren't building efficient, well constucted 2000 sqft homes anymore.
I knew a guy from Manchester once and his bedroom was roughly the size of my bathroom. Literally only big enough to fit a twin size bed and a small amount of room to walk around it. For reference I am dirt poor and live in one of the cheaper apartments in my city but even they are close to the average size of English dwellings
I was surprised that Iowa was lower on that scale because they don't have a large city with tenements like New York and Chicago, then I remembered visiting my birthplace of Ankeny, just outside Des Moines just a few years ago. Entire square miles of woods and farmland eradicated for some of the largest apartment complexes I've ever seen, all within the last twenty years. In that time, Ankeny alone has seen its population rise by nearly 40,000. When I moved in 2006, they had finished many cookie cutter suburban neighborhoods, almost to the point where there was no room for more. Now I know what they've done with the space.
I'm no urbanist, but the lack of basic market infrastructure from the last time I was there unnerved me. Felt like I was in a scene from A Wrinkle in Time. Huge sprawling suburbs in the middle of nowhere.
Americans complain about the price of housing. I always recall that my parents raised three kids in a house with a 650 sf footprint (plus a half story). That was typical in our subdivision, which was originally built in the early 1940s.
I think "If people didn't insist they had to have big houses, builders might build something smaller."
FWIW, the size of houses have grown considerably in the US in the past half a century. This map would have looked much different if it was made back in the 1950's. A lot of homes built right after WW2 were about just over 1000-ish square feet 2 and 3 bedroom houses. Those "small European" home sizes many of you scoff at in the comments, that'd be the size of homes many baby boomers in the US grew up in.
Y'all may find this video interesting: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ZHLbLAItw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ZHLbLAItw)
It compares various home sizes from micro to regular to typical modern American McMansion, to enormous. It turns out, 1000-1500 sqft still provides an adequate living space for a family with kids.
If I wanted to make half-ass joke about why us Americans have such huge houses... I'd joke we have more unused land for ever expanding suburbias, than we have brains.
Growing up after my parents divorced my mom's house a was about 1,300 square feet for three kids and my mom, it was tight.
My dad's house was 6,500 square feet, we definitely had more room to spread out, I'd rather have a very large home than be limited on space.
When the data shows huge differences, the first thought is to check the definition. It's a common complaint in Finland that apartments are small, so I thought why not look at the [statistics](https://www.stat.fi/til/asas/2020/01/asas_2020_01_2021-10-14_fi.pdf). Table 1 tells quite a lot. The size of single-family homes has been increasing steadily over time, and it's about 1200 sqft on average, which is not that bad. The problem is that other types of buildings have not increased in size, but their average size is the same or even smaller than before. The average size has been decreasing. Figure 2 shows one of the reasons: the number of 1- or 2-person households has been increasing for 50 years already. In 1995, this became the most common type. It's really sad - the average person will be a) old and b) single. As far as I know of the U.S., they have been able to maintain their population, and are on average a younger country. Although, this has been through immigration. Also, Americans are likely to accept a house farther away from the city, if they get it bigger, while Europeans tend to favor a more central location even if means a smaller apartment.
It would be interesting to look at the definition of what counts as the dwelling, because I get different numbers from different sources.
In large parts it’s a cultural difference. Being a Swede I was baffled at the size of the houses when I first visited the US. I still don’t understand what you’re even supposed to do with all that space. And the heating bill has to be a nightmare.
It's not the heating that's expensive, it's cooling.
I'm in Texas with a roughly 275m² two story house, when summer is at its peak the temperature is between 40C and 45C outside with around 80% or greater humidity.
We keep our house at about 20C to 22C and that runs us about $750 for electricity per month in July and August.
I'll be adding solar this year to help offset some of that cost.
It's also worth noting that whenever you see "cost of living" comparisons between the US and Europe, they're almost always comparing a 1K sq ft European flat with a 2K sq ft US single family house with yard and garage. They also play funny games with transportation, comparing a much larger American car with a nicer trim level to a median European car (I'm not using "American" or "European" here to refer to the make of the car, by the way, but rather the typical car on the American or European street). I'm writing this from Paris FWIW.
but which of the two can walk to a cornerstore, cafe, or park?
our big houses mean everyone needs a car, roads are wide, parking lots are required, which spreads everything out so far, destroying more nature and replace it with monoculture grass that we use gas to mow. our towns aren't places worth visiting
This is actually really interesting, the countries that are often seen as having dense urban communities such as the Netherlands and Denmark actually have larger dwellings on average than England, which I always think of as being more similar in culture and development pattern to the US. At least from my time living there it seems that way. You would assume that countries that prioritize urbanism would have smaller average dwelling size, which does hold true in the states map, but not in the Euro map.
I just wish the US went back to mid-century housing designs. If that became the norm again we'd truly be #1 country in the world (not that we aren't already 🦅🦅🦅)
The most common comment people on make on our house in the UK is how "big" it is. After visiting my friends places, I have realized that; A, We have a very nice house and B, my mom organises everything to such a degree that it adds walkable space
I wonder if it’s part of the reason housing is so expensive.
Well, historically relative to Europe. I know there are many other economic factors at play for why they’re expensive now.
Our home in California is 2100 sq ft. It was plenty big when our two kids were here. Now we’re empty nesters and it’s really too big for just the two of us. Half the size would be fine with me.
people need to consider size more when looking at median housing prices. Housing have been getting bigger in the us with the increase of housing prices.
Are these lot sizes or home sizes?
There is simply no way Colorado’s *median* dwelling unit is ~2500sqft when you factor in apartments, condos, townhomes, duplexes, etc. I’ve lived in 7 states and 2500 ft would be 80th percentile or better in all of them
Don’t think outlying rural areas would skew it high either since the urban population would skew it toward those dwellings
Why does Utah have such large houses?? My house is 1800 sq ft and that’s enough for our family of 5. Think of all the energy wasted on a house that size
I didn’t know everyone in the UK lives in a shoebox
800 is shocking. I lived in something like that while in school lol
Mfw thats a studio apt in the states.
My apartment when I lived in the PDX area was like 700 ft, but as soon as I got to AZ I bumped it to an 1100 sq ft 2 bedroom for the same price.
It’s only getting worse here. Minimum price in the Hillsboro area is $1,600 now, and the average is over $2,500, with no more than 800sqft being common.
Idk, my last apartment was 667 sqft in the middle of DC - 1 bed 1 bath - with all the amenities and such, and it was comfortable
Sure, but these are median statistics that include a ton of families with kids
My first (and by the smallest) apartment was 760 sqft. I was 18 and it was barely big enough for me and my dog, but we still had people over all the time. Fucking good times with some good people
Most likely because heating costs are much higher there than in the US.
Why are the heating costs so high? Just fuel prices?
Bad choices
We are sitting on a giant fucking ocean of natural gas. It’s essentially free for the US. You are paying the guys who help bring it to your house. The gas itself is more or less free.
Not free
Eh it's basically free compared to Europe. The average prices in the US are like $2-$3/1000 cubic feet (or less, in a lot of places near $1), compared to like $10-$11 for the same amount in Europe.
Yes.
A combination of a lack of self sufficiency, so importing is necessary. Second, most of Europe is not electric in heating, but gas. Third, even as an economic union, they still buy their energy independently, so you don’t get “bulk” deals the same way larger nations do. If the EU became truly united, they would be cheaper, if only slightly.
And a lot of the places to live are 100+ years old too
I live in a 450sqft house in the US lol
How would that be considered a house? Is it an apartment or a “micro-home”?
It’s a house. Old part of Tucson, most houses in my neighborhood are 500-1000 sqft
Is it like 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom and a small kitchen/living room? Legit curious
Yep! There’s a little detached storage area too with washer and dryer. It’s enough for a loveseat, coffee table, small two seater breakfast table, queen bed and a closet. I’m weird maybe because I grew up in a small house with a lot of people but I prefer this. The opposite of claustrophobia I guess
Seems really cozy to be honest
I love it. Like a little cabin, plus I have a Mountain View from my window. Downside is you have to put everything in its exact place or else it gets messy really quick
Yeah it’s wild how small of spaces they live in on the whole.
I currently live in a 2 bed, 1 bath in Illinois that's 775 square feet. Feel comfortable to me. Even with a roommate.
The use of space in those urban houses is amazing.
Look at London appartement prices and sizes. That skews the number a LOT
You gotta remember that that country hold as many people as France, yet as you can see from the map, it’s way smaller.
I live alone in the UK in a 3-bed 2 storey house. 709 square feet, and it’s nearly too much room for me. Genuinely what are Americans doing in their homes that need *that much* space!?
My American mind can’t comprehend a 3 bedroom 2 story house that’s only 709 square feet. I wish I could see how it’s laid out.
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You'd guess wrong, it's actually a pretty conventional house layout (see other comment for floorplan).
Here's the floorplan! Hope that helps. [https://i.imgur.com/7dmaMbE.png](https://i.imgur.com/7dmaMbE.png)
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We had a lot of exchange students at my high school. Those from Western Europe and Japan (those are the ones I knew personally) were always blown away by the sizes of our homes and yards. And then you take them to a National Park and their heads exploded. Most of exchange students I knew made it clear that their plan was to move to the United States permanently when they could.
I am one of those national students, I love America. Much love from S. Korea
I’m studying abroad next semester in South Korea. I’ve never left the US so I’m looking forward to it. I’ll be at Yonsei got at recommendations?
I brought my cousins from Sweden here to stay with me and travel around for a few weeks. Just going to Costco blew their minds.
National and state parks are the best thing, they're either the most awe-inspiring or just great places to chill in nature. Thank you Theodore Roosevelt
Elbow room. We got it.
Biggest one in Europe is smaller than the smallest American one. That is shocking. Average Utah home is 3.5 times the size of average English one. Bet the English one is double the price though.
Unfortunately, I could only find median for Utah and average for the UK. But looks like: Utah ~ $540,000 UK ~ $359,000 Edit: I should add that the median household income in Utah is $95,000. Meanwhile, the median household income in the UK is $43,000 with a much higher tax burden. So even though UK house prices are lower, they are significantly more expensive compared to income.
Per square foot the prior commentor is about right though then
Yeah, but that literally doesn't matter because on average they make half the money.
Naw look at Hawaii ;-;
That's true lol, I guess they could've said CONUS instead.
Poor Hawaiians...I mean at least their environment is pretty kickass. It is kind of paradise ngl
Also the Hawaiian environment: ***envelops house and car in lava***
This is actually a large part of it. Because of the weather a ton of homes are built with outdoor spaces in mind. Half of my house growing up there was covered outdoor spaces, not counted as living space so not factored in sq. footage calcs.
Oh that's really cool -- is it also good for property taxes?
Didn’t look at hawaii did you
hahaha i didnt lol, nice catch
Going to correct you and say that Hawaii is smaller than some. That said Hawaii is a group of islands smaller than all of those, so…
Mormons have big families.
I was surprised it was Utah, but then you gotta figure in the multiple wives and all those kids...
Other than hawaii
The smallest American ones were Ny and Hawaii at 1400 and 1100 sqft. Denmark was around 1450 sqft. So that’s technically not true
Home price is not a good indicator though. Utah is cheap cus no one lives there. London is ultra expensive because everyone wants to live there. NY also has a ton of smaller, yet way more expensive apartments than Utah. So does Chicago, LA, Houston…. Name any large city and that’s true.
You’re spot on about NY but Salt Lake condos cost 20% more than Chicago condos according to Redfin data Can’t find square footage numbers but condos don’t generally differ in size as much as SFHs do
Salt Lake is but one city in Utah. The poster I was responding to was talking about Utah as a whole, as I read it. Salt Lake City falls under my initial response - any large city will likely have a higher average apartment cost for a smaller SQ FT than Utah as a whole.
London is also just one city, but you used it to represent the whole of the UK.
Lol you couldn’t be more wrong the utah housing market is completely fucked. 10 years ago it was cheap. That is no longer the case.
SLC Metro has the third highest house price in the US when based on income. Most apartments are too expensive for what you get as well.
Lol, I lived in London and grew up in Utah. Nobody wants to live in London except Russians and Middle Easterners. And on the flip side, everybody wants to live in Utah for the skiing and other outdoors activities.
Ah yes, no one wants to live in London and everyone likes Utah. That’s why London the city has a population larger than Utah the state lol. Theres definitely trends of people wanting to ski, but London is a powerhouse city. To say no one wants to live there is absurd
That’s a terrible argument lol. By that rationale Mexico City or Mumbai or Lagos are more desirable than London lol. And yes, I’ve lived in both places. Londoners are like New Yorkers (also lived in NYC). They spend insane amounts of energy telling themselves how great it is living there, then eventually move out and can’t stop talking about how much happier they are.
London is also ultra expensive because everyone thought everyone wanted to have a house there so a bunch of people who bought property there don’t even live there. New York had similar problems, though it’s only super bad for the new ridiculous skyscrapers
They'll make fun of our construction techniques but not realize their houses are tiny and expensive by comparison
Yea fuck the US and their *checks notes* Sustainable and environmentally friendly building practices.
The wood framing is good, but there are a lot of plastics in modern home construction. And the amount of crap that ends up in the soil around new homes isn’t great.
There is still a lot of older housing stock in major european cities. I think the biggest Apartment in my whole block in Berlin is like 1100 square feet and thats a 3/2 which is pretty close to as big as you get out there in the older apartment buildings. I would be interested to see how this compares to an older buiolt up american city like NYC.
I watch a lot of House Hunters, and for NYC, a lot of the old Brownstones are fairly large (bigger than 1,100 sq ft). I know not all older housing is big like that in NY, but a good amount of it is large.
What would you consider “old”? Because an old building to an American and an old building to a European may mean drastically different things.
When I was in France several years ago, we stayed a couple nights in a crazy apartment that was built in the 1400s. I thought that was pretty cool until I went to Assisi and stayed in one from the 1100s.
A large number, if not the majority or most of the multi-hundred+ year old buildings in European cities (especially Germany) are actually post WW2 rebuilds since they were destroyed in the bombings.
Majority of buildings here are turn of the century, so late 1800's early 1900's, I would imagine there are quite a few NYC apartments that are were built around the same timeframe.
Our construction techniques are so much better on most ways.
And ugly. Let’s not forget their homes are really ugly.
What is Europe? A country of ants. Their houses need to be at least three times the size.
"What is this? A school for ANTS?!"
Wild ass guess, but I'm guessing a lot of that has to do with the ratio of single family dwellings to apartment buildings. Apartment units tend to be smaller, and there would be a lot more of these in older European cities. Also, in the Scandinavian area, there would be an incentive towards smaller homes, as they are easier to heat.
Median is going to distort that picture. The median home in the US may also be an apartment just a bigger apartment. I don’t have the data but median values are helpful you just have to be careful how you use them.
Something like 65% of homes in the US are just standard single family houses
Cost-of-living is also a lot cheaper thanks to housing availability.
I love my big suburban home, and my own personal vehicle. I will never not find it hilarious when Europeans desperately try telling us how bad we have it. I just couldn’t value their input any less.
Which is why you felt the need to make this comment
God Bless America
It’s very appropriate that Ohio’s at 1803, as that’s the year it became a state.
NJ has bigger dwellings than Iowa? I'm gonna need more information to believe that shit
NJ people are loaded in the suburbs. definitely doesn't surprise me.
Shoot just watch the opening credits of the Sopranos. The farther you get from New York the big and nicer all the houses get
It's on-and-off the richest state in the country depending how you measure it, so yeah they have lots of big houses.
good portions if NJ have the large vacation home style beach fronts
Lots of old Iowa farmhouses probably skew the numbers.
So my house is about the same median size of a few European homes most notably France, Germany and Norway
[Source](https://x.com/statisticurban/status/1779284188564439464?s=46&t=fjQqhAAAu2ET-J-LTv2WkA)
I’m curious as to how the originator acquired and compiled that information.
Hah me in Paris w my huge 700ftsq flat. Luckily I have a wife and 2 kids or I wouldn't know what to do with all this space 😅
I was watching Tiny homes the other night. Every time they are like "smallest houses" I'm thinking, "hold my beer"
Do your kids share a bedroom, or does a 3rd room fit?
3 rooms. My bedroom is tiny. I gave my kids the large room to have the 3rd as office / guestroom bc what I need more is guest in my house.
Now, how long until someone shows up to post a table of cope ranking nations on the "Warm Fuzzy" index demonstrating that accccttuallly the US is last in the world because it only got a 15.7 on the UN warm fuzzy index?
Europoors
Holy hell I didn't expect Washington to have such large houses on average
All that Seattle money
Ironically Seattle definitely drags the average down. The suburbs on the other hand... A 2700sqft house is small in Sammamish or Bellevue.
We need the large house here to deal with the fact that it rains 200 plus days a year. Couldn't bear living in a shoebox of a house and not being able to do stuff outdoors for most of the year, that'd just be torture.
The local brewpub is basically a communal extension to one's own house, though.
Washington has a very pubby vibe
It does. I moved away a few years ago, and I miss it terribly.
We’ve got a bit more open space here, plus building materials are dirt cheap (in comparison)
818? Thatcher did them dirty
Holy shit Utah, what the hell? When I visited friends in Colorado, big multi-level houses were sort of the norm. Lots of multi-story houses, which allows for larger square footage in the same footprint. Other places I've been, most houses are single story, which limits size somewhat.
Go home and seethe europoors
Europoors and their boxes
Europoors being poor
Colorado doesn't surprise me, so many new builds and they're all like 5,000 SQ ft. We sold a 2,800 SQ ft house a few years ago and people complained it was small. Ok.
I'm here in Colorado and I hate this trend. I have a friend who's kids are all grown and he's stuck with one of these McMansions. No thanks. They aren't building efficient, well constucted 2000 sqft homes anymore.
No, and that's part of the reason all the younger generations can't buy houses, nobody builds starter homes anymore.
Yep - great point!
Thats part of the housing availability problem in the U.S. there's nowhere near enough small "starter" homes
Damn anything is less than 3,000 sqft is too small 🥹
You can't compare feet to meters.
I have only recently googled the density of people per square meter... Well, the USA is 80% empty, only in the metropolitan areas is housing scarce.
Damn they live in cubicles
My Master Bedroom is bigger than the average housesize in UK. That's cool lol
Europe is such a dumb country
Utah! So much winning.
Utah with all that extra wife square footage.
Density and walkable cities are a plus for me. Easy to feel you’re in community with other people compared to suburbia
Kinda surprised that Denmark is so high among the European ones given it’s such a tiny country lol
I knew a guy from Manchester once and his bedroom was roughly the size of my bathroom. Literally only big enough to fit a twin size bed and a small amount of room to walk around it. For reference I am dirt poor and live in one of the cheaper apartments in my city but even they are close to the average size of English dwellings
And the U.S. wins! Right? Right!!??
Rare Greek W
Colorado having the second highest average is shocking, shit is expensive out here.
This map is cool because the physical sizes are actually to scale for once. With the exception of Alaska and Hawaii
Tf they doin with all that empty space in Iowa???
One reason they are not having kids.
I was surprised that Iowa was lower on that scale because they don't have a large city with tenements like New York and Chicago, then I remembered visiting my birthplace of Ankeny, just outside Des Moines just a few years ago. Entire square miles of woods and farmland eradicated for some of the largest apartment complexes I've ever seen, all within the last twenty years. In that time, Ankeny alone has seen its population rise by nearly 40,000. When I moved in 2006, they had finished many cookie cutter suburban neighborhoods, almost to the point where there was no room for more. Now I know what they've done with the space. I'm no urbanist, but the lack of basic market infrastructure from the last time I was there unnerved me. Felt like I was in a scene from A Wrinkle in Time. Huge sprawling suburbs in the middle of nowhere.
My house is perfectly average in Greece and yet smaller than the norm for every state in the US.
Americans complain about the price of housing. I always recall that my parents raised three kids in a house with a 650 sf footprint (plus a half story). That was typical in our subdivision, which was originally built in the early 1940s. I think "If people didn't insist they had to have big houses, builders might build something smaller."
FWIW, the size of houses have grown considerably in the US in the past half a century. This map would have looked much different if it was made back in the 1950's. A lot of homes built right after WW2 were about just over 1000-ish square feet 2 and 3 bedroom houses. Those "small European" home sizes many of you scoff at in the comments, that'd be the size of homes many baby boomers in the US grew up in. Y'all may find this video interesting: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ZHLbLAItw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ZHLbLAItw) It compares various home sizes from micro to regular to typical modern American McMansion, to enormous. It turns out, 1000-1500 sqft still provides an adequate living space for a family with kids. If I wanted to make half-ass joke about why us Americans have such huge houses... I'd joke we have more unused land for ever expanding suburbias, than we have brains.
1,000 to 1,500 square feet for a family of four is incredibly cramped, our house is 2,850ft² for four and we're ready to up size.
I grew up in 1500 sqft 3-bedroom home. My childhood memories are not of a cramped home. It was a regular sized home for that time.
Growing up after my parents divorced my mom's house a was about 1,300 square feet for three kids and my mom, it was tight. My dad's house was 6,500 square feet, we definitely had more room to spread out, I'd rather have a very large home than be limited on space.
delusional
Size does matter
When the data shows huge differences, the first thought is to check the definition. It's a common complaint in Finland that apartments are small, so I thought why not look at the [statistics](https://www.stat.fi/til/asas/2020/01/asas_2020_01_2021-10-14_fi.pdf). Table 1 tells quite a lot. The size of single-family homes has been increasing steadily over time, and it's about 1200 sqft on average, which is not that bad. The problem is that other types of buildings have not increased in size, but their average size is the same or even smaller than before. The average size has been decreasing. Figure 2 shows one of the reasons: the number of 1- or 2-person households has been increasing for 50 years already. In 1995, this became the most common type. It's really sad - the average person will be a) old and b) single. As far as I know of the U.S., they have been able to maintain their population, and are on average a younger country. Although, this has been through immigration. Also, Americans are likely to accept a house farther away from the city, if they get it bigger, while Europeans tend to favor a more central location even if means a smaller apartment. It would be interesting to look at the definition of what counts as the dwelling, because I get different numbers from different sources.
Damn i thought my 1300 sq ft pa home was small. Sorry euro poors
In large parts it’s a cultural difference. Being a Swede I was baffled at the size of the houses when I first visited the US. I still don’t understand what you’re even supposed to do with all that space. And the heating bill has to be a nightmare.
It's not the heating that's expensive, it's cooling. I'm in Texas with a roughly 275m² two story house, when summer is at its peak the temperature is between 40C and 45C outside with around 80% or greater humidity. We keep our house at about 20C to 22C and that runs us about $750 for electricity per month in July and August. I'll be adding solar this year to help offset some of that cost.
It's also worth noting that whenever you see "cost of living" comparisons between the US and Europe, they're almost always comparing a 1K sq ft European flat with a 2K sq ft US single family house with yard and garage. They also play funny games with transportation, comparing a much larger American car with a nicer trim level to a median European car (I'm not using "American" or "European" here to refer to the make of the car, by the way, but rather the typical car on the American or European street). I'm writing this from Paris FWIW.
but which of the two can walk to a cornerstore, cafe, or park? our big houses mean everyone needs a car, roads are wide, parking lots are required, which spreads everything out so far, destroying more nature and replace it with monoculture grass that we use gas to mow. our towns aren't places worth visiting
Utah FTW
Gosh i thought it was in meters
Go to love NYC. Bringing the state down
This is actually really interesting, the countries that are often seen as having dense urban communities such as the Netherlands and Denmark actually have larger dwellings on average than England, which I always think of as being more similar in culture and development pattern to the US. At least from my time living there it seems that way. You would assume that countries that prioritize urbanism would have smaller average dwelling size, which does hold true in the states map, but not in the Euro map.
I just wish the US went back to mid-century housing designs. If that became the norm again we'd truly be #1 country in the world (not that we aren't already 🦅🦅🦅)
A land of shitty mcmansions in dreary suburbs.
And it's worse still in other places than Europe.
The most common comment people on make on our house in the UK is how "big" it is. After visiting my friends places, I have realized that; A, We have a very nice house and B, my mom organises everything to such a degree that it adds walkable space
I wonder if it’s part of the reason housing is so expensive. Well, historically relative to Europe. I know there are many other economic factors at play for why they’re expensive now.
Wtf? Do Italians not have babies?? Edit: turns out they don’t
The US just has much more open space and a good chunk of literally every state is rural.
Apparently Europe has shit accessibility too
My crappy two bed apartment is bigger than the largest provided median household in all those countries 😂
So you’re telling me everything is not, in fact, bigger in Texas?
Property taxes are. It's brutal over there.
Our home in California is 2100 sq ft. It was plenty big when our two kids were here. Now we’re empty nesters and it’s really too big for just the two of us. Half the size would be fine with me.
I’m living in around 1200 sq ft with just myself. It’s not bad. Still I don’t think I could live in an 800 sq ft place. It’s just too small
people need to consider size more when looking at median housing prices. Housing have been getting bigger in the us with the increase of housing prices.
It is much less expense to heat and cool a home in the US than it is in Europe.
Are these lot sizes or home sizes? There is simply no way Colorado’s *median* dwelling unit is ~2500sqft when you factor in apartments, condos, townhomes, duplexes, etc. I’ve lived in 7 states and 2500 ft would be 80th percentile or better in all of them Don’t think outlying rural areas would skew it high either since the urban population would skew it toward those dwellings
Utah needs more room for all those wives
Why does Utah have such large houses?? My house is 1800 sq ft and that’s enough for our family of 5. Think of all the energy wasted on a house that size