Housing costs make UK households much poorer than US peers

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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/09/housing-costs-making-uk-households-much-poorer-than-us-peers-study-finds

I wanted to put the words study finds in the title of the thread, but the word limit didn't allow me to do so.

Do people agree with the findings of this study?

On a side note, despite the US having higher healthcare costs than the UK, for working folk at least, wages are typically more impressive than UK wages, in the US.

Apparently housing is 40% cheaper per square metre, in the US versus the UK.

This isn't a thread to bash the UK or anything, but in a lot of places in the UK, it is a genuine thing to pay over the odds for properties which are tiny.

Problem is with UK wages the deductions in both tax, national insurance and things like that. For example, when I worked on the railways it seemed like my pay was high, but half my wage went in deductions, so is swings and roundabouts.

Someone did a like-for-like on Youtube and found USA slightly more expensive overall. However UK healthcare maybe free but many people are stuck inpoverty forcing them to sell their home, and lose their job etc because they have been waiting years for operations, where if they ad been seen within months, the country would have saved itself an absolute fortune in benefits and raised far more taxes if they had been earning. Waiing lists are decades long. I know someone very well who has been waiting for "Emergency suicide counselling" which is compulsary that he attends it as part of condition of his bail (Is a crime to try to commit suicide in the UK). So he is not allowed to leave the country on a holiday or live utside the area util he has had this counselling, and he has been waiting so far on the NHS emergency councelling waiting lists in his area for 17 years, and his doctor can't tell him when it will be.

Yikes! That's awful!

UK has Socialism; US has Capitalism.  Coincidence?

I suspect that this may be because a larger part of the U.S.A. is rural. I wonder what the results would be if someone compared housing costs in U.S. cities to housing costs in U.K. cities, and also, separately, compared housing costs in U.S. rural areas to housing costs in U.K. rural areas. I suspect the costs might be closer to equal in those comparisons.

The U.K. does not have socialism, nor does the U.S.A. have pure capitalism. Both countries have mixed economies, with different mixtures.

Regarding the differences. I guess one would have to live for many years in each one to really get to know, and even in one country it varies a lot from.place to place. For example, London housing is absolutly crazy prices but rural areas are not so much (A flat in London will buy a very small farm (Smallholding) in rural Wales. BUT London wages and job availability and very low NHS waiting times are considered a dream in rural Wales. People survive here per week for less than people pay for weekly car parking in London and that is without the congestion charge or Ulez charge! So swings and roundabouts, and we are talking about the same country here! And is a similar thing over there in the USA no doubt. So how can we directly compare unless we take all figures as an average? But the reality is that very few people if any are an average. (Remember the old UK war planes where they only had one size of seat, and they tried to build planes in the early years to fit an "Average" person, and they found the planes to actually fit so few people in reality, that they had to have a major re-think and start making adjustable seats etc,as they found that "Mr Average" didn't exist!)

This is true, although the UK is a little more weighted toward socialism, and the US a bit more weighted toward capitalism, as per Fnord's general statement.

I'll add to my previous post - the last time the UK had real socialism was probably the 1970's. Nowadays we have a very watered down version of it.

Fair enough, Blitz.

Not enough evidence to establish a causal connection, to be sure.

But enough of a coincidence to make me go "Hmm..."

Yeah.

There's also the fact that the United States geographically is way bigger, so it makes sense to build bigger and I imagine land probably costs less.

The UK could probably fit into a single US state, geographically.

Depends which state. Some are small, others large. The UK fits into British Columbia (my Province) 4 times.

Housing prices in Canada are 40% or so higher than the USA. Kinda nuts since we have a lot of land and 1/10-1/8th the population. But there are only a handful of desirable cities to live in and a variety of contributing factors from construction zoning to foreign investors & Airbnb. etc.

Housing costs in Canada definitely make people poorer. It's getting quite extreme now.

Yeah, I have seen the odd tabloid article regarding how Canada is becoming unaffordably expensive.

I think it is a problem in the west in general, currently.

Time to throw caution to the wind & to live in a tent.

Yeah, it's impossible for a regular working person to buy a house on a single above average income. Even for most couples. People are now buying houses with other couples in order to qualify for the mortgage. It's crazy.

I have an affordable place to live thanks to family, but, I'm going to look into an out of town work opportunity and if I go there is nowhere to live so you have to sleep in your vehicle/camper or maybe on a construction site floor. For ~3x the pay as work in the city it'd be worth it for a while. And if it's something I do for an extended period, I might just buy an old trailer to live in and then rent it out or sell it off when I'm done with it. Something like that.

A trailer actually sounds kind of appealing to me. Some people have prejudice against them but they are cosy at least & I imagine relatively easy to maintain, versus say, a house or something.

There are very few places to park them to stay overnight that aren't campgrounds, constantly gotta be on the move to not get fined/chased out by security/bylaws officers/cops etc. A bit easier for people who condense their lives into living in a van.

The appeal to me would be that I can buy one from the 1970's for around $15k taxes in, use it for as long as I need it for, and then resell it for about what I paid - maybe only losing taxes. There are some fibreglass trailers of that era that are every bit as water tight today as they were when they were built. Rather do that than sleep in a tent. But even better would be if I could just put an air mattress on a construction site floor and sleep indoors. Thinking ahead, still not sure if this opportunity will materialize nor if I can get a crew together willing to go camp and work.. but it's worth looking into for the $.