A really easy thing to confirm by travelling to literally any other country is that The United States and people in it are extremely wealthy by world standards. We use our wealth very badly in terms of translating to quality of life, but in terms of absolute "do people here have lots of money" we do
the per capita GDP of Canada is lower than every US state besides Mississippi. Euros are mostly markedly poorer outside of like Switzerland and the batshit tiny microstates. To say nothing of your real middle income countries. Pop down to Mexico sometime!
America's destruction of its cities to replace them with car mandatory suburbs have made housing and transportation are huge drag on quality of life. Suburban sprawl is ludicrously expensive to subsidize and maintain bsky.app/profile/frac...
There's both a cost of living crisis and a major spending habits problem with Americans. It's all kind of downstream from chiefly housing costs exacerbating the impacts of discretionary expenditures.
Well, I think it takes time to realize how things have changed, right now, the big developers seem afraid of angering the cities, so the builder remedy stuff is mostly new players, and small scale. Hopefully things start to change.
