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Question for Americans: how important is housing space to you?
I am quite aware that Europe is considerably poorer than the US, a topic that comes up frequently in US-Europe discussion, other through Americans triumphantly explaining this fact to Europoors. There are quite a few indicators that can be used to show this, from incomes to wealth levels to various owned appliances.
However, one of the most common things to come up is something that seems less important than all those: Americans consider Europeans to live in pitifully cramped houses with little space. Take this tweet and its reactions, for instance.
I, personally, live with my wife and two kids in an apartment that's a bit smaller than the average size of housing for Finland. If I had the choice I'd take those few extra square meters and put them in the kitchen, since I like to cook and a bit more space for appliances and shelves would be nice. Other than that, I don't really have a problem with the size: there's four rooms and a kitchen, enough for the kids to have their own rooms and for me to work quietly in the bedroom when I'm working from home.
When living in America for a few months in 2008, I visited ordinary American houses, and it was of course evident already then that the house sizes are indeed bigger than here. However, this particular difference aroused no envy in me; I mostly remember thinking that it's just more room to vacuum and mop. There are, of course, people who bitch about how houses are too small, but they are mostly concerned with the amount of rooms, i.e. "Why are they building all these two-bedroom places where you can't fit a family?", rather than the square meters, as such.
Is it one of those things where if you are used to comparatively compact houses, the bigger houses don't really seem that different, but if you are used to bigger housing, the compact houses and apartments immediately come off as hopelessly cramped?
It depends. There are times when having a larger house is really nice. Like, you can host the entire extended family to sleep over on holiday vacations (which require a lot of long-distance travel). Much better than making them stay in a hotel or filling up the floor like a flophouse. It's also nice if you have hobbies that need a lot of space.
But yeah, too often the space just is either filled up with junk by hoarders, or not used for anything at all. A lot of people end up low on cash because they're paying for a much larger house than they really need, and stressed out from having to clean and maintain it all. Also a lot of houses are designed only to maximize space, so they end up with kind of an awkward layout and thin walls. In @f3zinker's example of "why not rent out the basement," well, it would probably be very awkward. You'd be stuck sharing the kitchen and maybe a bathroom with these strangers, and there's only one door to the house, and you'd fight over garage space because you all need your own car, and you'd have to agree on what temperature to set the thermostat, and you'd hear all the noise they make in the basement because it's not well insulated, and yadda yadda yadda.
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