Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

https://www.google.fi/maps/@60.2791313,24.9709347,3a,75y,66....

There is usually a bike and pedestrian way also, and there are buses going there too. But it's not human scale. The inside is divorced from the outside. In the winter it's a pretty noir experience as you visit these places after you get out of work, when you need to buy some lumber etc. It's dark and it rains, it's +1 C, there's a highway close by and the orange light from street lights and the car head and tail lights are lighting up the place. Salty water and brown sleet is splashing there from the large mass of cars driving around, and the constant noise from the studded tires. There is no cover, no trees, nothing living really except some barely struggling grass on some traffic dividers. These are built outside city centers, near the outer ring roads. Land is cheap. It used to be a field 30 years ago.

And vice versa, some places in America are just like some nice places in Europe, like a lot of Boston.

No, but a landlord who got into the market early when properties were dirt cheap can leverage that and buy more and more for renting them out, reducing the supply and increasing the competition if you want to buy your first property and not be a renter your whole life. You know, like when you want to settle down and have kids, you're gonna be out-muscled by a landlord who already has 3 properties and is is looking to buy 2 more.

>housing is a surprisingly flexible commodity (too expensive, people live with parents/share, and then move back out if prices fall)

The thing is this is one of the reason why birth rates are so low in rich western cities. How can you expect people to start families if you expect adults to live in shared accomodations or move in with their parents?

Having access to cheap, spacious housing that's just for living and not part of someone's investment vehicle, would definitely make "nesting" an enticing proposition for young adults, like it was for the boomer generation. But if you expect them to bum around between living with roommates and living with their parents like adolescents, and their only hope of nesting being to grind away after years in university at some soul-sucking job 40+ hours/week plus commutes just to afford a bank loan for a shoe-box that they'll have to pay off till they die, then of course they'll realize this expectation of their life is a scammy wage-salve trap and say "to hell with that, I'd rather stay single, childless and free and spend my time and money on travelling, clubbing, netflix, meme-stocks and videogames".

But of course, fat chance to get governments to admit their policies of enriching the banks, property investors and the older owning class by squeezing the young is the cause of this. To them, the real reason why the young can't afford to settle down is because "these pesky millennials and zoomers spend all their money on iphones and avocado toast, so to fix this we'll allow uncontrolled mass immigration from the third world".

Housing can't be an affordable necessity for starting a family that everyone should have access to while at the same time being an investment vehicle design to enrich their owners. It's either one or the other and most of the west has chosen the latter while talking how the former is more important.

In Austria, the goverment isn't even hiding the fact that housing is officially an investment vehicle, with the conservative party throwing the blame back on the people for not having bought properties as the reason why they stay poor and can't afford to keep up with rent increases. Despicable!

But - compared to what I have heard about the US, the variance between offers is much more extreme in the EU, depending on whether these companies only compete in the local market or globally, and it is really hard to figure this out before going through the whole process. I have been surprised by a few companies that pay very competitive salaries in the US but which are barely competitive compared to some of the salaries I know from local companies here in the EU.

So yeah, it is possible to find these salaries in the EU, but they will still be considerably lower than what you can expect in the US and the bad offers are harder to weed out in the EU.

Local European IT firms (your local broadband provider, or a supermarket chain) normally pay much less though.