That’s Chinese disinformation! And Lao disinformation! And Kazakh and Cuban and Vietnamese and… listen, Americans need to be fed a strict media diet or else they’ll start having thoughts.
That many people owning houses in [insert superior Western country] could never work
I studied this recently, the UK appears to have a 60% ownership rate, untill you examine how they report it.
33% of people outright own a house in the UK, the other % are paying one off. No sane person would say they owned a house if they had only made 2 700 pound payments on a 250k property, but the UK does for stats.
mfw cuba is magnitudes poorer than its neighbour, the USA but can provide housing and healthcare for everyone in it, and even a surplus of 50k doctors they export to the third world on demand.
They also provide food for everyone. There are government “stores” where citizens receive their weekly allotment of eggs, produce, dairy, flour, and occasionally meat. Certain things can only be bought but there’s a standard that everyone has access to something even when some foods can be scarce.
“But the houses there are much cheaper and lower quality”
meanwhile Usonia
cardboard houses in places with high frequency of tornadoes and other natural phenomenons.
Concrete and metal can not withstand the temperature fluctuations in the United States, that’s why wood is used. If you take concrete from -10C to 40C, its going to crack and fail after a few years.
The problem is that the wood has gotten significantly more cheap over the years. But if you’ve seen actual wood houses, its absurd how they last centuries while concrete weathers and turns to dust, and metal corrodes.
Further, wood stands up just as well as brick and concrete do in the face of tornados and earthquakes… In that they don’t. They all collapse. the foundations are made with brick or concrete but its cheaper to rebuild the top if its wood then another material. You’re not saving your house if it gets hit with a tornado.
Also concrete requires steel supports in order to be load bearing, which is again very expensive. If you don’t put structural steel in the concrete, then you’ve created a death trap.
The cost argument is probably the more correct one, i don’t think that the temperature fluctuation excuse holds water. In Eastern Europe we have some pretty extreme temperatures too, in a continental climate you can easily go from double digit negative temperatures in the winter to 30-40 in the summer. And the use of concrete and bricks and so on is still very widespread.
What about stones? Stone houses last a long time, stone doesn’t expand. Many houses in china also experience extreme temperature fluctuation and they build houses of stone too.
https://gisgeography.com/us-temperature-map/
The maps don’t bear out a lot of places with that sort of a temperature variety. Even they it did, -10⁰C and 40⁰C are just outside the norm for many steppe climates (an example off the top of my head), and there are whole cities of concrete in steppe climate regions.
Wood lasting centuries is even less credible, since wood can’t last decades. Buildings can last in a ship of theseus sense, but the wood itself breaks down for all manner of reasons.
“Numbers that high are impossible, the country is lying”.
Obviously the natural order of things is to have homeless on every street corner, it is impossible to exist otherwise!
But Laos Cuba Vietnam and China don’t have freedom Democracy and most important of all bald eagles!
