I think the difference here is fundamentally there is insufficient supply for the demand of housing globally, or at least US, UK and EU. The previous generation made new builds extremely difficult or impossible in many jurisdictions.

Well, EU isn't just one place. In Poland for instance building is very deregulated with very few cities having any kind of zones - basically if you can buy some land(and land is cheap) then you can build your own house. My own grandma built a house for herself to live in just before the pandemic - 120sqm of space, 2 beds 2 baths, with really large garden and construction+land+permits cost her a total of about $80k USD.

A friend of mine just got married, they bought a piece of land from the local council for about $20k USD and are looking at buying some house plans to start building this year.

From an outside perspective that seems to be a problem in many other countries - either the lack of land to build on(I can believe that in the UK but maybe not so much in US), or insane zoning laws that just straight up prohibit you from building something.

Yes, insane zoning limits in cities in the US since the 60s have indeed made it impossible to build near jobs.

But there's abandoned medieval villages (no plumbing or electricity so far...) in hilly rural Italy.

> But there's abandoned medieval villages (no plumbing or electricity so far...) in hilly rural Italy.

there's small towns with fine electricity and plumbing in rural Italy but they are de-populating anyway, cause most people want to live in/nearby cities as that is where money and opportunity generally is.

The same everywhere I think (bar few cases like the Netherlands which are basically a single sprawl).

Hungary just published their most recent census, and all of the country has depopulated in the last ten years except for Budapest.

The big hope is that the trend will reverse with more remote-ization, but it's, well, a hope.

zoning would not matter to my commute length unless I moved every time I changed jobs and had no dogs or human partners. I have made 30 years of compromises because of partners and pets. I've stayed at shitty jobs because good ones were too far away and I could not move.

building near jobs is either building company towns or embedding classism and environmental injustice into property. would you live next door to a small nuke power plant because it was colocated with your office job? how about a refinery? a bsl3 lab? sewer treatment? or would you force those workers to live near their work and put them and all the dirty parts of civilization far away from the upper class clean places?

I live next to a coal power plant. It's a tradeoff between my ability to pay the rent for a single family home with a garden and living close to a large city in Germany that gives our family the chance of job and education variety.

Is it a good deal? Ask me in twenty years.

There is financial fuckerage driving prices far beyond what normal dynamics would allow.

If it was that, then some jurisdictions would be doing much better than others.

Unless the parent generations all decided to make new housing construction hard, all over the world. In which case it seems likely that whatever changes they made were for a good reason, if they could all agree on it.