But are you able to buy a decent detached house with a backyard and maybe some pool in Berlin with that income? The worst thing in Germany (and maybe in most of Europe) - most of the people (esp. millennials) live in rented flats.
Renting is fine if your rental market is well regulated. The UK has very laissez-faire rental laws, so most tenants are desperate to own a home; Germany has very strict tenure laws, so most people are perfectly happy to keep renting.
This is exactly why some of think "flats are bad." I really hate living on top of other people.
Is that sentiment due to the concept of living in a high density environment, or the execrable execution of practically all high density residential developments?
There are known ways to develop high density without it feeling like high density. But they all subtract from the profit margin of the developer, and there is currently no customer demand for it over the lower-cost, higher-margin and more miserable executions, thus you very rarely ever see high density actually executed well.
I haven't been able to find a forum that specifically discusses affordable, high density design. Because I'd like to pepper them with a lot of questions I've pondered, but as a layperson, can't find answers to. Like: assuming cost can be absorbed, lots of people see digging below grade space as more trouble than its worth, because water is always seeping in. I see the water and think, great, let it flow into a cistern even deeper down to pump up and water plants. Why aren't we using the capital concentration of high density housing to make more space below grade and reduce water consumption off city mains at the same time?
I like having my neighbors at arms' length.
As for the water thing: well, living on a farm I have to take care of my own water and its far cheaper to buy municipal water than to dig wells and process your own, so no developer is going to do that.
In the context of OP, we're talking about the bulk of the population, who in the US have a median household income of $57,230 to $59,039 in latest census statistics. By virtue of sitting around chatting on HN, there is a very high probability that you have a very privileged position where that median household income is close to or below your individual income. It certainly is below my income.
I get it. I like living in a large space, too (50-100 acres is my ideal). And I get that there may be individuals like yourself in that bulk of the population who feel the same way. But realistically, when discussing policy decisions over how to structure a nation's infrastructure so it is affordable for most of its citizens, at our population levels, with our energy infrastructure, IMHO you're only looking at high density. The energy consumption profile alone of living low-density, combined with prevailing low-efficiency stick builds in the US, makes low density a punishingly expensive proposition over time for middle income families.
Those of us who are wealthy and/or privileged enough to avoid high density, I'm not prescribing we should do anything but pursue what we enjoy and are able to afford. But for a disturbingly large and increasing segment of the population, I don't see low density as a viable option, absent some pretty radical changes in the socioeconomic and cultural order. I welcome discussion to the contrary, as we need a solution for the burgeoning middle classes in developing nations better than the US model, and I'd prefer a low density approach because it is simply currently an easier sell.
> ...far cheaper to buy municipal water than to dig wells and process your own...
My thinking was more along the lines of, if you're building mid-rise to high-rise for high density, then you're going to be digging into the ground anyways for the foundation. You might as well dig a bit further for the marginal cost of getting your own cistern, letting the water seepage that is normally fought against fill the cistern, and use the water like gray water for a food forest and orchards, and let the filtered runoff feed downstream aquaculture arrays.
> But are you able to buy a decent detached house with a backyard and ...
You would need very thick reinforced concrete to be sure of surviving most tornadoes. And you'd have to solve the roof problem.
You are severely underestimating the power of tornadoes.
Several have been hit by tornadoes. There is even an older design (thinner with less reinforcement than modern designs) that survived an EF4 or EF5 tossing cars at it.
> No standard home construction even with brick
Regardless of the sheltering advantages of dome homes, it's misleading to say they're just as affordable. They don't resell well at all, making it an extremely risky investment. Costs of the basics (as told by the marketing documentation you sent me) can be just as cheap, until you realize you lose significant floor space and you need more materials for a similar sized home and you realize nothing standard fits. No nice doors, no normal windows. Now you need custom ones - price goes up.
Compared to the homes rebuilt after disasters, most of those are significantly cheaper to build than a dome and that's where insurance goes. People aren't willing to pay more for a non-resell-able and frankly ugly structure that isn't as practical.
Each room in a dome home will normally have at least 2 flat walls, frequently 3. That's enough for shoving things against walls, not that you should damage your paint that way.
Usually people use normal windows and doors. You can install them the ugly way or the pretty way, and oddly there are people who choose both. The ugly way has them on bulging protrusions. The pretty way has them recessed behind openings that are often rectangles or trapezoids with rounded corners, with the space between acting as a balcony or sheltered porch.
Here is a pretty one on sale now, having gone up in value by more than a factor of 8:
https://www.islandpacket.com/news/business/real-estate-news/... http://www.monolithic.org/homes/featured-homes/the-eye-of-th...
For obvious reasons, very few people have outdoor pools.