> Home ownership rate is not the same as housing costs.
No, but it’s a strong indicator that housing costs are not unaffordable nationwide, but merely in some high cost cities where most people don’t live.
> A lack of transit options is not the same thing as the length of commute.
Talking about “transit options” presupposes a solution to a problem. The problem is getting people to places, not transit per se. The US has chosen to prioritize direct car travel over potentially indirect transit, and the result is that Americans spend less time commuting than almost anyone else in the OECD. Put differently, for most Americans, the fact they have a 25 minute auto commute instead of a 45 minute train commute is not a sign of America being “in decline” but rather an advantage.
As to homicides, other countries do not have the same massive differences in homicide rate between cities and suburbs as the US. My county includes a small city (the state capital). The homicide rate in the nearest big city, 30 minutes away, is almost 15 times higher. By contrast, the homicide rate in London is only 50% higher than in the UK as a whole. Toronto’s homicide rate is actually lower than Canada as a whole. The differences are small enough to ignore for purposes of the point I’m making, which is that many parts of America are quite safe. Large cities have stratospheric levels of violence, but most of the population doesn’t live there.