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.
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.
But there's abandoned medieval villages (no plumbing or electricity so far...) in hilly rural Italy.
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?
Is it a good deal? Ask me in twenty years.
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.
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.