The data is completely unambiguous: housing prices are (and have been) rising much, much, much faster than wages.
Perception of things being different is simply because everyone and their dog is trying to fit into the few most attractive areas where prices have indeed skyrocketed.
U.S. is by far the cheapest in housing prices vs salaries of all developed countries and nearly the cheapest of all large countries in the world. 5th cheapest to be precise, those 4 above are oil petrocracies plus South Africa, that's fucked in so many ways it doesn't need to be discussed.
And it's absolutely necessary for us to urbanize instead of the wasteful way we use our land, in order to avoid the impending climate, biodiversity, and energy crises.
Anyway --- with this square footage argument. End of the day, I'm still priced out of a house, whether it'd be a big one or a small one. I don't really care about the price per square footage, I care about the ability to get a roof over my head.
Edit: Actually, can you provide sources for this? From what I can find, home prices have been anything but flat, even adjusting for inflation: https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/ I have a hard time believing that in ~12 years we grew the entire housing stock square footage by 33%
I also found some data that strongly disputes your claim that the US is the 5th lowest house price to salary ratio: https://www.statista.com/statistics/237529/price-to-income-r..., in fact it seems to be comfortably in the top 10 _highest_
https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/
as for your link - easy, what's understood by "house" in Luxembourg is usually a "Soviet style apartment block". You need to be a billionaire to own a typical US-sized single family house there, these are passed down the generations from the people who were rich 100+ years ago (but granted, they are usually not built of shit).
https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_count...
This rating assumes same housing everywhere, not just "average house in a given country". In this case, easily U.S. can be among top 5, because being very rich, and as people say here in the same thread "everything apart from housing and healthcare is cheap anyway", a bigger chunk of expenses can go there.
By another metric - "mortgage vs income" - U.S. is 6th best out of 106 large countries. 50% of the countries (that is, omitting 1/4 worst and 1/4 best) are between 1.7x and 5x worse.
Housing is much more accessible in the U.S. than in just about any country, even if you correct by per capita GDP, that is, it is more accessible than the per capita GDP would imply.
For example, the western part of the country's $/sqft going from $140 to $220 from 2012 to 2022 -- including inflation adjustment?
Sorry but, "housing prices have only gone up by 20% in the last 10 years in areas that are hemorrhaging job opportunities and education!" is not a good counterargument.
But GDP is _absolutely irrelevant_ to the average citizen's purchasing power / income.
And sure, every country has a growing segregation between attractive, expensive areas and unattractive, cheap ones. That's normal. Fitting into attractive ones is a matter of competition and only the best few will - there can't be a place for everyone there no matter how the economy is doing and how high/low are the taxes "for the rich" (because it's not the rich who are buying up the housing).
In any case, the home ownership hasnt budged much in over 50 years. People just like to complain like they always have.