You can't have one without the other. Sure, houses in Ex-Soviet countries aren't as big as the ones in the US even though there is a lot of land. But good luck

You can't have one without the other. Sure, houses in Ex-Soviet countries aren't as big as the ones in the US even though there is a lot of land. But good luck building an American sized house in a Western European country without paying a magnitude of what you would pay for the same amount of land in the US. From the article: “In most European countries, it’s much harder legally to build on unbuilt area than it is here,”. Most of the land is indirectly in use, either as farm land, national parkland or owned by the crown in the case of some countries (UK).