A lot of the price difference between Europe and USA now are wages. US wages for construction workers in NYC or SF are 2 or 3 times that of Madrid. Lots of things are cheap just for this reason alone.

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hnav 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What came first, the wage or the cost of housing?

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rr808 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Even states like Mississippi and Iowa have low housing costs and wages much higher than Spain.

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Shitty-kitty 8 hours ago | parent [-]

If you want to do a real comparison then you have to include the cost of healthcare.

	▲	rayiner 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, but that cuts in the other direction. In the U.S., skilled work like subway construction will provide employer-paid healthcare. U.S. employers pay $1.3 trillion a year in healthcare benefits. You have to account for that on top of the reported wages. So that makes U.S. workers even more expensive relative to workers in Europe, where healthcare will be paid from taxes on the wages paid to employees. Total compensation in the U.S. construction industry is about $46/hour on average: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf. That's almost $92,000 for a 2,000-hour year.
	▲	rr808 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes that is another reason, high healthcare costs for employing workers means higher construction costs in the USA.

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contubernio 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In Madrid where the average monthly pretax salary is below 1500 a shared room with four strangers costs 400-709 a month and small aprtments in bad neighborhoods cost 3000-4000 a square meter to buy.

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sofixa 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The price difference isn't 2 or 3 times though. We're talking about x10 easily.

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whatever1 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The US project prices are not just 3X the EU project prices. It’s just that the construction companies & consultancies overcharge. In the US the overhead is insane. From construction, to universities, to hospitals. Insane overheads everywhere.