Who Complains More on housing crisis: Poles or Americans?
· This piece is also available in Polish
Previously on…
Rudolf, feeling poor, wonders what went wrong in his life: he decides that instead of taking out a loan, he’ll look for comfort in data: so off he goes into the crazy world of real estate and salary statistics in Poland and the USA.
The first conclusion from comparing the housing markets in Poland and the United States goes like this: No American state is as tough as Poland!
So he decides to prick up his ears and find out whether Poles — having it harder — complain more than their American counterparts.
Read more: I’m Somewhat Furious and USA vs. Poland: The Housing Showdown
I’ll tell you, somehow these conclusions aren’t all that shocking.
I may be a nutcase, but I’m not a moron — I realize that in America everything is bigger than in Poland. So it’s no surprise that where Poles get 380 sq ft, an American gets 1210. After all, in the States, if you drive far enough out of town, you still come across whole hours of driving through wilderness inhabited by nobody.
I guess what surprised me more was that Manhattan isn’t nearly as out of reach as people tend to think, and also this — that Hawaii has it worstHawaii and the USA is an interesting story in general, because — I don’t know if you know this, but — it’s the only state that used to be a kingdom. See, in 1893 a group of planters and businessmen, with the help of the US Marines, overthrew the reigning queen: 5 years later the States annexed the island, and in 1959 Hawaii became the 50th state, and the only one that officially lies entirely outside North America. But after all, nothing bad happened, because in 1993 Congress officially apologized to Hawaiians for the illegal overthrow of their government 100 years earlier. .
It also surprised me that the average salary in 2024 was under 60 thousand dollars (after taxes). But then again: America is a land of contrasts, and since everything they have is bigger, the contrasts are bigger too, right?
Who lives with their parents at 25–34
But wait, let’s think about it: in Poland, despite everything, housing affordability is poor: on average, the same floor area in Poland costs over twice as many years of work as in the USA. If you don’t have your own place, you have to rent, and literally a few days ago I read that in Poland rents are rising 3 times faster than in the rest of the European Union!
As a result, a lot more young people (i.e. aged 25-34) live with their parents in Poland than in the USA.
So we must complain more than the Americans, right? After all, as Poles we love to complain!
Bullshit: with the help of “computing machines” I downloaded and analyzed over 700,000 posts across various social media sites from the last 2 years. The conclusion is simple: for every 100 posts about housing, a complaint turns up in 2–4 Polish ones and in 7–8 American ones. That means that despite all the facts I laid out earlier, it’s the Americans who feel more fucking pissed off!
What’s fascinating, though, is how this sense of being wronged (and the solutions people point to) comes across differently depending not only on geography, but also on language or social media platform.
One thing at a time: A complaining American most often simply says: “I can’t afford it”.
A Pole, on the other hand, more often talks about how something is wrong with the whole system: developers build shoeboxes and palm off shoddy work, the state subsidizes the wrong things, and investors buy up the apartments.
It gets even more interesting when we look at what solutions are being proposed in the two countries:
In other words: Poland wants to tax those who have too much. America wants to be able to build more — and if not, then cap rents.
Out of every 100 mentions of what people do about expensive housing — how many talk about kids (one figure = 5 per 100 mentions)
A very sad note for me in this comparison of sentiments is the matter of children: in Polish discussions you clearly see the suggestion (or even the call) to forgo offspring more often. I read it as capitulation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the result of some nasty operation from outside, aimed at weakening Poles in the long run. But maybe I’m seeing conspiracies.
And then there’s an important matter of timing: the Polish wave of anger on social media peaked in summer 2024, just before the start of our research window — so most of the posts collected catch only its tail endThe wave died out in two steps: first the program disappeared: from summer 2024 to spring 2025 the name of the subsidy program dropped from 48% to 12% of housing posts, and the number of those posts itself fell by a third. Then, from fall 2025 on, the rest died out — probably replaced at that point by the “doctors scandal”, meaning public anger at doctors’ high and often pathologically calculated pay (from 13 to 69 posts per thousand). And the doctors didn’t just push housing out — they walked into the same story as “the ones who own a dozen-odd apartments each”. . But what set off this wave of anger? It turns out the cause was the gracious and benevolent Polish Government, with its mortgage subsidy program: first the “Safe Loan 2%”, then the announced “0% loan”. Programs that were supposed to help young people turned out to simply pump up apartment prices; in other words: public money, instead of going to those in need, went to bankers and investors.
No wonder people got fucking pissed!
And then there’s language: in America English isn’t the only widely spoken language; in the southern states especially, you often hear Spanish alongside English — the language of migrants and former migrants (now: citizens) who came from across the southern border. Spanish-language TikTok in the US region talk about housing differently than English-speaking ones: the conversation about access focuses more on getting past the financial hurdles of buying, that is: saving up for a down payment, the deposit, or what monthly payment I’ll be able to afford.
Getting back to the cultural differences between the USA and Poland: When you read the top-rated Polish posts, it’s hard not to notice that the people in them have a roof over their heads that was allotted to them (or their parents/grandparents) back in the PRL days (from the workplace or from buying out a municipal apartment for a fraction of its value), or that they got “from grandma”. In Poland, you get an apartment.
On the American side, an inheritance or family help with buying is a niche topic.
My first reaction was: well, no wonder, America is the land of success, of making your fortune with your own two hands, and so on. Sounds sensible, right? Except it’s bullshit: the real scale of inheritance (or family help) is similar in both countries: in Poland 26% of apartments come from a gift or an inheritance (2016 data), in the USA 22–25% of first-time buyers get money from family for the down payment (2024 data). Okay, the methodology here is “a bit” skewed, but come on: it clearly shows that the difference in how often inheritance gets mentioned (2.0-5.2× more on the Polish side) is mostly an artifact of how much a given society talks about it, and not of how often it happens!
All right, but does that mean Poles have capitulated and there’s no hope for them? Look at the big picture:
- no American state is as tough as Poland
- in Poland the same floor area costs over twice as many years of work as in the USA
- in Polish discussions you clearly see the suggestion (or even the call) to forgo offspring more often
- Warsaw is even slightly less affordable for its residents than Manhattan!
- for every 100 posts about housing, a complaint turns up in 2–4 Polish ones and in 7–8 American ones (and that’s in a period that catches the tail end of the wave of anger over the subsidies) — that means the Americans feel more fucking pissed off!
Reddit: breakdown of every 100 mentions of civic action
Well, there is one side of the differences between the two countries that pours hope into my soul: when you look at how people talk about concrete actionThe share of such posts is low (roughly 6 per 1000 housing posts on Reddit PL and US). , you’ll notice that the demands differ radically:
- Poles fight for price transparency and build the tools themselves: they chipped in to buy data from the government register of transaction prices (and published it on Deweloperuch.pl before the state did)
- Americans go to the authorities or to court: complaints to the federal consumer protection agency, class action suits against RealPage, a company that helped landlords coordinate rents, tenant courts.
As a finishing touch, I’ve got a post from the most popular social networking site in Poland:
The pressure of the Holy Tag works my dears! The proposed amendment on developer price transparency has been voted through!
So my conclusion is just one: Be not afraid!
Be not afraid to be fucking pissed off about the right things! I know that 3/4 of Poles really don’t give a shit about the topic: according to Eurostat (ilc_lvho02 ) 74.7% of Polish citizens already own their home, and it’s unburdened by a mortgage. For comparison: in Germany it’s 23.3%, in France 30.5% and in Spain 45.5%. Who am I kidding?
👉 Only if you’re up for it
If you’ve got nothing better to do, you can also read the full report analyzing earnings, apartment prices and posts on various platforms (with a short profile of each platform).