I learned this after moving out of the US. I live in a third world country now and I feel more free here than I ever have in the US.

One example of this is that the traffic sucks here. Like its always crawling and slow, but the flip side is that you do not feel like you are constantly being hunted by police. Sometimes, not following the rules is what makes the most sense to reduce traffic and that is completely OK here.

There are many other examples, but off the top of my head that is what I thought of.

HOA truly scares me about American living. That a group of people can dictate what you can and can't do with your own house is absolutely wild. How is that home ownership?

In Canada the only real rule is don't leave your yard in disrepair.

No HOA for me. Long term goal is to build a greenhouse that connects the garage to the house, build a rainwater system for drinking that collects from the greenhouse roof, and collect water for the plants from my garage and house. The put solar in the back yard and plant some fruit trees and berry bushes.

The biggest pain is my city won't let you keep bees unless you have a certain amount of land, and I'd like to have a beehive passthrough for the greenhouse so my plants can get pollinated without letting pests in.

Newer suburban housing often depresses me. You have these large, lovely homes, but they’re crammed together so tightly that you could reach out of your kitchen window to turn on your neighbour’s sink. The front yard is often just a strip of dry grass with a single crabapple sapling, and the back yard is a box the size of a small bathroom, devoid of both foliage and privacy from the eight other houses overlooking it, and serves largely as a box with air to place your dog in. This could be remedied if the developers weren’t complete cunts and sacrificed a house or two per block to space the homes out a bit. But they can’t waste an inch.

I mean you see the same basic thing in places where there's a lot of post-WW2 GI housing, except the houses are smaller and older. They often packed those in pretty close together, like close enough you have space to run two strips with a mower between houses, one on each side of the property line.

Meanwhile there are freaks like me that want to share no walls but dislike the maintenance of a big lawn.

May as well connect the walls into row housing and drop the price 100k.

Sorry, best I can offer is row housing that is $100k more expensive.

Why do I feel like living in an apartment would be better in that case (if u can't find an older house)

Little boxes on the hillside

Little boxes made of ticky-tacky

Little boxes on the hillside

Little boxes all the same

There's a pink one and a green one

And a blue one and a yellow one

And they're all made out of ticky-tacky

And they all look just the same

In my Eu country, and also the neighbouring countries, the general rule for a detached building is that it has to be build 3 to 5 meters (depending on the local rules) from the terrain boundary. If the builder wants to build closer, then they have to build a blind wall on the boundary with certain minimum fire + insulation requirements. If then someone else builds against that blind wall, that someone else is expected to buy "half" of the existing wall, ie: pay the first builder some money.

So we fortunately don't get those dystopian tightly packed detached housing neighbourhoods.

The shared wall between a home and any other building is also required by law to have certain minimum acoustic insulation values. But there's plenty of old buildings where this isn't the case yet. Living in an apartment building without proper acoustic isolation is horrible, I'd rather live in a dystopian detached house, so maybe that's why those houses are still popular in North America and Australia: guaranteed proper acoustic insulation.