First of all, let’s try to avoid American-bashing, and stay respectful to everyone.
I’ll start: for me it’s the tipping culture. Especially nowadays, with the recent post on !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world with the 40% tip, it just seems so weird to me to have to pay extra just so that menu prices can stay low.
That’s not okay.
Dignified living is a suburban house with ample open floor space, a yard for the kids and pets to play in, and no HOA or building manager threatening you with homelessness and catastrophic debt unless you bow to his every whim.
That’s how I grew up, it was a hell of a lot nicer and less scary than the apartment I’m living in now, and housing costs have stolen that life from me. Now you’re telling me I should be happy with what my life has been reduced to? No, I am not happy about it. I am angry.
In Germany HOAs aren’t a thing and by law you have quite good tenant rights. for example once you have an open ended rental contract, your landlord can’t really throw you out on their whim.
Around here, they may not be able to arbitrarily throw me out, but they can decline to offer a new fixed-term lease when the current one expires, and rent automatically doubles if a fixed-term lease is not signed. Is that not a thing in Germany?
There are just 4 or 5 legal reasons for a fixed term contract which have to be specified, and after a few (2 or 3) renewals (or the landlord lying about the reason), the contract becomes open end automatically.