On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't
So the problem is that car dependence, zoning laws and lack of public healthcare means you have a lot of very expensive items that you can't do anything about without massively impacting your quality of life.So it is mostly an American problem, you can fix all of those via laws, many other countries has. In Europe housing scales down well, you can always pay less by living smaller or a bit further out from the city, you don't need a car and you don't need to pay that much for healthcare. Poor people still has it worse, but at least they have plenty of options.