But your points are valid, there's not many large cities, people tend not to have huge homes or sprawling lawns.
Larger income inequality leads to more luxury: expensive cars, bigger mansions, etc.
Case in point: I saw way more luxury cars in Moscow than in New York or London, while large parts of the city are incredibly ugly and poor.
For instance, my salary in a small Swedish city is 45,000Kr/mo. Of which I pay 6,000Kr in rent and about 3,000 for all my other bills combined (including gigabit internet). However there’s an unseen amount that my employer pays; my 45k salary is more like 90k in company costs.
Since the city is small, I would think of this as comparative to somewhere like boulder, CO. So you begin to get an idea of what purchasing power really is here and what things are paid for automatically (like insurances).
There’s also a large differentiation in regards to social norms (25 days vacation by law, income support in the event of unexpected job loss, generous maternity/paternity leave) muddying it even more.
EDIT: This spurred me to do some research and I came across this analysis by Pew research: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/05/through-an-... TL;DR: no matter how you measure, the standard of living is better in the US than in Europe.