I've seen two viewpoints on residential real estate. Some people buy a house to live in, and work to get it paid off. Maybe 10% of buyers do this. The rest push the envelope and get the biggest loan they can (usually the max mortgage payment is about 30% of your monthly gross income), based on some theory about selling it later; this is the "real estate ladder" theory, although that term isn't used here.

But the critical difference, perhaps, is that in the U.S. it's widely recognized that the real estate market is very volatile. Everybody knows this, and it's just factored into the personal financial risk calculation that everybody makes.