You’ve swapped all the units in your comparison, making it a little tricky to actually do a comparison.

So make it a little easier for everyone:

$100/sqft ≈ 925€/sqm

2-3000€/sqm ≈ $216-324/sqft

Or double to tripped per unit area.

> Germany appears to be 2-3000eur/sqm.

Most of this, especially in urban areas, is "thanks" to explosion in construction ground prices - up to 70% and more of the price of flats is the share of the underlying plot (https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-grundstueckspr...).

Net of land costs in both cases. Though to be clear they’re just the first figures I found, and the German figures in particular are all over the place.

I did a little arithmetic, at 1.16 dollars per euro and 11.11 sqft per sqm, and reulted in 1228 eur/sqm in the US, compared with 2-3000 eur/sqm in Germany. So half or a third the cost. That is significant. [Edited: I see others have had the same idea to regularize the units, now we can check each other's work ;)].

Converting the US price to eur/sqm yields 925 eur/sqm.

Making US prices 2-3 times cheaper than EU prices.

> Typical American home construction seems to be ~100usd/sqft

US building costs are highly variable by region. If you're going to compare to anywhere in the EU it'd be better to control for COL.

Here in Seattle our builds start at $300/sq.ft.