Maudit anglais !

That’s a good question, but I don’t know the answer, as my experience is strictly from working in the trades here. One thing to note is that the mayor’s office has a huge say in all that, and as someone mentioned above, there are often regulations on things like roof colour, so that houses in a given neighborhood all have matching roof tiles. I have friends that built a house nearby that the mayor hated because it wasn’t conformist enough for his tastes (they had incorporated lots of wood, resultant in a house with a more North American-style trim), but he’s totally fine with bland-ass white squares with red roofs, lol.

Actually it’s more about building the houses as cheap as possible, because although French houses are generally much sturdier and better insulated than North American homes, building codes are not really well controlled here. They don’t even do plumbing and electrical inspections in new builds.

This is normally only a problem when conversing with monolinguals. Almost anyone who has expended the immense energy required to learn a second language will understand that language ability and intelligence are completely separate.

That being said, it is a shitty feeling that I have experienced many times.