We use our car almost every day (groceries, errands), it would cost dramatically more and take more time to rent vehicles. These sorts of posts always seem over-fitted to highly walkable areas. And maybe that's the intended audience but they rarely qualify the advice.
I'd refine that some to "places where most development occurred post WWII, and they didn't maintain a tradition of mixed use development", so a lot of the US, especially in the west, Australia and Canada too, most likely, although I'm less familiar with them.
The US used to have corner stores and fairly walkable places, but it's something you find in the older parts of towns and cities, and it may have decayed since it wasn't prioritized much for many years.
When I went to a business trip to Germany my German coworkers told me to rent a car. The city I was going to didn't have good public transport. Sure if you go to one of the cities in Europe (or Asia) at anyone can name there is good transport. However even in Europe (or Asia) there are a lot of tiny cities and towns either without good transport, or limited transport. (There are of course some tiny towns with good transport)
Notice above I qualified it with Europe or Asia. If you go to South America, or Africa odds are even the city you are going to doesn't have good transit for most people. (A handful are building, but there are lot of cities that could have good transit that don't have it)
And in Europe, too. Sure, America is huge and there are a lot of cars, but in Germany (as an example) there are still over 500 cars for every 1000 people.
I don't think this is true at all. Most of the world population lives in third world conditions. They may not have a car, because they can't afford it, but that doesn't mean their neighborhoods are "walkable".
Visit the slums of Mumbai, or the shanty towns of Lagos, or the favelas of Lima. These may be high density, but they're certainly not "walkable". Either in the sense of being pedestrian friendly or having many services easily accessible by walking/public transport.
There's a reason that the motorbike is one of the most popular consumer products for middle income countries. In the vast majority of the third world, the populace is desperate for any sort of personal motor transportation.
A lot of people seem to think that the choice is between modern US cities (where indeed it's often hard to get around by foot or decent public transit) or the core of Amsterdam (or a number of at least parts of European cities). And that all of Asia in like Tokyo. I assure them that Jakarta and KL are not Tokyo.
Tangential, but my god why'd they have to name it that. All I can think of is that dirty viral video from a decade and a half ago. Damn my millennial early internet upbringing.
Yeah. To his condo point, fine. But if you choose to live downtown in an expensive city, who expects you to necessarily have a guest bedroom? (And if you own a house, you may well have a spare room that can be used as a guest bedroom but you also use for other things.)
As for vehicles, I have a mid-sized or so SUV and sometimes I transport people but I often transport stuff from the home improvement store, etc. I have no interest in owning a small vehicle and then have to rent on a semi-regular basis.
And, yes, I own tons of stuff that doesn't get used much. But most of that stuff can't be easily rented or borrowed for the times I need it. Should I rent an electric drill or a weed whacker every time I need one? There have been whole business models based on this idea but they ignore the transaction costs.
> There have been whole business models based on this idea but they ignore the transaction costs.
There's monetary and temporal costs. Instead of having to spend minutes to an hour to arrange and get a rental, you could have the item waiting in another room, ready to be used.
> But if you choose to live downtown in an expensive city, who expects you to necessarily have a guest bedroom?
I think this one is not quite like the others. if you only need a car for one week each year, you don't lose much by renting. but putting your friends in a hotel is not really a substitute for having them stay at your place imo. if I only get to see a close friend once a year, I want to make the most of the time that they're in town, cooking breakfast together, staying up talking until we can't keep our eyes open, etc. it's really not the same if a day of hanging out starts and ends with transit to/from a hotel.
Honestly, if they're a close friend, buy an air mattress or let them crash on the couch. I've done it plenty of times when visiting someone who didn't have a guest bedroom or there were a bunch of us.
I agree on the car if you're really only using it for a trip or two a year. (Indeed, I wouldn't even consider owning a car in that case. I probably would if I were going away a couple weekends a month though.)
That works fine in your 20s but not in your 30s when your friends are shackled to highly dependent screeching children, or in your 50s when your friends start having shitty backs and can't crash on your couch or leaky air mattress anymore.
I did this by renting a hotel room next to my friend for a few days. It’s actually fun and renting 2 rooms for up to 2 weeks per year is significantly cheaper than paying for an unused bedroom in a city. More importantly you retain flexibility to use that for more than just an empty room.
Couch surfing is also a perfectly reasonable alternative.
You're over-fitting to a specific example in this post. It's not about that; it's about the principle.
If you either determine that you use that car a ton, or you do the math, work out exactly how often you'd need that car, and what the costs are for the nearest viable alternative solution, and the car's TCO is cheaper - great. You did what this post is trying to tell you to do: Stop thinking about an unattainable hypothetical 'I shall be using this at maximum usage all the time', and start thinking about what you actually need, and how often you'd need it.
At which point in the would be future you could peform the calculation again based on present use cases and weigh whether or not you should buy the car. "Don't throw away that extra axe, you might be a lumberjack one day" isn't great advice.
Aren't both arguments just overfitting then? The article is an overfit of a situation unique to them (great walkability and on-time, frequent public transit is not commonplace) and the OP you're replying to sees a high need of independent travel on their own unique schedule outside of their local public transit time frames and rideshare availabilities.
Perhaps the lesson to learn is simply judge and balance your own unique situation to your needs, and drink a large cup of stfu when it comes to judging others for what their needs are rather than push your own choices/agenda upon others?
Perhaps the 95% in your situation would be more like getting a smaller car instead of, e.g. a minivan? I'm not saying you own a minivan, just that his general advice is not "don't get a car," it's don't get a car that based on some vision of what you want to do with it that only ends up actually happening 5% of the time. The insight is that it's usually cheaper to rent for the long tail use cases than to buy outright and leave idle for the vast majority of the time.
Many minivans are less expensive than many small cars. I do think there's a good life hack here of "don't spend a lot of money on a car" but I'm not sure it says much about the type of car.
Right, you have to pick the dimension of comparison to matter to you. Maybe the extreme case is getting a sports car that you only get to drive on the track once every couple months instead of a cheaper workhorse vehicle you'd use every day.
I am quite sure he is not talking about your situation. If you saturate the capacity of that car, then it seems warranted to buy it.
It could also be buying that DSLR camera for going photographing twice a year instead of renting for these occasions, or buying that 3000$ workstation to play games that require that power once a month instead of going to a net cafe (or using Stadia or whatever).
Your car doesn't stay idle 95% of the time, then. While the general principle might still apply in your case, the original examples don't, because your situation is different.
Agreed, but maybe it's best to think of the 95% as a convenient placeholder to remind you to account for extreme cases rather than a hard and fast rule.
I think it might be even more useful to think about the time you saved - i.e. without a car, will you be spending more than 5% of your time on transportation?
Data point: as someone who grew up in villages and small cities in eastern Europe, I've seen cars being used for whole hours a day in total. Driving somewhere for thirty minutes a day is still a short total commute time relative to what I have experienced in rural and little-urbanized regions.
The author doesn't even say not to get a car. He says don't optimize your car purchase for something ("schlep a bunch of kids far away") you almost never need it for. Optimize for the common use case. So buy a small car for day to day and rent the mini-van for those occasions.
This doesn't work for rural and suburban America. What are you going to do, drive half an hour to pick up your other car? And spend another half hour waiting? That's incredibly inconvenient and costly.
The car-agnostic ideal won't work outside of major cities. The backbone of America is car travel. People outside cities have more space and more stuff. They expect hauling and utility function in their vehicles. This isn't changing.
Maybe if you can convince suburbanites to downsize, you might have a point. But that's also a city-centric viewpoint imposed by limited space and desire to move easily. Neither of those things are desired in the suburbs.
City dwellers don't get it because they don't live that life.
Just so I can get an idea of the magnitude of the number, I am making an estimation. Please point out any egregiously incorrect numbers.
Price difference between smaller car and larger car: $15000
Lifetime of car: 8 years
Frequency the larger car is needed: once per month
Additional time to pick up and drop off rental: 3 hours
Money saved per hour: $52
So it seems that if someone values their time more than ~$50/hour, they should buy the larger vehicle.
Edit: Forgot to take into account the rental fee: $150
Money saved per hour: $2
It looks like it doesn't make sense to rent, as buying would allow the convenience of using the larger vehicle any time, especially if it is more than once a month.
Assuming all else is equal. But what if you need to move further from work to get a house with parking space for your extra vehicle? Then you should also account for your extra commute time.
If you used the service linked in the article, it would cost you about $60 to get a car for a 5 hour 50 mile trip every month. If it takes you one hour instead, you're saving $90 an hour. And since you just have to get to the closest suitable car, 1 hour is probably more than enough.
And I think most people would trade an hour driving for $50.
This was based on the parent's comment of half an hour to drive to the rental place, and a half hour wait. To err on the conservative side, assuming that this adds another half hour to drive to the destination, this is 1.5 hours for picking up, and 1.5 hours for dropping off.
Do... do people really not drive to different places to have fun anymore or... is fun dead? There's a slightly bit more to life than just utilitarian living. In a 1 hour drive radius to where I live, I have countless many national parks, trails and nature reserves. That doesn't even include the beach, where I go to maybe too often. I get it that they're in the dead and cold lands of Canada... but there's more fun to be had that's outside the city that's kid friendly. Cannuck land has national parks, trails and stuff, doesn't it? I thought it did. Then there's all the "commercial" fun things to do with all that money they've saved... sigh...
Actually, I legit played that game on a road trip since this conversation came up with a friend right before we left (2017 timeframe). I counted and kept track. Through Colorado north bound i-25, roughly 60% were more than 1 occupant. Through Wyoming, then west bound i-80 was about 40% more than 1. Didn't do it on the return trip. Throughout east coast Florida city driving doing it every now and then (especially at traffic stops) ranges from 40-60%. Rainy days seem to be high single occupant days from what I've noticed.
Sure, anecdotal, not perfectly scientific or even at a good enough scale... but I don't really believe the 10% idea. I'd love to see where their scientific data is on that.
Let's say 10,000 miles a year, 30 MPG for small car and 15 MPG for large car, and $3/gallon gas. That give an extra $1000 in gas per year for the large car, or an extra $83 per month if a large car is needed once a month, or $28/hour saved for the inconvenience of the hours spent picking up and dropping off the rental.
Either way, the delta is much smaller than what I was expecting, in the range of a couple of hundred a month at the high end, depending on which way the numbers swing. It can be something that's not worth worrying about, for someone who has a middle class income.
Definitely all the numbers have lots of leeway, and you can play with different scenarios to get different results. However, changing the MPG from 15 to 25 would make only a small difference ($17/mon difference in gas), and my point is still valid.
The result gets worse when you consider that $15K is probably not how much extra you would spend for a larger car, unless your two options were subcompact and full-size. Also, 8 years is 2/3 of what a typically abused car lasts, if you optimize for ROI you can easily get twice that.
I think your car lifetime is off by a factor of 2, and you're neglecting that a larger car will likely be less fuel-efficient and may have higher maintenance costs, but otherwise seems like the right ballpark. For something once per month, that seems like a reasonable conclusion for you.
I have a mid-sized car, and I go to Tahoe 3-4 times a year, and probably end up being the driver 2 or 3 of those times. For me, it makes sense to rent a 4WD/AWD SUV with snow tires for those 2 or 3 winter trips, especially since I'll split the cost of the rental among the friends who ride with me.
There's also the comfort/style/happiness factor: I like my car and generally don't like driving big bulky vehicles that are high off the ground; having an SUV as my primary vehicle would make me unhappy.
> This doesn't work for rural and suburban America. What are you going to do, drive half an hour to pick up your other car? And spend another half hour waiting? That's incredibly inconvenient and costly.
Maybe. Maybe not. The point is to do the exercise for your use case. If it costs you 1.5 hours and rental fees to get a minivan and you need it once a year, that's one side of the scale. On the other side you have purchase, insurance, maintenance, depreciation, storage and fuel costs.
The point is to be honest with both sides of the scale and to actually do the comparison rather than taking an automatic answer "I need to drive extra kids to camp sometimes, so I must own a minivan." Maybe. Maybe not. Just be conscious about the choice, not automatic.
Honestly, why not? I grew up in the suburbs in a two car family, and on a couple road trips we just opted to go to enterprise and rent a giant van to better fit all of us and our crap for a week and keep the mileage off the regular cars. It wasn't a novel thing, either, a few families I knew growing up would do things like that for traveling.
The delays and uncertainty associated with renting make that a total non-starter for parents with busy schedules. The only practical option for most of us is to buy a bigger vehicle. Or buy two: a big one and a small one.
I also think that leasing or buying used negates the car-rental argument. The costs of owning a used sedan are very low, and the on-demand convenience imho beats renting a car for $8/hr. Leasing enables one to have a new car without taking the depreciation hit.
> Leasing enables one to have a new car without taking the depreciation hit.
That's not accurate. With a lease you're just paying for the depreciation directly, at a predetermined rate.
It can definitely make sense, though. I leased a Bolt for my wife for $6K for three years. Even if she only drove it once every week or so it would be hard to do on-demand rental for less.
This argument ignores tail risks. Sometimes that 5% max capacity usage is something that turns out to be incredibly important and not substitutable short term.
I'll be a lot of people are regretting not building some slack capacity into their housing and transportation right now, when public transit is potentially dangerous and the whole family might be working from home thanks to COVID.
This is a really good point; the cost of excess capacity is effectively just an insurance policy that you buy ahead of time, lump sum, one time payment. I'm not sure you could replicate this with an actual insurance policy to collectivize the risk and reduce costs, at least not with the example of housing in a pandemic in mind.
How much slack capacity is reasonable though? Sure, it's good to have a non-zero amount. But that doesn't mean that the opposite extreme - having 20x the capacity that you actually use - is the right way to go.
If the best place is anywhere in the middle of those two extremes (e.g. to have 5x the capacity), it won't be possible to achieve while everything is based on individual private ownership. We'd have to share, and build the slack capacity into the shared pool of vehicles.
This depends on the cost of the item, the risk associated with not having it, the cost associated with renting it, how wealthy you are, and so on and so forth. No single number makes any sense.
A plunger can probably expect <0.1% use of it's capacity. But being stuck without one really sucks, the cost to rent is... once you account for the spent traveling back and forth would be higher than the cost of buying, and as a result literally everyone just buys them.
On the flip side a 20 year old fast food worker with $0 in their bank account probably just plain can't afford to have 5x the housing capacity they actually use. That would bankrupt them. So they just don't do it.
Oof this hits close to home. Moved right before COVID started and got an apartment right next to my job. Figured I didn't need space for an office. My commute is short and I can just use the apartment common areas if I need to wfh. 1 month later and I'm wfh full time in a studio apartment and my desk is in my closet because I have no space and the common areas are closed.
Roads are not safe to be on during earthquakes. During the Northridge earthquake overpasses collapsed and gas lines below road surfaces exploded into fireballs. You won't have any notice to do much of anything when the quake hits. If you live in an area where a tsunami is a risk after an earthquake, you should walk on foot to higher ground.
It's easy to say that, seeing how difficult COVID has been for many people, but should we really be optimizing for what is likely a once-in-a-lifetime event?
your blog server sits idle 95% of the time. don't pay for capacity to handle hypothetical peak load if you were to go viral by hitting the frontpage of HN. if that were to happen, just fail and let the punters read the blog from archive.org / google search cache
We didn't use our guest room much last year (although we did still use it for storage), but it sure is nice to have it now that we need two home offices.
It's not just the 5% of the time you need it, it's also the immediate and guaranteed availability.
I rarely use my car, I'm the exact kind of person this is aimed at. I haven't used it in *monthts. But when I need it, it's there. There's car rental place about 500 meters walking distance from my home, but they aren't open 24/7. There is also a ride share car parked at about 1km from my home, but it's only one car and if someone else took it I can't use it.
These things only work when you know well in advance you're going to use it and even then, they might not be available at peak times. There's only so many ride share cars available, and if everyone wants to visit their parents on Christmas, there's not enough of them. Car rental companies aren't going to buy enough cars to cover their 5% peak use either.
I'm American so any questions about health insurance automatically are predisposed towards absurdity. But yeah, I do. I don't want to be stuck in a hospital with a multi thousand dollar medical bill for an emergency. The worst that would happen without me owning a car is needing to rent one on a moment's notice. Maybe there's the odd moment when I would need a car for a city-wide evacuation? Seems like that's such an exceptional case that I would not spend my money maintaining a car just to be prepared for it.
That is the trade off you made. It might not be right for the next person. There are things you cannot do with a rental car (off road). There are times when you cannot get a rental car when you want it. If you have hundreds of dollars per months that you are not spending anyway it might be worth it. (though my yearly costs for my truck that I drive a few times a year are much less than $100/month - it is paid for years ago though)
It's shocking to me how cheap used cars are (equivalently - how few people buy them).
I am doing exactly the same thing as you. Bought a ~$3k old used car that is always there for me. I do use it more often, ever week or two, though.
It is even more shocking to me that people would buy a car on credit (except when it has a business purpose, i.e. you can comfortably cover interest payments with the increase in revenue). You're not supposed to use credit for consumption!
Low mileage/late model used cars can be relatively expensive. "Clunkers" can be quite cheap but it's a bit of a crap shoot. Donated my old high mileage 2nd car (fortunately) before the pandemic hit. For some new tires and a brake job it would probably have kept going for a few more years but, especially if you want to take longer drives, old vehicles inspire less and less faith and take more and more time.
All of those failures consume time and energy, possibly wasted vacation, missed work, uncomfortable situations, etc. I've had used cars but at this point I'm willing to pay a considerable premium for maximizing reliable transportation.
I actually looked up statistics from my country’s equivalent of the AAA of the road-side breakdowns they service before I bought it. The Mitsubishi Colt I own is one of the most reliable cars you can get. Japanese cars in general are very reliable.
The only reason to buy new is if you have some sort of aversion towards someones boogers on the wheel and fart dust in the seat. We bought a 2018 toyota for 9k out the door. Nearly 10k off msrp for 2 years used.
Credit is fine if the interest rate is low and you aren't stretching yourself financially. I could've bought my car in cash if I wanted to but at a 2.5% interest rate I figured why bother, that's almost nothing after inflation. I might as well just keep the money invested in the market.
Why don't you just borrow money to buy stocks, without involving the car?
You can get lower rate if you use your own stocks as collateral, i.e. if you use brokerage margin. Heck, these days margin lending is so crazy common that there are even ETFs that package leveraged equities for you to go anywhere between -300% via 0% to 300% long, just change the allocation with a few clicks (or taps on your phone).
Old used cars are great most of the time, but they sometimes break for no reason, or require non-trivial work (e.g. replacing struts or wheel bearings, that sort of stuff). This is of course not a problem if you live in a single family house and have plenty of space to store the necessary tools and to work on it, but if you go all in into the lifestyle of living in a condo downtown that's recommended by the author of the article above, this can turn into huge and expensive hassle.
This has been my strategy for last 12 years. I own a 17 year old Volvo XC wagon and a 16 year old Toyota Camry. Volvo I bought 13 years ago from a 96 year old gent who's family had taken away the keys. Bought it sight-unseen on Craiglist for $9000. I'd put it up against any modern SUV for looks and functionality (except smartphone integration). The Toyota was $4500 and had 30K miles.
The Volvo heads to the shop on Wednesday. I'm concerned that I'm in for an expensive bill from the mechanic (~$1000) for various ailments. Never an easy analysis on a car with a KBB value of like $2500. But on the other hand, I'm driving a $40K car.
Another benefit of second used car is that if friends and family come to visit, they have a car to use.
Still, despite so far putting 150% of the "value" into repairs I realize it does not matter. Large Ratios of a small number are nothing compared to even small ratios of a large number.
Once the repairs are done I get to know the state of those parts. Absolute worst case, and the engine needs replacement, we're still only talking about 1 year worth of depreciation on a new car.
Will I need to replace the engine? Likely not. Would it have been slightly cheaper to spend 2x on a better used car? Sure, but maybe that one would have been a lemon too.
The scary part of used cars is spending money on repairs. Yet even expensive repairs are cheap. They are only expensive relative to the market value, but the market value is based on that lemon market risk.
The end result of having bought a far too cheap lemon: I've still spent less than a properly vetted vehicle and now I know some good mechanics down the street. The vehicle itself now has parts which are known quantities.
I'd really love an excuse to buy a new car. I've got the cash for it, but nothing modern cars can provide justify paying an engine replacement of depreciation every year.
I think the biggest "excuse" is new accident avoidance tech. A friend last year hit a bear. She didn't see the bear but her Subaru did, and probably saved her life.
In the city that the author is writing from, car insurance can cost between $100 and $300 for minimum coverage on most cars unless you've been driving for a substantial amount of time crash-free. Likewise, gas is about $1.3 to $1.6/L
I'd pay about the same as your car for parking in my building for a year. Luckily rideshares are way more common around here, and I can often find one at walking distance (or else I can uber/ride my bike or a rideshare bike to one).
It saddens me to see your correct answer being voted down. I get there's a moral condemnation of surge prices in certain circles.
Nonetheless this condemnation, once legislated, have removed the very practical ability to purchase important services or goods when they matter the most to you. Instead we end up all over-buying just to ensure we have it at the key junction.
Even on a short time scale, as prices get higher, many people will discover that they have some alternatives or can wait a while, leaving the product available to those who really, really need it.
Have you tried to order an uber from a suburb that isn't very near the city center? You wait 20 minutes while you watch them drive from the airport to your house, and half the time the driver cancels the ride after you've been waiting for 15 minutes when they realize how far you are from the airport where all the fares in the area typically come from.
In small towns or bigger villages, the number of taxis/ubers, whatever might only be around 10 to 20. Once they are gone, you have to wait till they are a viable again.
As I read the article, I compare the author's world view to that of the "survivalists" and "preppers". The guys who stockpile food, water, ammo, etc. that they'll likely never use but might. They deliberately optimize for the 5% or 0.5%, rather than the 95%. They assume independence will eventually be needed (running water may one day be unavailable), where the author is willing to risk relying on inter-dependence (car rentals and hotels will always be available). The survivalists firmly espouse the "when I need it, it's there" point of view. I don't know if one view is right or wrong, but they are clearly opposite approaches to dealing with tail risk.
> I rarely use my car, I'm the exact kind of person this is aimed at. I haven't used it in monthts. But when I need it, it's there.
If those months are not hyperbole, you might find that when you need it, it doesn't start. (That just happened last week to a friend of mine who had to bring his kid to swimming class, after leaving the car unused for a few weeks.)
Does the cost/benefit really work out, though? Suppose I buy a $50,000 minivan which I expect to keep/last 10 years. At $8/hr for a rental, the breakeven is 50000/8/10/365=1.7hrs/day. When I was growing up in a family of 4, my parents easily spent more time than that in our van, shuffling us between school and other activities. And of course this doesn't count the depreciated value of the car after 10 years.
I can imagine the hotel argument working out better mathematically, but it's definitely very much dependent on where you live. In a rural area you'd probably be crazy not to get a bigger home. In an urban area, a hotel could make sense.
The author has other articles about how he's taught his children how to use the bus on their own to get around, and how they ride it to school daily. The "take the kids to school" use case isn't true for everyone, and I feel like people are also missing the point of the article.
You're supposed to analyze for yourself if you need to own a car full-time, and if the answer is yes, perhaps a smaller one might do? If you're constantly shuttling large groups around, then the answer to both might be yes, and that's fine too.
Your calculation doesn't count for insurance, tax, maintenance and fuel. That being said, I consider nearly 2 hours a day spent in a car to be a massive amount of time and would definitely want to have my own car if that was the case.
Then again I used to walk to school and today I walk or cycle to most places. I wouldn't be able to do that if I was living in one of those US suburbs.
He argues as if living on the outskirts is mostly about affording a yard that you don't really need, but there's so much more benefit than that for kids living in a rural area.
When I was a preteen in the late 60s and early 70s I got to explore and be independent in a way that is rare today, though I lived in a vast densely populated suburb. At age ten I would hop on my little stingray bike and explore for a dozen miles in any direction. Today that would be an invitation to have your children seized by child protective services.
It's still like that in rural areas. A kid can explore the wilderness with her dog on a Saturday and not be expected until dinner. Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people. The air is cleaner, the night sky is darker, wildlife is all around. If she skins her knee or gets lost, she gets to deal with it herself rather than having an adult on tap. This breeds more independent people with hard earned self confidence. She can watch and help her parents do a bazillion things around the house that they'd dial up a contractor for in the city.
Yeah, it's harder to get a ride share, and you can't work in an office in the city without a very long commute. But there are higher priorities than those, like growing better humans.
> But it's still like that in rural areas. A kid can explore the wilderness with her dog on a Saturday and not be expected until dinner. Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people. The air is cleaner, the sky is darker, wildlife is all around. If she skins her knee or gets lost, she gets to deal with it herself rather than having an adult on tap. This breeds more independent people with hard earned self confidence. She can watch and help her parents do a bazillion things around the house that they'd dial up a contractor for in the city.
In my experience this is very common in cities too. It's the suburbs that prevent it. I don't have kids yet, but in my (very urban) neighborhood it's extremely common to have kids out and about on their own. It's generally seen as being very safe.
When I talk to coworkers with kids in the suburbs they're much more worried about letting their kids run around without adults. To be fair, it makes some sense: cars are one of the biggest killers of kids, and they're a much bigger risk in the suburbs (where most streets are wide and fast) than the city.
I live in an urbanized suburb (SFH, but 5 miles from a city core) and kids are out all the time. We have a few helicopter parents that feel the need to monitor their kids constantly, but for the most part, the parks, buses, restaurants, convenience stores, etc are all full of kids/teens. They don't even really cause trouble either. You'd think a group of teenage boys would be assholes, but nope, they just kind of mind their own business.
Once you get to the cookie-cutter subdivisions in the far suburbs, that's when the kids all disappear. Part of it might be helicopter parenting, but I think it's caused mostly by a lack of any outdoor activities. Riding your bike means going to the next subdivision over. Repeat that a half-dozen times and you get to a heavily trafficked road that can be followed for a few miles to a strip mall with a Target. Even all of the nice parks in these places are only accessible via car -- surrounded on all sized by 4-6 lane traffic going 45+MPH.
Cincinnati. The city is old enough that the inner suburbs were established largely before cars became common, so a lot of them are more pedestrian friendly. Granted, the city loses that midwestern economy when you get closer to the center. You either pay out the nose ($1MM+ is not unheard of) for a home close to the city, or you buy a dirt cheap house ($60k- is not unheard of) in a "rough" neighborhood.
>Today that would be an invitation to have your children seized by child protective services.
This is a common refrain, but I've never seen more than one-or-two anecdotal accounts of this happening. Do you have citations or articles that support common CPS intervention in cases like this? In my experience CPS is primarily focused on abuse and malnutrition, and tries everything possible to keep families together.
Parents act like the world outside is scary and dangerous, despite declining crime rates. I think that many younger kids are in dual-income families, and are at after-school care from 3-6 every day. Those that aren't are often in after-school activities, and aren't home, bored with time to burn outside. If the kids are home, they'd rather play Fortnite or Call of Duty with their online friends than build a fort in the riverbed.
You don't see it in the news that much, but you get phone calls because nosy neighbour reports an unattended kid outside. Law in some places say that children have to be supervised until 12, etc.
The phone calls create a chilling effect as parents tell other parents. So if you even want to avoid the helicopter parent trend, society forces you to be their chauffeur.
So no, kids don't get taken away immediately, but the singular phone call is enough to stop it in %99 of cases.
But here are some links (go through the links that the articles give too):
It's funny you ask; the person who runs the linked submission actually got told in 2017 that they had to keep their kids under constant supervision until they were 10, after an anonymous tip that they were letting their kids ride the bus unsupervised.
Extremely common in cities, that's how I grew up in the 90s.
However, the kids I met in college who grew up in rural areas had to be driven everywhere. Looking at their faces when I'd mention taking the bus to a concert as a teen, you'd think I was talking about performing wizardry.
As a city kid I could literally go anywhere I wanted at any time, just walk, hop on my bike, or the bus. My parents left dollar bills in a designated spot for bus fare if we wanted to go somewhere.
There was even "wilderness" in the city I grew up in. I grew up building tree forts of dubious structural integrity and swimming in streams. Without adults being involved, just the neighborhood kids. I loved that there were always neighborhood kids, there was always a playmate around - just walk outside and see who was out and about. This was all elementary school age.
The good part about "neighborhood kids" is you don't get to choose them, they were just whoever lived in your area - so you learn to get along with people you'd otherwise not hang out with.
> To be fair, it makes some sense: cars are one of the biggest killers of kids, and they're a much bigger risk in the suburbs (where most streets are wide and fast) than the city.
On the flip side, I see far more reckless driving in the city than in the burbs. Blowing lights or stop signs or excessive speeding are all more common in the city often directly in front of police. That wouldn't fly in the suburbs, and moreover people sort of expect traffic laws to be followed within reason (people still speed, but it's not normal to go 70 in a 45). Further, I have a strong suspicion that there are more hit-and-runs in the city than the suburbs. In the burbs, streets are wider and the speed limits are higher, but they have push-to-walk buttons and almost everyone stops well before the light turns red.
It does, however, support the quoted statement that (actual level of recklessness notwithstanding) cities are safer than suburbs in regards to getting hit by cars.
Depends on the city. I live in LA and we have probably the most dangerous streets in the country for pedestrians. We were the only city to see our car on soft body deaths rise after implementing vision zero.
My theory is this is a result of the traffic, ironically. You spend 2 hours out of your day commuting at 12mph at best, so the minute you have 100 yards of asphault ahead of you, many people opt to just whip to 50-60mph on 35mph roads and 25mph residential streets to savor the speed. If you hit someone at that speed, death is practically guaranteed.
The streets in LA are also ridiculously wide with few barriers and obstacles unless you get into the hills. This is a recipe for drivers speeding up, and never bodes well for bicyclists or pedestrians who don't benefit from the wider spacing when they're crossing streets or navigating intersections. In my limited experience, NYC has many narrower streets but is still problematic especially outside of Manhattan, and SF is similar in some parts.
You also are dependent on parents to go see most friends, and the amount of kids nearby will be fewer. That independence doesn’t really start until 16 when you get a car. All this to say is everything comes with trade offs.
i grew up in a rural area and appreciated the freedoms that entailed, but in no way is that the only, or best, way to develop independence in children.
what you're describing is more an indictment of poor risk assessment, that parents are paranoid and over-protective for no good reason, than some inherent difference of rural vs urban living. crime is not a serious concern anywhere, just like getting eaten by a bear is not a serious concern anywhere.
no, that's exactly the point, it's not. the risk is overblown, even considering bear country. the worldwide risk is on the order a few dozen attacks (not deaths) per year, primarily to defend their cubs, with extreme hunger being a secondary cause (bears understandably don't risk fights without good reason).
I grew up in grizzly country in Northwest Montana, spent loads of time out in the wilderness on my own or with my younger brothers, and even saw a mamma grizzly with two cubs in the wild once. They are absolutely not a serious concern.[1] We used to make fun of outsiders who feared just getting out of the car without their guns and pepper spray. :-)
[1] That being said, please don't be stupid: keep your distance and show them all due respect.
Yeah, I'd laugh at those outsiders, too. Campsites are different. Idiots leave food around, which grizzlies find, and come to expect. Then the next idiot comes around, wipes salmon grease on his pants, goes to sleep wearing those same pants, and gets eaten.
I agree with your [1] -- where you're taking the concern seriously.
When people talk about raising kids right, it always pans back to growing up in a rural area away from most people. Besides the dark skies/wilderness why is growing up in a rural area better than in a city for children?
Given that the majority of people live in a city/metropolitan area, I'll assert that my subjective opinion that growing up in a city would be better for a child than your subjective opinion that rural areas are better.
also: kids are not always staying kids. I was happy when I was a teenager that I could explore the city on my own and independent and with friends and not stuck in a (for teenager boring) rural area.
I agree with you - I think that rural life is quite empowering, but can be quite isolating as well. I also think that cities can inspire a sense of independence and self-reliance - in NYC, many middle schoolers ride the subway alone. In my apartment, we fix things ourselves, and my 6 year old already has a working understanding of plumbing and electrical. She's also been exposed to a diversity of cultures and ideas, not all of them pleasant, but all educational.
Overall, I find the suburbs to be the worst of both worlds - overprotective parents shuffling their kids in cars from scheduled activity to activity with other kids of a similar ethnic and socioeconomic background
> Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people.
Crime in rural areas today is rampant due to the opioid crisis. I don't know of a small town that hasn't been absolutely torn apart. Ironically while small town crime is way up due to opioids & heroin, it's down in large cities, about as low as rural towns in the 70s.
> If she skins her knee or gets lost, she gets to deal with it herself rather than having an adult on tap.
Tell me which kids don't have cellphones these days? All my friend's kids in rural (very rural) areas have them for "safety", and 2g-3g reaches pretty much every hollow.
Your description does not match the experiences I've had in the last 10 years, and as someone who grew up in a very rural area (~1k people/sq mi) and now lives in a very urban area (~18k people/sq mi).
Where I live in New Mexico it's closer to 10 people/sq mi. There is poor cell phone reception on some high points and none elsewhere. So I hike with a PLB. This area does have a serious drug problem but there are so few people that the threat is low. Where I typically hike I've seen maybe a half dozen people, at a distance, in a dozen years.
Just went with wikipedia's number for my hometown.
The city pop is 3k, but the county is only 16k, for an area of 450 square miles. I did not grow up in city limits, and the area was less than half the population back then.
Just was trying to give some very conservative numbers. More than happy to meet more yokels like me :)
Echoing kgermino's statement, I also live in a (small but dense) city on the East Coast, in a very walkable neighborhood where the train station is a ten minute walk away from my house. There are kids bicycling and playing outside, lots of families with dogs, all enabled because the roads are smaller and we're still a walking distance from food, hardware store, etc.
Do not confuse the singe-zoned, panopticon-esque tracts of land with nothing around but houses with small yards and not a single shred of grocery stores, points of interest or wildlife-allocated land for dozens of square miles (necessitating car travel) [1] with "living in cities." Additionally, crime goes down not just with a fewer number of people, but also with people taking ownership over their community – as you'll see in loved neighborhoods of bigger cities like New York – rather than barricading themselves inside their house and watching with suspicion any person that walks past their shuttered blinds, because in places so hostile to travel on foot, no one in their right mind walks.
In an era of continuously increasing human footprint on the planet, we should not be talking about the (environmentally and fiscally) expensive expansion of humans to the corners of the planet that remain "rural" and a respite for our Earth's natural resources. We should consider how to use properly the space we have already colonized, and we should begin with elimination of single-zoned tracts of land.
> we should begin with elimination of single-zoned tracts of land
Not everyone's needs and preferences are the same. It's great that your city meets your needs and preferences. That doesn't give you the right to impose your preferred solution on everybody else.
What do you think zoning is, if not "imposing <someone's> preferred solution on everyone else [ who might develop it ]" ?
Zoning is explicitly how communities act to stop people from doing things in with property there that a sufficiently powerful subset (hopefully a majority, but only hopefully) of the people already there don't like.
A way for individual communities to be the way the owners of those communities would like them to be. That's why different communities can be zoned different ways, i.e., one community does not get to impose its preferred way of being on everyone else.
The post I was responding to advocated abolishing single-zoned tracts of land altogether, which is a way for some people to impose their preferred solution on everyone else.
Zoning allows people that do not own land to decide what can be done with it.
That has some positive purposes ... it may indeed be a good idea not to put a toxic manufacturing facility next door to residential lots or a school. It might possibly make sense to focus retail development in a certain area within a community rather than haphazardly throughout it.
But single-dwelling has almost nothing to do with such high minded purposes, and exists almost entirely to keep higher income home owners away from lower income renters or mixed-income housing. It is, quite simply, rich people telling poor people "we don't want you here".
> Zoning allows people that do not own land to decide what can be done with it.
Land ownership, at least in every US jurisdiction I have experience in, is not that simple. Yes, technically my wife and I "own" our house and the plot of land it sits on. We have a title deed filed with the county clerk. (I'm leaving out the fact that we have a mortgage because the lien holder on the mortgage doesn't really have any rights that are relevant to this discussion; for our purposes here it would be the same if we owned the house and land free and clear.) That gives us a whole bundle of rights connected with the house and land, but it is not absolute "ownership" in the sense you appear to be using the term. The city, the county, and the state all have rights that don't go away just because someone buys the house and land; after all, they were all there long before we got there, and they all played a role in building the house and improving the land, not to mention all the infrastructure--roads, sewers, electricity, water, telephone, Internet. Our house and land aren't just sitting there in a vacuum; they are part of a community that is bigger than us and that has some ownership rights over the whole community that have to be balanced against the rights of individuals within the community.
Someone who really, really doesn't want to put up with any of that can go out to a highly rural jurisdiction and buy a plot of land that's far enough from all neighbors that they can basically do whatever they want.
> single-dwelling has almost nothing to do with such high minded purposes, and exists almost entirely to keep higher income home owners away from lower income renters or mixed-income housing.
Sorry, not buying it. You're welcome to build your own community that works the way you want it to if you don't like any existing communities. But you don't get to just declare by fiat that communities that don't work the way you prefer are evil.
I'm glad that you've outlined why property/ownership is much more complex than libertarians and conservatives typically acknowledge. I entirely agree with everything in your first paragraph, and it's all extremely important stuff.
However, I've lived in a wealthy suburban community that used single-dwelling zoning to exclude apartments, townhomes and low income housing, and this led me to do a bunch of reading about the way this zoning classification is used across the US. That reading left me with only one conclusion: it is almost entirely a classist tool, used by the wealthy to exclude everyone else. Of course, the communities that do this have lots of nice sounding justifications for it which do not sound remotely problematic. But dig a little deeper (I did, really), and I am fairly confident that it becomes completely clear what is actually going on.
> I've lived in a wealthy suburban community that used single-dwelling zoning to exclude apartments, townhomes and low income housing
I agree that such communities exist. However, that does not mean all communities that have some parts of them zoned for single-family dwellings are like that. Every community I have lived in that had portions of it zoned for single family dwellings also had townhomes and apartments, all in the same community and all within similar reach of whatever amenities were provided. (I have also been on both sides of the divide you draw, living in townhomes and living in single family homes.)
It doesn't need to be the case that every community with even one single-family dwelling zoned neighborhood has the same motivation.
As I said, it wasn't until I started reading around about this issue that I came to see how pervasive this use of the law was, and how in so many cases the motivation was reasonably easy to ascertain.
I'm not denying that conceptually speaking, such zoning could be done with purely good intent. I'm claiming that within the US, and specifically within largely white wealthy communities, it is rarely used with good intent.
> I'm claiming that within the US, and specifically within largely white wealthy communities, it is rarely used with good intent.
And your basis for this claim is your personal anecdotal experience, plus "a bunch of reading" you have done. IMO that's a pretty flimsy basis for such a sweeping claim.
This is attacking a straw man; the elimination of single-family zoning does not imply replacing that zoning with some other equally onerous requirement. Allowing students to attend school without requiring a dress code is hardly "imposing your preferred solution on everybody else".
Also, the idea that local interests should have the power to block community changes is directly responsible for many prescient issues, like the lack of housing in California causing sky-high home and rental prices. See e.g. a review of the book Golden Gates, which touches on NIMBY-ism in California: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/business/economy/housing-...
> the elimination of single-family zoning does not imply replacing that zoning with some other equally onerous requirement
Sure, it does: it explicitly says (not implies) that nobody who wants to live in a single-zoned community is allowed to any more, anywhere. That's an onerous requirement for anyone who does want to live in such a community.
> the idea that local interests should have the power to block community changes is directly responsible for many prescient issues
I think you mean "present" issues.
The problem I see is the idea that local interests should have no power to block the grandiose plans of politicians and bureaucrats who won't have to live with the results. At least in the case described in the article you linked to, the city manager, as far as I can tell, was also a resident, so he had skin in the game.
I note, btw, that the project mentioned in the article was allowed by zoning rules.
> But there are higher priorities than those, like growing better humans.
I grew up in a suburban bordering on semi-rural area, and while I do think living in a rural region certainly has it's benefits (like the ones you describe), implying it by default "grows better humans" than those living in an urban area is ridiculous.
Growing up in NYC I walked home alone, took the subway to meet friends, walked around all of manhattan a million times, etc. Most of that started around age 13-14, and as a preteen I would have my slightly older sister along with me.
At 15 I started to bike everywhere. I took my bike to the Hudson river path and I could get anywhere I wanted in 10-20 minutes - visiting a friend who lived downtown, or head up to Central Park to meet up and bike around with others, try out some diners uptown, etc.
At 16 my friends and I would walk around the east side, walking for miles in the middle of the night.
I don't think it was negligent at all, but I felt extremely independent because I could get anywhere as a kid without needing a car. I've always found that growing up in a city that felt safe and had great public transportation made me extremely independent at an early age.
For even more context to this: when you're a child in NYC, the public school system gives you a free MetroCard as soon as you start elementary school. They're meant to be for commuting, but they have a small enough eligibility radius and extra rides to make them generally useful. Once I got one (I was maybe 8 or 9) I was more or less independent, as were all of my childhood friends.
This is in stark contrast to people I befriended in college, who were (1) largely reliant on their parents for socialization and exploration until they were old enough to drive, and (2) incapable of handling the general mishegass that happens in urban environments without me as their tour guide. This doesn't make them bad people or dependent in some profoundly handicapping way; it just goes to show that a frontiersman's notion of "independence" is perhaps not the most interesting one in 2020.
Oh hell yeah. Those cards were like little slices of plastic magic. Every once in a while someone would lose one, or claim to lose it, and you could snag the extra and get yourself anywhere from an extra 3 to 6 rides, and with free transfers that basically meant you could be anywhere any time for free.
I went to school upstate and it was impossible to get around without a car. Everyone was totally reliant on them, and I guess as kids you were always beholden to whoever was licensed/ had a car. To me that's insane, we could get anywhere for free, whenever.
Yep! I seem to recall the MetroCards claiming to only have three daily rides on them, but actually working at least four or five times (presumably as a margin of error/safety for lost kids). I used mine more than once to ditch school and take the D out to Coney Island :-)
Two of my kids got to see the before/after of this sort of thing when we took them to Berlin for a semester (I was guest lecturing at the TU). Since they had to take the S/U-Bahn to get to school, we got them monthly passes that let them go anywhere, anytime "for free". For a 14 and 17 year old, I think it seemed like heaven. The older one would go to nightclubs and come home at 03:00 and we weren't worried about drunk driving etc. The younger one could explore the whole city (hello, Dolores Burritos!) with her friends, or go to Idea to get art supplies, without us.
Getting back to Philadelphia where everything collapsed back to "Dad, can you drive me to ..." was depressing for everyone I think.
Same. I bicycled around my neighborhood with friends when I was I think 10 without any real oversight. I'm guessing some adults kept watch either outside or from windows when we played on our block but we could roam further out on our own.
Yeah, but you had to grow up in a constant cloud of pee smell .
It amazes me how much this doesn't seem to bother people. New York smells like pee. Everywhere. I've only been a few times, but it has always smelled like pee. I don't feel like "all three times I went, everywhere smelled like pee" really deserves anymore chances when no other place I have ever visited or lived has ever smelled like pee, with the exception of a dirty horse barn. Is all of New York a dirty horse barn?
Maybe New Yorkers just like it? I mean, it has to be that. Because nothing in New York is all that great, such that you'd put up with the constant smell of pee.
I'll have you know that Central Park smells like manure, not pee. The rest of the city smells like hot trash, but only in the summer ;)
Joking aside: NYC has a lot of smells, but human urine isn't actually one I pick up all that often (except for sometimes in the subway). As for why anybody would live here: it's one (maybe the most important) of the world's cultural nexuses, as well as the most thoroughly developed urban environment in the United States. Those are sufficient draws for many people.
I mean there are a billion reasons to live there, and I don't even live there anymore. Amazing museums, public transportations, entertainment, restaurants, and parks are some of the universal ones. If you're lucky enough to be well off you then gain access to some other amazing things, such as some top tier private schools.
Last time I hung out in Chelsea I was surprised at how tolerant the residents were of the trash stacked on the street in the heat of the summer. I was staying at a small “normal” place that I’m sure was a least 2 million dollars, and it was, just odd how this amount of trash everywhere was normal.
It's absurd how they tolerate that and pay the highest rent in the country for the privilege of having a swarm of rats scatter when they walk past the trash heap at night. No other city in the country just leaves waste in a pile unprotected on the side of the road like NYC. I don't understand why they don't at least have a god damn huge bin like any other first world city if it's going to be a pile of trash anyway on the sidewalk day in day out. It's downright medieval and I don't understand how it isn't a public health crisis having so many rats so close to eating and living.
Part of the problem is that Manhattan at least basically doesn't have alleys. BTW, if you think things are bad now, don't do any time traveling back to the 1970s/80s.
I don't know what to tell you lol it doesn't actually smell like pee. I lived there for over 20 years. Also NYC has amazing pizza, it sounds like you might just have really bad opinions.
Depending on how much energy you’re willing to invest in exploring and what your preferences are, it might take you a while to find the slice of NYC that’s appealing to you. Everyone’s different, but NYC definitely has something for everyone.
I’ve lived in NYC for almost seven years, and I’m just starting to feel comfortable. Not because I’ve changed too much, but because I now know what I like, what I don’t like, and how to seek out the former and avoid the latter.
It helps if you have friends who have already lived there for a long time, and who have similar interests, they’ll be able to short circuit you. Otherwise I’d recommend knowing yourself and researching, in that order.
The places that are most well known are the places with the biggest marketing budgets. (you mentioned Broadway). Most New Yorkers avoid those like the plague, fwiw. They’re built for people for whom money is not limiting factor to hedonism.
That's valid, but of course everyone is different. It took me a while. Others get lucky and feel comfortable right away.
I wasn't meaning to imply that most people take as long as I do.
DC and NYC are geared towards different people, and that's OK. pg has written nice food for thought on this topic. http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html
Good pizza, but if there is a bar in walking distance you will be smelling pee. All my visits come with that ripe smell. I get that in DTLA too. It's just what happens when you have people drinking and no public restroom infrastructure to speak of. Maybe you are noseblind, or it's been a few since you've been on the bar scene in manhattan, but the piss smell is very real especially during hot summer nights.
I mean, if you walk around you will maybe smell pee sometimes? But saying the city "smells like pee" kind of implies that it's pervasive, contrasted with "outside of bars, at night, you might spell pee" (something I've never experience by the way).
NYC smells bad and the trash situation in Manhattan is straight out of the middle ages. That being said, I found New Orleans to have far worse smells. Something about how they do their trash there is even more degenerate than Manhattan. Imagine a little 5x5 alcove cut into the wall with a dumpster full of fried fish grease that hasn't been hosed out since Katrina. It was brutal. The entire city is a health code violation in any state but Louisiana. It straight up made me lightheaded sometimes in the french quarter, just putrid rank smells permeating the humid air with no breeze pushing it anywhere.
What advice do you have for raising a kid in a city in this day and age? My biggest concern is all the addicts in my city. Some 60k live on the street, certainly many are working and are invisible, but the most visible of the unhoused are certainly concerning and have put myself on edge a few times riding pubic transportation, being personally accosted, watching fights break out over nothing due to someone being mentally unstable making eye contact with another person, seeing knives pulled on the train and being trapped in the car until the next station. I worry that if I let my child out and about unsupervised like this that they would be targeted as an easy mark for what little they happen to carry on them by desperate people looking to feed their addiction, because I know adults who've experienced this simply due to appearing vulnerable and alone. The kids I do see on public transit and on the sidewalk are typically shuttled around by their grandparents, or in a pack with a half dozen other kids. Maybe I'll teach them to use my skateboard so they'd at least have a blunt object like I do when I am out and about by myself on transit.
I don't know about your city, so it depends. I wouldn't feel the same way I did in SF, for example.
In NYC you learn quickly what's safe and what's not. I was taught that, at a very early age. You learn how to spot the difference between someone who's homeless and someone who's dangerous. You learn to be aware of your surroundings, you learn to duck into places like shops if you think someone is following you, etc.
It sounds awful listing it out like that, but those were just what we learned growing up. It was just how we took care of ourselves.
One of my favorite games was to catch African chameleons, and run around with them on my finger, pointing them at flies.
That's a game that you won't find too easily in the US.
But it was really dangerous. We had some very nasty snakes, thereabout, half the bugs could give you bites that would take a month to heal, and violent crime was quite prevalent. I learned to be quite careful.
I survived. Not sure I'd want to put my kids through the same risks, but my parents didn't seem to have a problem with it (good or bad? I dunno. They were quite fascinating people, in their own right).
It did give me a unique perspective, though. In my mind, I'm glad to have had it.
A finger mounted tonguegun? Kid me would've loved it! (Adult me too!) Best thing I could manage was a two handed digger (holding a Guinea pig just above the ground).
My wife & I talk occasionally about an interview we read of some tribal group, I believe in Africa. A kid is exploring a machete. The westerner asks a woman why she isn't stopping the kid. She explains machetes are quite sharp, so the kid will either quickly learn to be careful- or be removed from the gene pool (paraphrasing).
It answered a lot of questions we hadn't been able to answer previously. (Mainly revolving around how difficult parenting still is, even with all our modern miracles)
>Yeah, it's harder to get a ride share, and you can't work in an office in the city without a very long commute. But there are higher priorities than those, like growing better humans
Pretty ridiculous statement here.
So, the kids I knew in college who grew up in rural areas all said a lot of their peers (and sometime them) got (sometimes heavily) involved in drugs/alcohol because "there was nothing else to do."
>Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people.
Disagree completely, I believe there is safety in numbers and the community mostly watches out for kids. (Personal experience here)
> At age ten I would hop on my little stingray bike and explore for a dozen miles in any direction.
My experience was very different, my subdivision was hemmed in by freeways and expressways on most sides. Going anywhere required a ride from an adult.
This is the kind of subtle change in society that I can't describe.
As a kid, at my uncle place in the country side, we used to take bikes with my cousin and go whatever. Far away, unattended, no phone (hell, I don't think that house had a landline at the time).
Nowadays it feels a fantasy novel about another galaxy.
I grew up in the city and explored the city freely. The issue here is not the landscape, it is that definition of "acceptable parenting" moved on absurdly.
And frankly, rural kids are not more independent. Also, the "skins her knee" thing is strawman. Kids who are small enough to need that adult on tap are not exploring forest alone (say 5 years old). And at the age where rural kids explore forest with dog alone and it is fine for them to get lost, they don't get taps in city either.
I mean the independence thing very seriously, even you see the same age kid going in city alone as unfanthomable, but even now, they actually do.
Even you encourage everyone to move to the countryside (as you do for example by subsidizing car use), you destroy the very things you like about the country: cleaner air, dark skies, wilderness all around.
It’s generally true that you have two options—you pay a big capital cost for a chunk of capacity which is available to you whenever you need it, or you pay operational costs for renting as you go. This applies to guest rooms, cars, and computers.
The maxims aren’t very good. “Don’t pay for something you don’t use” is weak advice, because sometimes it’s cheaper long-term to pay for unused capacity than it is to pay for usage when you need it. And this all gets muddled to hell as soon as you factor in the opportunity costs. Each option has a different amount of risk.
“You’re paying for 5% usage, 100% of the time” is just not a solid foundation for making these decisions.
There are situations where it makes sense. If you don't particularly want a pickup truck for other reasons, don't buy one because you might want to pickup a load of mulch or a tree in the spring. Rent a truck at the home improvement store for an hour or pay for delivery.
But the vast bulk of the things I own and don't use on a daily or even weekly basis are things that would either be a hassle to rent or pay for as a service, would end up costing more using them that way, or simply aren't practically available at all as a rental item.
I think convenience is the hidden cost here. No one is going to bother renting a car to move some dirt. They would pay for it to be delivered however because thats even easier than picking it up yourself and the savings from having a smaller car make it cheaper too.
> Your computer is probably 95% idle. Just saying.
On that point, my next machine will be in the cloud. 32 GB laptops cost around $1,500. For the same cost I can buy 6,250 hours on a VPS ($.24 / hr) which is three years' working-hours use. It's even cheaper if I only need all 32 GB for a fraction of the time.
In return I get zero risk of theft, zero risk of hardware faults, zero capital outlay. The best part is that I can try it for a month for $10[1] and if I don't like it I can revert to the status quo!
Not that long ago, I provisioned a VM for myself and started doing some development there. I wanted to compile a fairly large project, so I stopped the VM, changed it to a much larger instance (32 CPUs, 128 GB memory) and ran make -j32.
The build finished ten or fifteen minutes later, and I swapped it back out for a smaller instance. It’s nice.
The principle seems fine (if you don't use something much then the overhead of renting when you do need it is probably worthwhile), but it feels a bit odd applying it to cars in particular unless you live extremely close to work -- a bit of a moot point with wfh right now -- since you'll be using the car enough that your dominant costs are variable rather than fixed. If 50% of your yearly car ownership costs stem from gas and other variable costs then "paying for the 95%" is a strawman since the variable costs won't decrease by renting a car (and in fact are often many times higher), so you can only reduce your total costs by at most a 2x factor.
After 4 years of city living we recently bought a SUV. It was purely emotional and just like the author mentioned the numbers don't work out. But I wanted to treat myself after years car-free living. Since COVID lockdown has started I would say public transportation in my city has become more reliable, and free. Given this change and more time working from home I have even less need of a car.
All this free time at home had me thinking of roadtrips, boon docking, overlanding, and camping. So I bought a European 4WD SUV. Basically a money pit in fuel, maintenance, parts and reliability. Financially, it doesn't make sense. But all the money I didn't pay in car loans, maintenance, fuel, and tolls went to saving for a car I truly wanted.
For me, buying a car makes as much sense as buying a gaming PC. It should be something you really want and willing to spend money on. If you need a car for work, get the cheapest one you can and factor the mileage into your salary. I've turned down many offers with small pay bumps simply because the expense of the commute made the salary bump a net negative.
kind of a tangent, but I'd argue gaming PCs aren't uneconomic unless you also need a laptop. a decent laptop with a 1TB ssd is already around $1500. with that kind of money you can buy or build a desktop that thoroughly outclasses even the newest generation of consoles.
obviously that doesn't work if you really need a personal laptop, but how many people fit this criteria? I only use my laptop a week or two out of the year when I go on vacation. I'd probably get more out of vacation if I left the thing at home anyway.
I lived like this for a while, both in Hong Kong and in Los Angeles, with two kids. There's a sense to it.
But what's not discussed in this article is the friction of this sort of lifestyle. The time when you couldn't get the rideshare when you needed it. The time lost using less efficient public transport. The hassle you go through every time you need to do... anything.
And as the children get older? Well, the lifestyle gets old too.
Don't pay for what you don't need and won't use. I agree. Just keep in mind you're paying for more than just the few minutes you're actually in a car.
I rented a mini van once for a road trip over a national holiday. I got to the rental office, was in line for an hour, and then they told me it was no longer available. Not even a sorry. Drove our two cars instead.
It takes 15 minutes each way to the nearest Home Depot to rent gardening tools and another 20 minutes in line. Then factor the drive back, and the return trip and it adds up to to 100
minutes of my time. Also, if you are using the tool more than a couple of times, it’s probably cheaper to buy. The only things that make sense to rent are specialized, expensive tools.
Guest bedrooms can be used for many things. If you are sick, you can isolate yourself to prevent other people in the household from getting sick. You can have actual guests over and you don’t have to drive them to/from and get to spend more time with them.
Whenever CalTrain breaks down, Uber prices surge. You either wait 30 minutes or pay quadruple prices. SamTrans will make you wait for the bus that comes every half an hour.
So the pluses are availability, reliability, optionality, and lowered transactional cost.
The author is essentially advocating a low-margin lifestyle. There is little spare capacity or other tolerances engineered into their choices. They may have cash in the bank, but they don't have any reserves of interior space, exterior space, or transit capacity. Instead, they rely entirely on being able to acquire that on-demand.
That works out most of the time, but it's a risk. And, like any other risk, it needs to be planned for, and it carries its own emotional and experiential weight.
This isn't life optimisation, it's putting cost optimisation over happiness.
Having a yard/garden with kids is wounderful, open the back door and shove them outside without shoes to play for accessible easy outdoor time.
Half the fun of Friends staying over in the guest room is when you can have a few drinks and everyone relaxes knowing no one is traveling. The next morning you can all have breakfast together.
Car shares are great for going to the shops on Tuesday, getting a car for Christmas when you want to see family is a different ballgame.
This is also a perspective I could have much more easily bought into pre-COVID.
We have kids, and live in a rural area, and honestly, many summers, don't get a ton of use out of our property and home because we spend most our free time and income on travel. Generally, we're gone at least 2-weekends a month on car trips, fly away for a few weekends a year, and try to fit in 1-2 international trips as well.
Obviously, all that's changed in the last year.
With COVID, we've felt incredibly lucky to live in a rural area where our kids were able to spend basically all summer just "playing outside." No need to interact with other people on mass-transit. No shared elevators or public spaces.
When we did start socializing a bit, it was very nice to have a nice private, outdoor space to (more) safely entertain our guests in.
COVID is hopefully a very temporary, one-time event. But it has changed my perspective.
Still, while I agree that the article takes optimization to sort of silly lengths, I do see a solid point behind it.
I apply the same philosophy to boats, RVs, vacation-homes and the like. (Though, I admit that COVID has tested my resolve there a bit). Expensive investments that aren't really going to make sense unless you're using them far more than our family would. Plus, with any major purchase like that, you're "locked-in" to doing that one thing if you're trying to maximize the value of your investment.
Buy a vacation home, and you're going to have a mental barrier going on vacation somewhere else. Buy a boat, and you're going to feel like you're wasting money when you spend a week of vacation somewhere besides a lake.
>Buy a vacation home, and you're going to have a mental barrier going on vacation somewhere else.
I would probably agree with OPs sentiment in the context of vacation homes. They're not necessarily a great investment. They sort of lock you into a location. They're another thing you have to manage. And so forth. I'd much rather just get a hotel room, a B&B, etc.
I've even thought of buying a small place in the city. First of all, I'm really glad I didn't do that in the last year or two. But, really, while I wish I had done it 10 years ago knowing what I know now about property values, I also don't miss having another property to manage and I can always get a hotel if I want to spend a weekend in town every now and then.
This is, in turn, where AirBnB and companies like it add value to the world.
There are some really bleak effects on affordability in urban areas, but for someone who owns a vacation home they use two or three weeks out of the year, it's great: employ someone local to handle keys and cleaning, cover mortgage/taxes, maintenance, and maybe enough profit that you don't feel so bad going somewhere else once in a while.
In turn, someone like me can rent it! The best of my experiences with AirBnB have been this exact sort of rental, while the worst were situations where I discovered that the rental was illegal.
The only problem with AirBnB in high cost of living cities is that it gobbles up supply zoned for housing and uses it for ostensibly commercial purposes, which hurts the people living there who might have had the chance of signing a lease for that vacant apartment you don't use. Instead it goes to people looking to save $30 a night on a hotel.
in 2019 (i.e. before covid), I threw a party at my centrally located, but also quite small, 1 br apartment. Had some friends in from out of town and put them up at a hipster boutique hotel 3 blocks from my apt. They hung out at my place for as long as they wanted, stumbled back to the hotel when they were done, and retreated to privacy of their own hotel room. We all walked to breakfast the next day.
The way the math works out is that I would be able to pay for three nights per month in that hotel for the difference between a 1br and a 2br in my building.
I don't think everyone reading this article needs to shoehorn their own situation into the analysis, but for me it makes a ton of sense. I kind of want a 2br, but I really wouldn't use the space that often and I have excellent alternatives.
As someone living in a 1br, I'm not sure how you aren't constantly pining for the 2br like me. It would change so much. Right now my living room houses my hobbies, my job, my tv, my dining room, my gym, and my couch where I can fit 1 friend awkwardly sleeping with their legs sticking out the end. A second bedroom would become the office, the gym, the guest room, the music room, and would free up my living room for, well, living.
I dream of that day, but I don't expect to see it for another 4-5 years at least given the nature of the beast in this field in this city.
My father summarizes this concept by saying that if you consider the actual usage time, a prostitute is way more cost-effective than a wife, and still it just isn't the same thing.
That depend on whether he interacts with his wife only for sex. There are obviously many other tasks a wife can do, which could require hiring the prostitute for basically all waking hours, and that's not even getting into the misalignment of interests with a freelancer versus having a partner. I think the proper comparison for rent-versus-buy should be a girlfriend versus a wife.
A slightly more polite way of putting that would be that sex with your spouse is incidental, the reason for the relationship, is the relationship. A prostitute can't provide that.
I think it goes beyond the relationship, as a marriage is a commingling of finances and legal rights. A marriage is a common way to achieve pooling of resources and division of labor, with a long-term outlook for the benefit of all parties. Not the most romantic way of looking at it, but this must be taken into account as unaligned goals for the above are the most common reasons that marriages fail.
This is a fine argument for simplifying your life, but it is not a good economic argument.
Hotels are expensive. Rental cars and Uber are expensive.
If you even take a few Uber trips a month, you're probably better off owning an affordable car.
If you have visitors regularly, you should probably buy a house with that extra bedroom. It's an asset that you can sell and recoup virtually 100% of your investment later on. You can't sell all the hotel rooms you've previously rented.
Having a yard turned out to be a fantastic thing to own this year since parks were all forced closed. Trust that you will always have access to that local green space (and that it will be safe and accessible) turned out to be misplaced.
> If you have visitors regularly, you should probably buy a house with that extra bedroom. It's an asset that you can sell and recoup virtually 100% of your investment later on. You can't sell all the hotel rooms you've previously rented.
if you're buying a house, it probably makes sense to get one more room than you typically need. like you say, it's likely that you recoup the cost at the end anyway. if you're renting, it's a little different. a decent hotel room is $100-200 a night in most cities. that's not cheap, but having one extra bedroom probably adds at least that much to your monthly rent.
I argued in a different post that a hotel room isn't necessarily a substitute for a spare room. it's a much less intimate way to entertain visitors. depending on the guest, that could be a pro or a con.
A hotel room also isn’t a substitute because it can’t be used as flex space. The pandemic has many of us wishing for dedicated home office space, an extra room serves that purpose. It can also serve as a home gym and hobby project space, sometimes all at once.
> If you even take a few Uber trips a month, you're probably better off owning an affordable car.
My wife and I live in the city and downsized from two cars to zero after doing the math last year. Granted your definition of "a few" might be different from mine, but it takes way more than my definition of a few rides to break even.
If you ask someone to itemize the costs of car ownership, they tend to miss or underestimate a few. The big ones are insurance and depreciation. I am confident that my total rideshare costs over the past year are less than just the difference between my city insurance premium and my suburb premium on the same used car, and my record is spotless. The math is surprising. (Any cost of ownership estimate or calculator I share here can be reasonably challenged, so try it with your own numbers.)
This isn't to speak of the other costs and risks of non-ownership. Every situation is different. We are lucky to have subsidized public transportation passes, corporate discounts on rentals, walkable commutes, grocery stores in every direction, etc.
> If you ask someone to itemize the costs of car ownership, they tend to miss or underestimate a few. The big ones are insurance and depreciation. I am confident that my total rideshare costs over the past year are less than just the difference between my city insurance premium and my suburb premium on the same used car, and my record is spotless. The math is surprising.
I did this exact analysis on my car some years ago, after 5 years of ownership. I took into account all repairs/maintenance, purchase price, depreciation, insurance, gas, city fees and parking (yes, I keep track of all those expenses).
It came out to $288.77/month.
In reality, it was a bit less, given that 2 years later someone wrecked my car and their insurance paid more than it was worth (with no major repairs in those 2 years).
I then bought a much, much cheaper used car (about same value as my old one when it was wrecked), so the cost would be significantly less what I show above ($100 out of that $288.77 was just depreciation).
Depreciation seems to be the major cost, and my car was fairly used (8 years old when I bought it, but low on miles). Don't buy a used car for more than $10K - mine was less and you can still see the amount of depreciation! A lot of people think they're beating the game by buying a 2-3 year old used car, but the depreciation will still be really high. Of course, you can get good cars for under $4K, but it may be risky to go long distance in those.
Of course, the other trick is to get a reliable car. Pick only models with good histories (buy the Consumer Reports guide as one reference for this), and do a buyer's check before buying it. If you go to a used car lot and they don't let you do that check, then refuse to buy it.
The people for whom the advice of "buy a 2-4 year old certified pre-owned car" makes economic sense are the ones who are otherwise buying a new car. There are a ton of people who seem to default to "I'm buying new" for whatever reason.
I've had excellent savings (and frankly, minimal hassle) from buying an 8-year old Mercedes diesel with 180K on it, a 7-year old Honda CR-V with 165K on it, and a 7-year old Alfa Spider with 24k on it in my younger days. The Mercedes was bullet-proof but painted with an eco-friendly paint system that ensured they prematurely rusted (oh, the irony of taking a perfectly functional car off the road to save the pla). The Alfa I sold running well with 125K on it a few years back as we were planning to have kids. The Honda is still my SO's daily driver with around 215K on it.
I do my own wrenching on the cars, which also keeps the costs down, but even if I paid an independent (non-dealer) mechanic to do everything, decent cars just don't break that much any more. (The Alfa was extremely reliable. From 1993-2009, it broke exactly once and that was the failure of a Bosch distributor, nothing to do with the Italian heritage. The Mercedes took no major work over that time. The Honda did need a clutch which was $750 in parts and would have been around $1000 in labor.)
Not feeling the need to carry collision insurance is another big money saver.
> The people for whom the advice of "buy a 2-4 year old certified pre-owned car" makes economic sense are the ones who are otherwise buying a new car. There are a ton of people who seem to default to "I'm buying new" for whatever reason.
a lot of people just want the shiniest new thing they can get a loan for. I do think there are some legitimate reasons for buying new/CPO though. a lot of people (somewhat frivolously) plan to own a car for about five years, so buying new/CPO leaves the car in its original warranty for the majority of the time they own it. this probably isn't better economically, but knowing that a) cars are less likely to break during warranty, and b) the dealership will fix it for free if it does might be worth it for the peace of mind. there are some cars (mostly cheap performance cars) that I simply wouldn't consider buying used out of fear of what the previous owner may have done to it.
somewhat of a tangent, but I was looking at a couple online TCO calculators recently. not sure how they do their calculations (or how accurate they are), but I got some very surprising results. for all the models I was considering buying, the five year TCO was almost the same for CPO as it was for new, only lower by a few percentage points.
Articles about how most people are doing it wrong or optimizing for the wrong thing always leave me wondering who they are trying to convince, me or themselves.
The big question this doesn't get into is: what do you want to have available instantly, with no acquisition cost beyond "remembering where you keep it"? What do you want to be able to customize perfectly to your needs?
As an example of the latter: I've tried bikeshares but they just made me long for my own bike: they're all too low for me, they usually have three gears at best, they have hard-to-move solid tires, the cargo area is usually in the front instead of my preference of the back. The cheap, beat-up seven-speed I own is a lot more fun to ride on.
I love my roadbike, but it's not always convenient to deal with the shackles of ownership of said bike. It's like having a car in the sense that you need to think about where you can put it and take it with you when you leave. If you go out drinking, the bike has to stay home. If you go to the airport, the bike has to stay home. If you take it on the train, you are 'that guy' taking up three grandmothers worth of standing space with your bike and causing a disruption as people give you zero time of day to deal with maneuvering your bike up and down escalators. If you take it on the bus, everyone on the bus gets pissed that you are making them late for work securing the bike to the front of the bus, and in my city sometimes busses are ambushed at red lights for the bikes mounted in the front so it's not a great spot security wise.
On the other side, with the bike share, I don't care about what happens to the bike after I'm done with it. Someone could rip it apart for scrap money or throw it into a river for all I care. Me finding another one in working order is trivial, compared to replacing my stolen bicycle. Plus many of them are electric so I can do it in a full suit.
I WFH so I only use my car once per two weeks (to get groceries). My SO doesn't WFH, and hers is more comfortable so we use that when we go most places. My car is 17 years old, but only has 100K on it. Runs great. Low maintenance, so I keep it knowing that if I need it it is there. But, I can afford that luxury partly because there's no care payment and the insurance isn't tremendous.
The guest bedroom makes for a decent storage space
A yard has aesthetic value and you might be living in an area like greater NY metro area where land is worth more than the house built on it, so it's going to make financial sense down the line.
The perspective of the author doesn't seem to come from the same background and experiences as many of the people reading the article, especially since the comparisons of the decisions they made to the "normal" are based on a very strange normal. That's fine, but it might be nice to get a sense of where they come from and what type of lifestyle their social group is living. Looks like "modo" is a canadian service - maybe canada is wildly different from the US but at least from my brief visits to metro areas in that country a significant portion of the lifestyle for the people I met in the toronto area seemed to be a lot like your typical american urban/suburban lifestyle in the US. I guess I just don't recognize the people "paying for the other 95" since I can't imagine anyone buying housing in an urban area with condos and public transit and parks that also sees property land area as purely recreational space instead of a financial investment, or people with young children that can't afford a 50k car that would think it makes more sense to rent out a minivan everytime they need to take the kids anywhere rather than get a 10 year old odyssey that'll keep running for 10 more. And I certainly can't imagine anyone that would decide to get a smaller house without a guest bedroom for financial reasons and then be so magnanimous that they're willing to pay for their friends hotel's when they visit! If they're not visiting to hang out with me at my place, why am I paying for their vacation? I wouldn't expect them to pay for mine!
That was a sort of odd touch for me. Mind you, I obviously don't know the details--maybe an old friend that he knew didn't have much money. But, yeah, I'd consider an offered guest room a nice offer but I'd never expect someone to offer to pay for a hotel if they didn't have the room.
The other people's reactions were also odd - the first reaction to hearing someone say they'll pay for a hotel instead of buy a house with a guest room is discuss the cost of the hotel? Is that just a Canadian thing I don't know about? It sounds like the friend group also all share the same idea that you are expected to provide for lodging when a friend visits. The only context where that sort of obligation even slightly makes sense to me is if your parents are visiting.
The funny thing to that reply is that it's my dad who feels really strongly about paying for accommodations if I or my brother visit him. But, yeah, absent some serious wealth disparity it seems weird and, even then, it would probably be something I'd throw off with a line like "I have more credits at that hotel than I know what to do with" or something like that to avoid anyone being embarassed.
A fifth wheel costs about $35,000. Many of my neighbors have models that cost $50,000+. You need to factor in renting out the campsite for a week, fuel to tow your camper there (it might be 100-200 miles away), and the fact that you need a large pickup truck to do the towing.
You could rent a lot of hotels for that kind of money, or rent a cabin to stay in, and drive there in your car. "Roughing it" seems expensive.
Note that you said 100-200 miles away. If you are driving much longer than that the cost of gas to pull it vs a mini-van is probably more than a hotel + restaurant meals. (depending on how expensive your tastes are). Maybe it works out if you have a luxury camper (read would splurge on the expensive hotel rooms), like to cook your own meals, don't drive too far every day. There is a reason most campers don't got very far from home: they need a lot of fuel.
Having had a RV (which I lived in all summer - I didn't move it), and done real tent camping I object to calling any form of RV roughing it. I've been 10 hours be canoe from the nearest car before (it took us a full week - I've talked to some who did the same trip in a long day which is where the time estimate comes from), I know what roughing it means, and a RV isn't it.
my sister and her husband lived out of an over an over cab camper for, literally, years. From San Diego to Montana to Alaska. She was working medical jobs in San Diego and parking in the RV parks. Saved a ton of money.
While I do agree somewhat with this article, keep in mind that ownership of things results in different realized costs. Owning a house is a very different cost than owning a car, not only in terms of longevity but usage and storage. The fact I don't have a place to "store" my house does not affect the resale value, compared to that of a car that was only stored in a garage.
If you want to maximize value of something, finding alternative uses for that item usually results in lower cost of ownership. My yard currently has about 200 square feet of garden in it, which provides a substantial amount of food to eat, at no additional cost than the water and minimal gardening supplies to keep it going. My kids can also use the yard, along side my garden, maximizing value. Once my house is paid off, my yard has a realized cost of close to zero. Friends can setup a tent in the yard with an air mattress instead of needing a guest room.
That fancy mini-van? I can also be the person that rents that out as a potential income source. Suddenly, something that was a liability is now a revenue stream, and I still have the convenience of using it basically whenever I want.
Most things you'll find you use only 5% of the time you own them, but their cost is low so they get no mention or attention. Other things are stupid to justify in terms of financial costs. Kids are expensive, and looking at them as an asset or a liability is laughable.
Instead of figuring out the percentage of time the item will be used, try and instead maximize value from it. Split the cost of a lawn mower with your neighbor. Rent out your car on a car-share app. Car pool to school and work. When trying to purchase a big item, try and figure out what you really need, and fight your ego. Can you buy it used? Is a specific color really worth thousands of dollars? Life isn't something that can be explained through an algorithm, don't try and run every decision through it.
Not noted in the article that usage of car share, hotel rooms, and parks are all already highly correlated with local conventions for work holidays.
Sure, you can get an easy car share 95% of the time, but the 5% of the time that you actually need one is also the same 5% of the time that everyone else in the city needs one -- the long weekend when everybody wants to head out to the countryside. Likewise hotel rooms and the facilities in parks. So you may need to plan waaaaaaaaay ahead if you depend on access to these shared resources.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 327 ms ] threadIn many suburbs for example it's common to need the car to do basically anything.
The US used to have corner stores and fairly walkable places, but it's something you find in the older parts of towns and cities, and it may have decayed since it wasn't prioritized much for many years.
Notice above I qualified it with Europe or Asia. If you go to South America, or Africa odds are even the city you are going to doesn't have good transit for most people. (A handful are building, but there are lot of cities that could have good transit that don't have it)
I was born in a small city in Spain where most people still need a car to go to work, do groceries, go to a restaurant, etc.
Visit the slums of Mumbai, or the shanty towns of Lagos, or the favelas of Lima. These may be high density, but they're certainly not "walkable". Either in the sense of being pedestrian friendly or having many services easily accessible by walking/public transport.
There's a reason that the motorbike is one of the most popular consumer products for middle income countries. In the vast majority of the third world, the populace is desperate for any sort of personal motor transportation.
As for vehicles, I have a mid-sized or so SUV and sometimes I transport people but I often transport stuff from the home improvement store, etc. I have no interest in owning a small vehicle and then have to rent on a semi-regular basis.
And, yes, I own tons of stuff that doesn't get used much. But most of that stuff can't be easily rented or borrowed for the times I need it. Should I rent an electric drill or a weed whacker every time I need one? There have been whole business models based on this idea but they ignore the transaction costs.
There's monetary and temporal costs. Instead of having to spend minutes to an hour to arrange and get a rental, you could have the item waiting in another room, ready to be used.
I think this one is not quite like the others. if you only need a car for one week each year, you don't lose much by renting. but putting your friends in a hotel is not really a substitute for having them stay at your place imo. if I only get to see a close friend once a year, I want to make the most of the time that they're in town, cooking breakfast together, staying up talking until we can't keep our eyes open, etc. it's really not the same if a day of hanging out starts and ends with transit to/from a hotel.
I agree on the car if you're really only using it for a trip or two a year. (Indeed, I wouldn't even consider owning a car in that case. I probably would if I were going away a couple weekends a month though.)
Couch surfing is also a perfectly reasonable alternative.
If you either determine that you use that car a ton, or you do the math, work out exactly how often you'd need that car, and what the costs are for the nearest viable alternative solution, and the car's TCO is cheaper - great. You did what this post is trying to tell you to do: Stop thinking about an unattainable hypothetical 'I shall be using this at maximum usage all the time', and start thinking about what you actually need, and how often you'd need it.
Perhaps the lesson to learn is simply judge and balance your own unique situation to your needs, and drink a large cup of stfu when it comes to judging others for what their needs are rather than push your own choices/agenda upon others?
It could also be buying that DSLR camera for going photographing twice a year instead of renting for these occasions, or buying that 3000$ workstation to play games that require that power once a month instead of going to a net cafe (or using Stadia or whatever).
You could drive somewhere 15 minutes away and back, twice per day, and still be under 5%.
The car-agnostic ideal won't work outside of major cities. The backbone of America is car travel. People outside cities have more space and more stuff. They expect hauling and utility function in their vehicles. This isn't changing.
Maybe if you can convince suburbanites to downsize, you might have a point. But that's also a city-centric viewpoint imposed by limited space and desire to move easily. Neither of those things are desired in the suburbs.
City dwellers don't get it because they don't live that life.
Price difference between smaller car and larger car: $15000
Lifetime of car: 8 years
Frequency the larger car is needed: once per month
Additional time to pick up and drop off rental: 3 hours
Money saved per hour: $52
So it seems that if someone values their time more than ~$50/hour, they should buy the larger vehicle.
Edit: Forgot to take into account the rental fee: $150
Money saved per hour: $2
It looks like it doesn't make sense to rent, as buying would allow the convenience of using the larger vehicle any time, especially if it is more than once a month.
And I think most people would trade an hour driving for $50.
You can add "additional time to park in the city because you have a big-ass car" to your calculations :)
I doubt those in the suburbs will have any trouble parking. That's a city problem.
Sure, anecdotal, not perfectly scientific or even at a good enough scale... but I don't really believe the 10% idea. I'd love to see where their scientific data is on that.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1040-july...
https://nhts.ornl.gov/
Let's say 10,000 miles a year, 30 MPG for small car and 15 MPG for large car, and $3/gallon gas. That give an extra $1000 in gas per year for the large car, or an extra $83 per month if a large car is needed once a month, or $28/hour saved for the inconvenience of the hours spent picking up and dropping off the rental.
Either way, the delta is much smaller than what I was expecting, in the range of a couple of hundred a month at the high end, depending on which way the numbers swing. It can be something that's not worth worrying about, for someone who has a middle class income.
FWIW, 15 MPG would be low for my F150. A Volvo wagon gets 25 MPG, for example. This ain't the 70s :).
I have a mid-sized car, and I go to Tahoe 3-4 times a year, and probably end up being the driver 2 or 3 of those times. For me, it makes sense to rent a 4WD/AWD SUV with snow tires for those 2 or 3 winter trips, especially since I'll split the cost of the rental among the friends who ride with me.
There's also the comfort/style/happiness factor: I like my car and generally don't like driving big bulky vehicles that are high off the ground; having an SUV as my primary vehicle would make me unhappy.
Maybe. Maybe not. The point is to do the exercise for your use case. If it costs you 1.5 hours and rental fees to get a minivan and you need it once a year, that's one side of the scale. On the other side you have purchase, insurance, maintenance, depreciation, storage and fuel costs.
The point is to be honest with both sides of the scale and to actually do the comparison rather than taking an automatic answer "I need to drive extra kids to camp sometimes, so I must own a minivan." Maybe. Maybe not. Just be conscious about the choice, not automatic.
Own what appreciates, rent what depreciates.
That's not accurate. With a lease you're just paying for the depreciation directly, at a predetermined rate.
It can definitely make sense, though. I leased a Bolt for my wife for $6K for three years. Even if she only drove it once every week or so it would be hard to do on-demand rental for less.
I'll be a lot of people are regretting not building some slack capacity into their housing and transportation right now, when public transit is potentially dangerous and the whole family might be working from home thanks to COVID.
If the best place is anywhere in the middle of those two extremes (e.g. to have 5x the capacity), it won't be possible to achieve while everything is based on individual private ownership. We'd have to share, and build the slack capacity into the shared pool of vehicles.
A plunger can probably expect <0.1% use of it's capacity. But being stuck without one really sucks, the cost to rent is... once you account for the spent traveling back and forth would be higher than the cost of buying, and as a result literally everyone just buys them.
On the flip side a 20 year old fast food worker with $0 in their bank account probably just plain can't afford to have 5x the housing capacity they actually use. That would bankrupt them. So they just don't do it.
I'm not likely at all to reach anywhere near 50% even...
I wish I lived / worked places that were more walking friendly and etc but that's just not the case.
I rarely use my car, I'm the exact kind of person this is aimed at. I haven't used it in *monthts. But when I need it, it's there. There's car rental place about 500 meters walking distance from my home, but they aren't open 24/7. There is also a ride share car parked at about 1km from my home, but it's only one car and if someone else took it I can't use it.
These things only work when you know well in advance you're going to use it and even then, they might not be available at peak times. There's only so many ride share cars available, and if everyone wants to visit their parents on Christmas, there's not enough of them. Car rental companies aren't going to buy enough cars to cover their 5% peak use either.
Neither would I.
I paid €2600 for my car (2007 Mitsubishi Colt), about 20 euros a month for insurance, and 26 a month in road tax.
I am doing exactly the same thing as you. Bought a ~$3k old used car that is always there for me. I do use it more often, ever week or two, though.
It is even more shocking to me that people would buy a car on credit (except when it has a business purpose, i.e. you can comfortably cover interest payments with the increase in revenue). You're not supposed to use credit for consumption!
I put 80,000 miles on it in 2 years... I think I got my money's worth.
It's kind of like shorting the market with OTM options. The eventual payout can easily cover years of "failures".
Secondly there is a huge difference in safety.
On a three year old car? I really doubt it.
You can get lower rate if you use your own stocks as collateral, i.e. if you use brokerage margin. Heck, these days margin lending is so crazy common that there are even ETFs that package leveraged equities for you to go anywhere between -300% via 0% to 300% long, just change the allocation with a few clicks (or taps on your phone).
Leveraged ETFs are almost never appropriate except to monetize a very short term view.
The Volvo heads to the shop on Wednesday. I'm concerned that I'm in for an expensive bill from the mechanic (~$1000) for various ailments. Never an easy analysis on a car with a KBB value of like $2500. But on the other hand, I'm driving a $40K car.
Another benefit of second used car is that if friends and family come to visit, they have a car to use.
Still, despite so far putting 150% of the "value" into repairs I realize it does not matter. Large Ratios of a small number are nothing compared to even small ratios of a large number.
Once the repairs are done I get to know the state of those parts. Absolute worst case, and the engine needs replacement, we're still only talking about 1 year worth of depreciation on a new car.
Will I need to replace the engine? Likely not. Would it have been slightly cheaper to spend 2x on a better used car? Sure, but maybe that one would have been a lemon too.
The scary part of used cars is spending money on repairs. Yet even expensive repairs are cheap. They are only expensive relative to the market value, but the market value is based on that lemon market risk.
The end result of having bought a far too cheap lemon: I've still spent less than a properly vetted vehicle and now I know some good mechanics down the street. The vehicle itself now has parts which are known quantities.
I'd really love an excuse to buy a new car. I've got the cash for it, but nothing modern cars can provide justify paying an engine replacement of depreciation every year.
I look for that excuse myself regularly now.
I think the biggest "excuse" is new accident avoidance tech. A friend last year hit a bear. She didn't see the bear but her Subaru did, and probably saved her life.
That's what surge pricing is for.
Nonetheless this condemnation, once legislated, have removed the very practical ability to purchase important services or goods when they matter the most to you. Instead we end up all over-buying just to ensure we have it at the key junction.
If surge pricing doesn't exist and all cars are taken, you're simply SOL, period.
In small towns or bigger villages, the number of taxis/ubers, whatever might only be around 10 to 20. Once they are gone, you have to wait till they are a viable again.
We have a decent sized yard, and my right now my wife is planting a fig tree because that is fun for her.
If those months are not hyperbole, you might find that when you need it, it doesn't start. (That just happened last week to a friend of mine who had to bring his kid to swimming class, after leaving the car unused for a few weeks.)
It addresses this problem 99% of the time.
I can imagine the hotel argument working out better mathematically, but it's definitely very much dependent on where you live. In a rural area you'd probably be crazy not to get a bigger home. In an urban area, a hotel could make sense.
You're supposed to analyze for yourself if you need to own a car full-time, and if the answer is yes, perhaps a smaller one might do? If you're constantly shuttling large groups around, then the answer to both might be yes, and that's fine too.
Then again I used to walk to school and today I walk or cycle to most places. I wouldn't be able to do that if I was living in one of those US suburbs.
When I was a preteen in the late 60s and early 70s I got to explore and be independent in a way that is rare today, though I lived in a vast densely populated suburb. At age ten I would hop on my little stingray bike and explore for a dozen miles in any direction. Today that would be an invitation to have your children seized by child protective services.
It's still like that in rural areas. A kid can explore the wilderness with her dog on a Saturday and not be expected until dinner. Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people. The air is cleaner, the night sky is darker, wildlife is all around. If she skins her knee or gets lost, she gets to deal with it herself rather than having an adult on tap. This breeds more independent people with hard earned self confidence. She can watch and help her parents do a bazillion things around the house that they'd dial up a contractor for in the city.
Yeah, it's harder to get a ride share, and you can't work in an office in the city without a very long commute. But there are higher priorities than those, like growing better humans.
In my experience this is very common in cities too. It's the suburbs that prevent it. I don't have kids yet, but in my (very urban) neighborhood it's extremely common to have kids out and about on their own. It's generally seen as being very safe.
When I talk to coworkers with kids in the suburbs they're much more worried about letting their kids run around without adults. To be fair, it makes some sense: cars are one of the biggest killers of kids, and they're a much bigger risk in the suburbs (where most streets are wide and fast) than the city.
Once you get to the cookie-cutter subdivisions in the far suburbs, that's when the kids all disappear. Part of it might be helicopter parenting, but I think it's caused mostly by a lack of any outdoor activities. Riding your bike means going to the next subdivision over. Repeat that a half-dozen times and you get to a heavily trafficked road that can be followed for a few miles to a strip mall with a Target. Even all of the nice parks in these places are only accessible via car -- surrounded on all sized by 4-6 lane traffic going 45+MPH.
I’m considering moving the family to Austin but have mostly been only looking at the new suburb developments in the south- and northwest.
This is a common refrain, but I've never seen more than one-or-two anecdotal accounts of this happening. Do you have citations or articles that support common CPS intervention in cases like this? In my experience CPS is primarily focused on abuse and malnutrition, and tries everything possible to keep families together.
Parents act like the world outside is scary and dangerous, despite declining crime rates. I think that many younger kids are in dual-income families, and are at after-school care from 3-6 every day. Those that aren't are often in after-school activities, and aren't home, bored with time to burn outside. If the kids are home, they'd rather play Fortnite or Call of Duty with their online friends than build a fort in the riverbed.
The phone calls create a chilling effect as parents tell other parents. So if you even want to avoid the helicopter parent trend, society forces you to be their chauffeur.
So no, kids don't get taken away immediately, but the singular phone call is enough to stop it in %99 of cases.
But here are some links (go through the links that the articles give too):
* Started by some new stories: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/03/27/fr...
* The linked article author went through an entire lawsuit about this with BC's CPS: https://5kids1condo.com/we-won-common-sense-prevails-in-bus-...
I bet if you did 10 minutes of google research yourself you could find plenty more.
They recently lost a legal battle but are continuing to appeal. http://5kids1condo.com/i-took-the-government-to-court-for-ki...
However, the kids I met in college who grew up in rural areas had to be driven everywhere. Looking at their faces when I'd mention taking the bus to a concert as a teen, you'd think I was talking about performing wizardry.
As a city kid I could literally go anywhere I wanted at any time, just walk, hop on my bike, or the bus. My parents left dollar bills in a designated spot for bus fare if we wanted to go somewhere.
There was even "wilderness" in the city I grew up in. I grew up building tree forts of dubious structural integrity and swimming in streams. Without adults being involved, just the neighborhood kids. I loved that there were always neighborhood kids, there was always a playmate around - just walk outside and see who was out and about. This was all elementary school age.
The good part about "neighborhood kids" is you don't get to choose them, they were just whoever lived in your area - so you learn to get along with people you'd otherwise not hang out with.
On the flip side, I see far more reckless driving in the city than in the burbs. Blowing lights or stop signs or excessive speeding are all more common in the city often directly in front of police. That wouldn't fly in the suburbs, and moreover people sort of expect traffic laws to be followed within reason (people still speed, but it's not normal to go 70 in a 45). Further, I have a strong suspicion that there are more hit-and-runs in the city than the suburbs. In the burbs, streets are wider and the speed limits are higher, but they have push-to-walk buttons and almost everyone stops well before the light turns red.
https://injurylawyer.com/pedestrian-accidents/high-rate-of-p...
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-04-15-mn-58713-...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448007/
https://www.collinslaw.com/blog/shocking-report-reveals-subu...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/019443609029503...
My theory is this is a result of the traffic, ironically. You spend 2 hours out of your day commuting at 12mph at best, so the minute you have 100 yards of asphault ahead of you, many people opt to just whip to 50-60mph on 35mph roads and 25mph residential streets to savor the speed. If you hit someone at that speed, death is practically guaranteed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skaoQy04EjU
what you're describing is more an indictment of poor risk assessment, that parents are paranoid and over-protective for no good reason, than some inherent difference of rural vs urban living. crime is not a serious concern anywhere, just like getting eaten by a bear is not a serious concern anywhere.
You must not live in Grizzly country. It's a serious concern.
[1] That being said, please don't be stupid: keep your distance and show them all due respect.
I agree with your [1] -- where you're taking the concern seriously.
Given that the majority of people live in a city/metropolitan area, I'll assert that my subjective opinion that growing up in a city would be better for a child than your subjective opinion that rural areas are better.
Overall, I find the suburbs to be the worst of both worlds - overprotective parents shuffling their kids in cars from scheduled activity to activity with other kids of a similar ethnic and socioeconomic background
Crime in rural areas today is rampant due to the opioid crisis. I don't know of a small town that hasn't been absolutely torn apart. Ironically while small town crime is way up due to opioids & heroin, it's down in large cities, about as low as rural towns in the 70s.
> If she skins her knee or gets lost, she gets to deal with it herself rather than having an adult on tap.
Tell me which kids don't have cellphones these days? All my friend's kids in rural (very rural) areas have them for "safety", and 2g-3g reaches pretty much every hollow.
Your description does not match the experiences I've had in the last 10 years, and as someone who grew up in a very rural area (~1k people/sq mi) and now lives in a very urban area (~18k people/sq mi).
The city pop is 3k, but the county is only 16k, for an area of 450 square miles. I did not grow up in city limits, and the area was less than half the population back then.
Just was trying to give some very conservative numbers. More than happy to meet more yokels like me :)
Do not confuse the singe-zoned, panopticon-esque tracts of land with nothing around but houses with small yards and not a single shred of grocery stores, points of interest or wildlife-allocated land for dozens of square miles (necessitating car travel) [1] with "living in cities." Additionally, crime goes down not just with a fewer number of people, but also with people taking ownership over their community – as you'll see in loved neighborhoods of bigger cities like New York – rather than barricading themselves inside their house and watching with suspicion any person that walks past their shuttered blinds, because in places so hostile to travel on foot, no one in their right mind walks.
In an era of continuously increasing human footprint on the planet, we should not be talking about the (environmentally and fiscally) expensive expansion of humans to the corners of the planet that remain "rural" and a respite for our Earth's natural resources. We should consider how to use properly the space we have already colonized, and we should begin with elimination of single-zoned tracts of land.
1 - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/7/7/abolish-single-...
Not everyone's needs and preferences are the same. It's great that your city meets your needs and preferences. That doesn't give you the right to impose your preferred solution on everybody else.
What do you think zoning is, if not "imposing <someone's> preferred solution on everyone else [ who might develop it ]" ?
Zoning is explicitly how communities act to stop people from doing things in with property there that a sufficiently powerful subset (hopefully a majority, but only hopefully) of the people already there don't like.
A way for individual communities to be the way the owners of those communities would like them to be. That's why different communities can be zoned different ways, i.e., one community does not get to impose its preferred way of being on everyone else.
The post I was responding to advocated abolishing single-zoned tracts of land altogether, which is a way for some people to impose their preferred solution on everyone else.
That has some positive purposes ... it may indeed be a good idea not to put a toxic manufacturing facility next door to residential lots or a school. It might possibly make sense to focus retail development in a certain area within a community rather than haphazardly throughout it.
But single-dwelling has almost nothing to do with such high minded purposes, and exists almost entirely to keep higher income home owners away from lower income renters or mixed-income housing. It is, quite simply, rich people telling poor people "we don't want you here".
Land ownership, at least in every US jurisdiction I have experience in, is not that simple. Yes, technically my wife and I "own" our house and the plot of land it sits on. We have a title deed filed with the county clerk. (I'm leaving out the fact that we have a mortgage because the lien holder on the mortgage doesn't really have any rights that are relevant to this discussion; for our purposes here it would be the same if we owned the house and land free and clear.) That gives us a whole bundle of rights connected with the house and land, but it is not absolute "ownership" in the sense you appear to be using the term. The city, the county, and the state all have rights that don't go away just because someone buys the house and land; after all, they were all there long before we got there, and they all played a role in building the house and improving the land, not to mention all the infrastructure--roads, sewers, electricity, water, telephone, Internet. Our house and land aren't just sitting there in a vacuum; they are part of a community that is bigger than us and that has some ownership rights over the whole community that have to be balanced against the rights of individuals within the community.
Someone who really, really doesn't want to put up with any of that can go out to a highly rural jurisdiction and buy a plot of land that's far enough from all neighbors that they can basically do whatever they want.
> single-dwelling has almost nothing to do with such high minded purposes, and exists almost entirely to keep higher income home owners away from lower income renters or mixed-income housing.
Sorry, not buying it. You're welcome to build your own community that works the way you want it to if you don't like any existing communities. But you don't get to just declare by fiat that communities that don't work the way you prefer are evil.
However, I've lived in a wealthy suburban community that used single-dwelling zoning to exclude apartments, townhomes and low income housing, and this led me to do a bunch of reading about the way this zoning classification is used across the US. That reading left me with only one conclusion: it is almost entirely a classist tool, used by the wealthy to exclude everyone else. Of course, the communities that do this have lots of nice sounding justifications for it which do not sound remotely problematic. But dig a little deeper (I did, really), and I am fairly confident that it becomes completely clear what is actually going on.
I agree that such communities exist. However, that does not mean all communities that have some parts of them zoned for single-family dwellings are like that. Every community I have lived in that had portions of it zoned for single family dwellings also had townhomes and apartments, all in the same community and all within similar reach of whatever amenities were provided. (I have also been on both sides of the divide you draw, living in townhomes and living in single family homes.)
As I said, it wasn't until I started reading around about this issue that I came to see how pervasive this use of the law was, and how in so many cases the motivation was reasonably easy to ascertain.
I'm not denying that conceptually speaking, such zoning could be done with purely good intent. I'm claiming that within the US, and specifically within largely white wealthy communities, it is rarely used with good intent.
And your basis for this claim is your personal anecdotal experience, plus "a bunch of reading" you have done. IMO that's a pretty flimsy basis for such a sweeping claim.
Also, the idea that local interests should have the power to block community changes is directly responsible for many prescient issues, like the lack of housing in California causing sky-high home and rental prices. See e.g. a review of the book Golden Gates, which touches on NIMBY-ism in California: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/business/economy/housing-...
Sure, it does: it explicitly says (not implies) that nobody who wants to live in a single-zoned community is allowed to any more, anywhere. That's an onerous requirement for anyone who does want to live in such a community.
> the idea that local interests should have the power to block community changes is directly responsible for many prescient issues
I think you mean "present" issues.
The problem I see is the idea that local interests should have no power to block the grandiose plans of politicians and bureaucrats who won't have to live with the results. At least in the case described in the article you linked to, the city manager, as far as I can tell, was also a resident, so he had skin in the game.
I note, btw, that the project mentioned in the article was allowed by zoning rules.
I grew up in a suburban bordering on semi-rural area, and while I do think living in a rural region certainly has it's benefits (like the ones you describe), implying it by default "grows better humans" than those living in an urban area is ridiculous.
At 15 I started to bike everywhere. I took my bike to the Hudson river path and I could get anywhere I wanted in 10-20 minutes - visiting a friend who lived downtown, or head up to Central Park to meet up and bike around with others, try out some diners uptown, etc.
At 16 my friends and I would walk around the east side, walking for miles in the middle of the night.
I don't think it was negligent at all, but I felt extremely independent because I could get anywhere as a kid without needing a car. I've always found that growing up in a city that felt safe and had great public transportation made me extremely independent at an early age.
This is in stark contrast to people I befriended in college, who were (1) largely reliant on their parents for socialization and exploration until they were old enough to drive, and (2) incapable of handling the general mishegass that happens in urban environments without me as their tour guide. This doesn't make them bad people or dependent in some profoundly handicapping way; it just goes to show that a frontiersman's notion of "independence" is perhaps not the most interesting one in 2020.
I went to school upstate and it was impossible to get around without a car. Everyone was totally reliant on them, and I guess as kids you were always beholden to whoever was licensed/ had a car. To me that's insane, we could get anywhere for free, whenever.
Getting back to Philadelphia where everything collapsed back to "Dad, can you drive me to ..." was depressing for everyone I think.
meshugaas - noun (slang): Crazy or senseless activity and behavior
It amazes me how much this doesn't seem to bother people. New York smells like pee. Everywhere. I've only been a few times, but it has always smelled like pee. I don't feel like "all three times I went, everywhere smelled like pee" really deserves anymore chances when no other place I have ever visited or lived has ever smelled like pee, with the exception of a dirty horse barn. Is all of New York a dirty horse barn?
Maybe New Yorkers just like it? I mean, it has to be that. Because nothing in New York is all that great, such that you'd put up with the constant smell of pee.
Certainly not the pizza.
Joking aside: NYC has a lot of smells, but human urine isn't actually one I pick up all that often (except for sometimes in the subway). As for why anybody would live here: it's one (maybe the most important) of the world's cultural nexuses, as well as the most thoroughly developed urban environment in the United States. Those are sufficient draws for many people.
Still love to visit NYC though.
How does that translate into everyday living for people who don't have a job in culture creation (media, fashion etc.)?
Like, Broadway. That's a big, inside joke, right?
I’ve lived in NYC for almost seven years, and I’m just starting to feel comfortable. Not because I’ve changed too much, but because I now know what I like, what I don’t like, and how to seek out the former and avoid the latter.
It helps if you have friends who have already lived there for a long time, and who have similar interests, they’ll be able to short circuit you. Otherwise I’d recommend knowing yourself and researching, in that order.
The places that are most well known are the places with the biggest marketing budgets. (you mentioned Broadway). Most New Yorkers avoid those like the plague, fwiw. They’re built for people for whom money is not limiting factor to hedonism.
I wasn't meaning to imply that most people take as long as I do.
DC and NYC are geared towards different people, and that's OK. pg has written nice food for thought on this topic. http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html
In NYC you learn quickly what's safe and what's not. I was taught that, at a very early age. You learn how to spot the difference between someone who's homeless and someone who's dangerous. You learn to be aware of your surroundings, you learn to duck into places like shops if you think someone is following you, etc.
It sounds awful listing it out like that, but those were just what we learned growing up. It was just how we took care of ourselves.
One of my favorite games was to catch African chameleons, and run around with them on my finger, pointing them at flies.
That's a game that you won't find too easily in the US.
But it was really dangerous. We had some very nasty snakes, thereabout, half the bugs could give you bites that would take a month to heal, and violent crime was quite prevalent. I learned to be quite careful.
I survived. Not sure I'd want to put my kids through the same risks, but my parents didn't seem to have a problem with it (good or bad? I dunno. They were quite fascinating people, in their own right).
It did give me a unique perspective, though. In my mind, I'm glad to have had it.
My wife & I talk occasionally about an interview we read of some tribal group, I believe in Africa. A kid is exploring a machete. The westerner asks a woman why she isn't stopping the kid. She explains machetes are quite sharp, so the kid will either quickly learn to be careful- or be removed from the gene pool (paraphrasing).
It answered a lot of questions we hadn't been able to answer previously. (Mainly revolving around how difficult parenting still is, even with all our modern miracles)
Pretty ridiculous statement here.
So, the kids I knew in college who grew up in rural areas all said a lot of their peers (and sometime them) got (sometimes heavily) involved in drugs/alcohol because "there was nothing else to do."
>Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people.
Disagree completely, I believe there is safety in numbers and the community mostly watches out for kids. (Personal experience here)
My experience was very different, my subdivision was hemmed in by freeways and expressways on most sides. Going anywhere required a ride from an adult.
As a kid, at my uncle place in the country side, we used to take bikes with my cousin and go whatever. Far away, unattended, no phone (hell, I don't think that house had a landline at the time).
Nowadays it feels a fantasy novel about another galaxy.
And frankly, rural kids are not more independent. Also, the "skins her knee" thing is strawman. Kids who are small enough to need that adult on tap are not exploring forest alone (say 5 years old). And at the age where rural kids explore forest with dog alone and it is fine for them to get lost, they don't get taps in city either.
I mean the independence thing very seriously, even you see the same age kid going in city alone as unfanthomable, but even now, they actually do.
It’s generally true that you have two options—you pay a big capital cost for a chunk of capacity which is available to you whenever you need it, or you pay operational costs for renting as you go. This applies to guest rooms, cars, and computers.
The maxims aren’t very good. “Don’t pay for something you don’t use” is weak advice, because sometimes it’s cheaper long-term to pay for unused capacity than it is to pay for usage when you need it. And this all gets muddled to hell as soon as you factor in the opportunity costs. Each option has a different amount of risk.
“You’re paying for 5% usage, 100% of the time” is just not a solid foundation for making these decisions.
But the vast bulk of the things I own and don't use on a daily or even weekly basis are things that would either be a hassle to rent or pay for as a service, would end up costing more using them that way, or simply aren't practically available at all as a rental item.
On that point, my next machine will be in the cloud. 32 GB laptops cost around $1,500. For the same cost I can buy 6,250 hours on a VPS ($.24 / hr) which is three years' working-hours use. It's even cheaper if I only need all 32 GB for a fraction of the time.
In return I get zero risk of theft, zero risk of hardware faults, zero capital outlay. The best part is that I can try it for a month for $10[1] and if I don't like it I can revert to the status quo!
[1] I'll probably start with an 8 GB machine
The build finished ten or fifteen minutes later, and I swapped it back out for a smaller instance. It’s nice.
All this free time at home had me thinking of roadtrips, boon docking, overlanding, and camping. So I bought a European 4WD SUV. Basically a money pit in fuel, maintenance, parts and reliability. Financially, it doesn't make sense. But all the money I didn't pay in car loans, maintenance, fuel, and tolls went to saving for a car I truly wanted.
For me, buying a car makes as much sense as buying a gaming PC. It should be something you really want and willing to spend money on. If you need a car for work, get the cheapest one you can and factor the mileage into your salary. I've turned down many offers with small pay bumps simply because the expense of the commute made the salary bump a net negative.
obviously that doesn't work if you really need a personal laptop, but how many people fit this criteria? I only use my laptop a week or two out of the year when I go on vacation. I'd probably get more out of vacation if I left the thing at home anyway.
But what's not discussed in this article is the friction of this sort of lifestyle. The time when you couldn't get the rideshare when you needed it. The time lost using less efficient public transport. The hassle you go through every time you need to do... anything.
And as the children get older? Well, the lifestyle gets old too.
Don't pay for what you don't need and won't use. I agree. Just keep in mind you're paying for more than just the few minutes you're actually in a car.
I rented a mini van once for a road trip over a national holiday. I got to the rental office, was in line for an hour, and then they told me it was no longer available. Not even a sorry. Drove our two cars instead.
It takes 15 minutes each way to the nearest Home Depot to rent gardening tools and another 20 minutes in line. Then factor the drive back, and the return trip and it adds up to to 100 minutes of my time. Also, if you are using the tool more than a couple of times, it’s probably cheaper to buy. The only things that make sense to rent are specialized, expensive tools.
Guest bedrooms can be used for many things. If you are sick, you can isolate yourself to prevent other people in the household from getting sick. You can have actual guests over and you don’t have to drive them to/from and get to spend more time with them.
Whenever CalTrain breaks down, Uber prices surge. You either wait 30 minutes or pay quadruple prices. SamTrans will make you wait for the bus that comes every half an hour.
So the pluses are availability, reliability, optionality, and lowered transactional cost.
The author is essentially advocating a low-margin lifestyle. There is little spare capacity or other tolerances engineered into their choices. They may have cash in the bank, but they don't have any reserves of interior space, exterior space, or transit capacity. Instead, they rely entirely on being able to acquire that on-demand.
That works out most of the time, but it's a risk. And, like any other risk, it needs to be planned for, and it carries its own emotional and experiential weight.
Having a yard/garden with kids is wounderful, open the back door and shove them outside without shoes to play for accessible easy outdoor time.
Half the fun of Friends staying over in the guest room is when you can have a few drinks and everyone relaxes knowing no one is traveling. The next morning you can all have breakfast together.
Car shares are great for going to the shops on Tuesday, getting a car for Christmas when you want to see family is a different ballgame.
We have kids, and live in a rural area, and honestly, many summers, don't get a ton of use out of our property and home because we spend most our free time and income on travel. Generally, we're gone at least 2-weekends a month on car trips, fly away for a few weekends a year, and try to fit in 1-2 international trips as well.
Obviously, all that's changed in the last year.
With COVID, we've felt incredibly lucky to live in a rural area where our kids were able to spend basically all summer just "playing outside." No need to interact with other people on mass-transit. No shared elevators or public spaces.
When we did start socializing a bit, it was very nice to have a nice private, outdoor space to (more) safely entertain our guests in.
COVID is hopefully a very temporary, one-time event. But it has changed my perspective.
Still, while I agree that the article takes optimization to sort of silly lengths, I do see a solid point behind it.
I apply the same philosophy to boats, RVs, vacation-homes and the like. (Though, I admit that COVID has tested my resolve there a bit). Expensive investments that aren't really going to make sense unless you're using them far more than our family would. Plus, with any major purchase like that, you're "locked-in" to doing that one thing if you're trying to maximize the value of your investment.
Buy a vacation home, and you're going to have a mental barrier going on vacation somewhere else. Buy a boat, and you're going to feel like you're wasting money when you spend a week of vacation somewhere besides a lake.
TL;DR: Like most things in life, it's a balance.
I would probably agree with OPs sentiment in the context of vacation homes. They're not necessarily a great investment. They sort of lock you into a location. They're another thing you have to manage. And so forth. I'd much rather just get a hotel room, a B&B, etc.
I've even thought of buying a small place in the city. First of all, I'm really glad I didn't do that in the last year or two. But, really, while I wish I had done it 10 years ago knowing what I know now about property values, I also don't miss having another property to manage and I can always get a hotel if I want to spend a weekend in town every now and then.
There are some really bleak effects on affordability in urban areas, but for someone who owns a vacation home they use two or three weeks out of the year, it's great: employ someone local to handle keys and cleaning, cover mortgage/taxes, maintenance, and maybe enough profit that you don't feel so bad going somewhere else once in a while.
In turn, someone like me can rent it! The best of my experiences with AirBnB have been this exact sort of rental, while the worst were situations where I discovered that the rental was illegal.
The way the math works out is that I would be able to pay for three nights per month in that hotel for the difference between a 1br and a 2br in my building.
I don't think everyone reading this article needs to shoehorn their own situation into the analysis, but for me it makes a ton of sense. I kind of want a 2br, but I really wouldn't use the space that often and I have excellent alternatives.
I dream of that day, but I don't expect to see it for another 4-5 years at least given the nature of the beast in this field in this city.
Hotels are expensive. Rental cars and Uber are expensive.
If you even take a few Uber trips a month, you're probably better off owning an affordable car.
If you have visitors regularly, you should probably buy a house with that extra bedroom. It's an asset that you can sell and recoup virtually 100% of your investment later on. You can't sell all the hotel rooms you've previously rented.
Having a yard turned out to be a fantastic thing to own this year since parks were all forced closed. Trust that you will always have access to that local green space (and that it will be safe and accessible) turned out to be misplaced.
if you're buying a house, it probably makes sense to get one more room than you typically need. like you say, it's likely that you recoup the cost at the end anyway. if you're renting, it's a little different. a decent hotel room is $100-200 a night in most cities. that's not cheap, but having one extra bedroom probably adds at least that much to your monthly rent.
I argued in a different post that a hotel room isn't necessarily a substitute for a spare room. it's a much less intimate way to entertain visitors. depending on the guest, that could be a pro or a con.
My wife and I live in the city and downsized from two cars to zero after doing the math last year. Granted your definition of "a few" might be different from mine, but it takes way more than my definition of a few rides to break even.
If you ask someone to itemize the costs of car ownership, they tend to miss or underestimate a few. The big ones are insurance and depreciation. I am confident that my total rideshare costs over the past year are less than just the difference between my city insurance premium and my suburb premium on the same used car, and my record is spotless. The math is surprising. (Any cost of ownership estimate or calculator I share here can be reasonably challenged, so try it with your own numbers.)
This isn't to speak of the other costs and risks of non-ownership. Every situation is different. We are lucky to have subsidized public transportation passes, corporate discounts on rentals, walkable commutes, grocery stores in every direction, etc.
I did this exact analysis on my car some years ago, after 5 years of ownership. I took into account all repairs/maintenance, purchase price, depreciation, insurance, gas, city fees and parking (yes, I keep track of all those expenses).
It came out to $288.77/month.
In reality, it was a bit less, given that 2 years later someone wrecked my car and their insurance paid more than it was worth (with no major repairs in those 2 years).
I then bought a much, much cheaper used car (about same value as my old one when it was wrecked), so the cost would be significantly less what I show above ($100 out of that $288.77 was just depreciation).
Depreciation seems to be the major cost, and my car was fairly used (8 years old when I bought it, but low on miles). Don't buy a used car for more than $10K - mine was less and you can still see the amount of depreciation! A lot of people think they're beating the game by buying a 2-3 year old used car, but the depreciation will still be really high. Of course, you can get good cars for under $4K, but it may be risky to go long distance in those.
Of course, the other trick is to get a reliable car. Pick only models with good histories (buy the Consumer Reports guide as one reference for this), and do a buyer's check before buying it. If you go to a used car lot and they don't let you do that check, then refuse to buy it.
I've had excellent savings (and frankly, minimal hassle) from buying an 8-year old Mercedes diesel with 180K on it, a 7-year old Honda CR-V with 165K on it, and a 7-year old Alfa Spider with 24k on it in my younger days. The Mercedes was bullet-proof but painted with an eco-friendly paint system that ensured they prematurely rusted (oh, the irony of taking a perfectly functional car off the road to save the pla). The Alfa I sold running well with 125K on it a few years back as we were planning to have kids. The Honda is still my SO's daily driver with around 215K on it.
I do my own wrenching on the cars, which also keeps the costs down, but even if I paid an independent (non-dealer) mechanic to do everything, decent cars just don't break that much any more. (The Alfa was extremely reliable. From 1993-2009, it broke exactly once and that was the failure of a Bosch distributor, nothing to do with the Italian heritage. The Mercedes took no major work over that time. The Honda did need a clutch which was $750 in parts and would have been around $1000 in labor.)
Not feeling the need to carry collision insurance is another big money saver.
a lot of people just want the shiniest new thing they can get a loan for. I do think there are some legitimate reasons for buying new/CPO though. a lot of people (somewhat frivolously) plan to own a car for about five years, so buying new/CPO leaves the car in its original warranty for the majority of the time they own it. this probably isn't better economically, but knowing that a) cars are less likely to break during warranty, and b) the dealership will fix it for free if it does might be worth it for the peace of mind. there are some cars (mostly cheap performance cars) that I simply wouldn't consider buying used out of fear of what the previous owner may have done to it.
somewhat of a tangent, but I was looking at a couple online TCO calculators recently. not sure how they do their calculations (or how accurate they are), but I got some very surprising results. for all the models I was considering buying, the five year TCO was almost the same for CPO as it was for new, only lower by a few percentage points.
As an example of the latter: I've tried bikeshares but they just made me long for my own bike: they're all too low for me, they usually have three gears at best, they have hard-to-move solid tires, the cargo area is usually in the front instead of my preference of the back. The cheap, beat-up seven-speed I own is a lot more fun to ride on.
On the other side, with the bike share, I don't care about what happens to the bike after I'm done with it. Someone could rip it apart for scrap money or throw it into a river for all I care. Me finding another one in working order is trivial, compared to replacing my stolen bicycle. Plus many of them are electric so I can do it in a full suit.
The guest bedroom makes for a decent storage space
A yard has aesthetic value and you might be living in an area like greater NY metro area where land is worth more than the house built on it, so it's going to make financial sense down the line.
The perspective of the author doesn't seem to come from the same background and experiences as many of the people reading the article, especially since the comparisons of the decisions they made to the "normal" are based on a very strange normal. That's fine, but it might be nice to get a sense of where they come from and what type of lifestyle their social group is living. Looks like "modo" is a canadian service - maybe canada is wildly different from the US but at least from my brief visits to metro areas in that country a significant portion of the lifestyle for the people I met in the toronto area seemed to be a lot like your typical american urban/suburban lifestyle in the US. I guess I just don't recognize the people "paying for the other 95" since I can't imagine anyone buying housing in an urban area with condos and public transit and parks that also sees property land area as purely recreational space instead of a financial investment, or people with young children that can't afford a 50k car that would think it makes more sense to rent out a minivan everytime they need to take the kids anywhere rather than get a 10 year old odyssey that'll keep running for 10 more. And I certainly can't imagine anyone that would decide to get a smaller house without a guest bedroom for financial reasons and then be so magnanimous that they're willing to pay for their friends hotel's when they visit! If they're not visiting to hang out with me at my place, why am I paying for their vacation? I wouldn't expect them to pay for mine!
That was a sort of odd touch for me. Mind you, I obviously don't know the details--maybe an old friend that he knew didn't have much money. But, yeah, I'd consider an offered guest room a nice offer but I'd never expect someone to offer to pay for a hotel if they didn't have the room.
A fifth wheel costs about $35,000. Many of my neighbors have models that cost $50,000+. You need to factor in renting out the campsite for a week, fuel to tow your camper there (it might be 100-200 miles away), and the fact that you need a large pickup truck to do the towing.
You could rent a lot of hotels for that kind of money, or rent a cabin to stay in, and drive there in your car. "Roughing it" seems expensive.
Having had a RV (which I lived in all summer - I didn't move it), and done real tent camping I object to calling any form of RV roughing it. I've been 10 hours be canoe from the nearest car before (it took us a full week - I've talked to some who did the same trip in a long day which is where the time estimate comes from), I know what roughing it means, and a RV isn't it.
At some point, you should probably think of hobbies as hobbies and not demand that they be the most efficient means of producing an outcome.
I agree the way most people go about buying RVs seems sub-optimal, but hotels or even cabins are not necessarily equivalent goods.
If you want to maximize value of something, finding alternative uses for that item usually results in lower cost of ownership. My yard currently has about 200 square feet of garden in it, which provides a substantial amount of food to eat, at no additional cost than the water and minimal gardening supplies to keep it going. My kids can also use the yard, along side my garden, maximizing value. Once my house is paid off, my yard has a realized cost of close to zero. Friends can setup a tent in the yard with an air mattress instead of needing a guest room.
That fancy mini-van? I can also be the person that rents that out as a potential income source. Suddenly, something that was a liability is now a revenue stream, and I still have the convenience of using it basically whenever I want.
Most things you'll find you use only 5% of the time you own them, but their cost is low so they get no mention or attention. Other things are stupid to justify in terms of financial costs. Kids are expensive, and looking at them as an asset or a liability is laughable.
Instead of figuring out the percentage of time the item will be used, try and instead maximize value from it. Split the cost of a lawn mower with your neighbor. Rent out your car on a car-share app. Car pool to school and work. When trying to purchase a big item, try and figure out what you really need, and fight your ego. Can you buy it used? Is a specific color really worth thousands of dollars? Life isn't something that can be explained through an algorithm, don't try and run every decision through it.
Sure, you can get an easy car share 95% of the time, but the 5% of the time that you actually need one is also the same 5% of the time that everyone else in the city needs one -- the long weekend when everybody wants to head out to the countryside. Likewise hotel rooms and the facilities in parks. So you may need to plan waaaaaaaaay ahead if you depend on access to these shared resources.