Reply to How do so many young families have $80k SUVs?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]These cars are extraordinarily selfish - they’re dangerous to others and bad for the environment. But they’re a good representation of the people that drive them and their excesses and entitlement.[/quote]

How big is your house?[/quote]

DP here. The people with the giant SUVs are the SAME people with the McMansions. Highly correlated. [/quote]

+1. Excess begets excess. And people like this tend to live in the same neighborhoods, have kids at the same schools, etc. So what they see validates these choices and encourages them to consume even larger ones. I have known multiple people who moved from smaller homes to larger ones in a neighborhood of large homes. Within a year -- SUV (perhaps before they drove a wagon or a sedan). Within 5 years -- big SUV. This is true regardless of family size. We have some friends who moved from a row home in DC where they had a small BMW (very nice car, but small). They moved to a 4 bedroom house in Falls Church, and within a year they both had SUVs. They have one child. So a family of three in a 4000+ square foot house, two car garage, two luxury SUVs. If they still lived in the city they'd still have a nice life (private schools, great neighborhood, nice home, etc.) but they'd live in a house half as large and drive a small sedan. But where they live, everyone has a big house and huge cars, plus everyone drives everywhere since nothing is walkable, people engage in activities that involve more gear, which validates them having the big cars, and so on. It's a cycle.

Whereas you see people who move into the city go from two cars down to one. Then maybe get a cargo bike and stop driving their one car as much. They walk more, take metro, because it's convenient. Their neighbors all live in smaller homes as well, many people only have one car or no car, there is social pressure to walk or bike places, people will recommend bike seats for kids or a bike trailer, or suggest taking turns walking the kids to school to help each other out. Different culture, different choices.

What I'd love is if we could duplicate that city culture of smaller footprints and less car-dependency, out in the suburbs. Not everywhere, if you want a big house and car-dependent lifestyle, you'll always be able to find that. But near metro stops or convenient bus lines into the city, it would be great if we could actually build higher density, smaller houses with smaller yards, grocery stores and commercial districts built at a pedestrian/bike scale so that you could live there and mostly get around on foot or bike, take metro into the city for work, and just use your car on weekends or for specific tasks like taking a kid to sports meets or whatever. There are lots of places around DC where this would be possible, but there is so much resistance to the kind of density and infrastructure you need to make that happen. But it would provide opportunities for so many more people to access that lifestyle at various price points. [/quote]

I could walk to everything but have no time.[/quote]

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