I suspect it isn't about desire but income. A car can typically cost up to $10,000 per year regardless of specific purchase price there is insurance, fuel, repairs and/or car payments (lower purchase price on used vehicles raises maintenance significantly) ... sure you can shave a bit here and there, but on the whole if you're going to own a car, you're going to be out a lot of money.
Making the choice not to own gives you a leg up for other purchases.
Housing, I suspect is bennefitting from similar post-hoc analysis. "Millennials don't want to own homes" which I've seen in headlines should also be weighed against the fact the houses today cost many multiples more than a typical annual salary. I believe when my father was buying his first home the rule of thumb was "roughly 5* annual salary" nowadays in Toronto homes are easily 10*
This stuff (microhousing, ultra-mobility) isn't necessarily about "enlightenment amongst the youth" it's the crushing cost.
Crushing cost and income instability. I know very few people my age (35) or younger who've held a single job for longer than maybe 3-5 years, most of the time its even shorter than that. Our parents could count on a job being stable for decades at a time and with regular raises. When you don't know where you will be working 2 years from now its hard to predict where you will be living 30 years from now. Makes signing a mortgage kind of a dumb idea.
$10,000 per year?? That sounds... incredibly high. Insurance is maybe $1k? (I pay ~$650/yr). Fuel maybe another grand? (I've paid ~$750 year-to-date). Repairs can add up, but I don't think I've spent more than $1k in a year on repairs for my 23 year old car, which I bought for $2.5k three years ago.
10k a year only sounds reasonable if you're making payments, and I suspect the amortized cost once you (eventually) sell the vehicle will be much lower.
Granted, this is only my own experience, but considering it's so far off from 10k makes me wonder how accurate that statement is for the general population.
Buying a 23 year old car puts you in the outliers already. Typically with that age you'll have trouble keeping the yearly repairs averaged at below $1000, but you might.
Lots of people are eating a few grand in depreciation each year, plus higher fuel costs, plus higher insurance rates. And don't forget financing costs, licencing, taxes. Many people are clearly eating more on depreciation than you are spending, all in.
10k may be a little on the high side, but 5 or 6k isn't at all (you're already at, what 3 to 3.5 on the cheap end).
in fairness to you an hawaiianbrah I'll admit that the $10k is pretty close to an upper limit on that one... any maybe rounded up as well.
So my napkin calculation was roughly $30k for the base auto, financed at $500/month for 5 years. $1000/year on insurance and $50/week on gas.
$500 * 12 = $6000
$50 * 52 = $2600
+$1000
total = $9600
In the above calculation there's $0 spent on service & $0 on financing interest. The theory is that as age goes up, the annual repair cost increases as well.
I think there's also a bit of a confound in the fact that I'm operating in Canadian dollars where my numbers might be inflated... as well, I haven't owned a car myself since somewhere around 2005.
My payment at the time was $450 on a Mazda 5.
All said and done though $5k to $10k is not a wildly unreasonable range. Which I think we were generally agreeing on.
Was it about some fundamental inherent desire in the first place, or increased income then too, plus ample advertising and touting it as the "american way"?
Other regions, even as rich, don't place as much emphasis on car ownership.
>Is that so? If americans want to live like that, why don’t american cities look like european cities already?
Because cities are expensive infrastructure that takes many decades to change after it has been built. Unless an earthquake or other natural disaster or war takes a city down, change at the level of changing the roads, moving whole neighborhoods, etc is very slow.
Older cities (the ones most comparable to cities in Europe) do look a lot like European cities. New York and Boston both have extensive public transport, including commuter rail to fairly large outlying settlements.
They are also incredibly popular (if you take housing prices as a proxy for desirability).
There seems to also be a cultural element, and I doubt that can be solved with merely technological means.