If you have a walkable town, you don't need a car for your basic you need to live. You just walk to the store. Also, because going to a store is not a car trip, you can do it every day, or every other day. You don't need a insanely large fridge and freezers that Americans seem to have. You can also take advantage of temporary price reductions.
Towns built around walkability, bikes and public transport are just superior in every way that we can measure, from health to water use and so on.
The US needs to fundamentally change its approach to cities and towns. You can't have poor people working in cities to provide services and then force them to live in some Cul-de-Sac cheap house 1-2h drive outside of the city.
I highly suggest people listen to Peter Calthorpe, who coined the turn Transit Oriented Development. Here some great videos that are worth checking out, one general, one about California:
It's disheartening to read some of the replies to your comment. A large number of Americans seem so traumatized/conditioned to the suburban/car-centric setup, that they can't even envision a future with Transit.
It is doubly sad, because the political and economic dominance of the boomer era was so pronounced, that many Americans now dream of a future (suburban white picket fence house) that is derived from exactly this unsustainable past that made the 'dream' unachievable in the first place. American suburbia works if you live in a unipolar era of unprecedented wealth that's unmatched almost anywhere else in the world or in history. Well, duh. It's no different to considering Dubai's abandoned Palm Islands or World Islands a sensible infrastructure because they haven't yet bankrupted a country with practically infinite per-capita wealth. The first sign of economic troubles will decisively doom your nation. It's started for America, and other unsustainable cities will follow suit.
it is staring Americans in their face too. Every private money-conscious closed-system mini-govt ensure that transit and density are in order. People rave about the convenience of buses in college towns and Disneyland's metro system, as if either of those are unrealistic outside of those contexts.
I have said it before and will say it again. American urban infrastructure (or lack there of) is the closest thing we have to a monocausal root of all of America's problems. Obesity, loneliness, cost of living, low trust, Govt. debt etc etc.
The problem with monocausal issue is that it also touches everything.
To really address it, there is no monocausal solution.
- Taxation policy (Land Value Tax)
- Transportation policy local and federal level
- Services policy (police, social services)
- Land use policy (mixed-use, multi-fam homes and so on)
Problem is many of these institutional systems were developed or revolutionized in the exact wrong moment, in the 50/60. So that many standards and standard way of doing things have encoded the exact wrong solution.
Traffic engineering is a particular victim of this. Everything is done by a book of standards, and the standards are just totally wrong.
I'm as much of a transportation alternatives fan as anyone, but when I got to the "Cars vs Public Transit" I just rolled my eyes a bit. Modern ebikes cost a few thousand dollars, and are so absurdly cheaper than cars, they pay for themselves within a single year.
If you live within 20m of where you work, and cargo-centric ebike will suffice (or farther if you can charge it at work). You can take kids to school on one, you can go grocery shopping on one, you effectively do every single trip in a modern city.
For the few things you can't do, the occasional cost of short term car rentals are drops in a bucket.
The point I'm trying to make is this. Yes, public transit is important, yes we need to make our cities interconnected with trains. However, if we want to create a functional system for transit alternatives... we can do it literally today, by creating network of low-car/car-free streets for ebike traffic.
This doesn't work so well as to warrant an 'eye-roll' for a large portion of the world, where it would be ridiculous to expect people to be riding ebikes long distances, for half the year or more. In my city, people would think you were insane if you tried riding more than than a few Kms with any regularity during the winter, since it often hits -45 C (-49 f), generally with significant snow and slush on the ground. It's also not exactly trivial to make such a huge change to layouts of cities' traffic flows.
Edit:
As a point of illustration that I'm not overstating the issue, my city actually has a thriving e/bike rental market for 5-6 months/year and for the other part of the year, the rentals literally disappear and you can't find a single one until part way through spring season.
I do find it curious that the only neighbourhoods in my own city where use of bikes for that sort of thing (grocery shopping, taking kids to school etc.) is common are typically fairly well-off ones.
I'm wondering if part of the reason is that those in poorer neighbourhoods are too worried about having a bike stolen? (it would certainly worry me!). Obviously part of it is also lack of investment in decent bike-friendly infrastructure. But I suspect it may be partly cultural - esp. in areas where there's a significant number of recent immigrants who might think of bicycles as something people would only use to get around on in the poorer countries they came from.
It seems like a large stretch to call car dependency "the majority of the problem" when only one of the eight areas in the article are clearly related to car dependency. For transportation, yes absolutely car dependency is a major cost. But how would reducing car dependency significantly affect the high cost of childcare, for example?
I completely agree that there would be a lot of benefits if the US focused on making urban areas more walkable and less car-dependent, but I feel it's often presented as though it would solve every problem that the US has.
> But how would reducing car dependency significantly affect the high cost of childcare, for example
1. Driving children to schools and other activities is a huge cost in time and money. If children could walk and bike, it would be much cheaper. I walked to school (even back home for launch) and then took the bicycle to soccer practice.
2. Children can spend time alone much earlier and travel alone much earlier. My parents were comfortable with me being alone at home for launch and after school, risk of car accidents was vanishingly small.
3. Mother helping each other out in a walkable neighborhood is trivial. My mother worked, I would simply walk home with a friend and would it at his house. And then later when my parents were home from work I would walk home. No big deal.
4. Having distributed housing policy with lots of option leads to cheaper apartments being available next to richer neighborhoods, means that its easier for low paid child care workers to live closer (walking distance) from the people who have children to take care off.
5. Having mixed use zoning allows for buildings that have child care facilty closer to actual housing in general.
> but I feel it's often presented as though it would solve every problem that the US has
I doesn't solve every problem, but it impacts most problems positively.
I have a couple of small stores nearby and I don't use them at all for groceries because the selection is limited and the prices are high. I drive the 1.5 miles to the larger local store.
Those stores could have different variety if more people relied on them, but they simply don't have the space to compete with the larger store. One gets by selling alcohol and convenience items, the other is really a meat counter.
This is a pipe dream. US cities will never be able to accommodate public transportation as a viable alternative to car ownership. Take a drive around Europe and take a drive around the US and it becomes very obvious, very quickly, why that’s the case. You can’t go back and relayout every American town and city. Just not gonna happen. Sorry. Find something else to pour your energy into.
Not to mention that many/most Americans don’t want to live in your utopia. I’ve lived in walkable, lively parts of cities. Now I live in a stand-alone house and drive everywhere and I much prefer it.
> You can’t go back and relayout every American town and city.
You don't actually need to do this! Its a fantasy that you somehow need to re-design your city to make improvements.
In fact, by simply removing some harmful regulation you can already do 100x better. Removing the function based zoning. Allow mixed use as default. Removing lots of the other regulation such as minimum lot size, offsets and so on.
US city were not designed for cars, and mostly they are simple grids, and that's totally fine.
Changes in pricing for things like water, move to block pricing and increase price depending on how much infrastructure is required.
The tax system should move from property based to land based.
Cars need to be slowed down, lanes need to be made thinner, and add a protected bike lane. This is actually a case where US insane wide streets come in handy, space for bike-lanes is already there.
> Not to mention that many/most Americans don’t want to live in your utopia. I’ve lived in walkable, lively parts of cities. Now I live in a stand-alone house and drive everywhere and I much prefer it.
Even rural and small towns or even villages can be walkable.
And your taxes are likely not covering the infrastructure required for you live-style, you are subsidized by the poorer parts of the city you live in.
Also evidence shows, that areas such as I suggest are getting a huge amount of demand and are really expensive. So I think evidence is clear that there is a huge amount for such development.
And evidence also shows that where they happen they actually make sense for cities in terms of taxation.
I would have agreed with you... up until the pandemic. If we didn't live in a car dependent country, way more people I know would have died. You -could- make the argument that we'd probably be healthier and thus, wouldn't be as severe of a risk but that's neither here nor there.
I barely leave the house. And when I do, I've mostly always taken as much precautions as I could. I get curbside pickup for all of my groceries. I can't drink the water locally, so I'm dependent on bottled water.
All of this would have been a disaster if I had to cram myself on public transit to go places (definitely would have caught COVID then) or lug a fucking case of water to my house 4 times a week.
Ähh no idea what you are talking about. There is no evidence that less car depended places have higher death rates. You can't just throw out something like that without explanation.
How many people have been saved because they had a neighbor who was one apartment below and was able to help very quickly.
I would argue to opposite of what you suggest is true. More dense less car depended places have a far easier and cheaper time getting medical care to people.
Getting medical care to some far flung subburbs is part of the issue.
> I barely leave the house. And when I do, I've mostly always taken as much precautions as I could.
Why? What crazy situation is this? Most people in most places in the world are not afraid to leave the place where they live. And that was even true for most poor cities. Locals are usually not afraid to walk to the store down the street in their neighborhood.
> I can't drink the water locally, so I'm dependent on bottled water.
That again is a problem of infrastructure. Infrastructure problems are very hard to solve in far flung suburbs and are very expensive because the amount of piping goes up per person.
So I agree, that's a very bad situation, but the solution to that is infrastructure, and not car dependency.
> All of this would have been a disaster if I had to cram myself on public transit to go places
First of all, there is this thing called walking. Also a think called, a bike.
Also talking about public transport in terms of 'cram' is funny, because often you have more space in public transit then in a car and you can work or watch movies.
You seem to have a US perspective of public transit being some dingy lower class thing.
> definitely would have caught COVID then
Funny I never had COVID and I live in Switzerland, the most public transport orient place in the world maybe.
> or lug a fucking case of water to my house 4 times a week.
I actually do that with Cola Light an it isn't that big a deal.
If you want to do really big one time deliveries for some bulk items every week, that's fine. Or you can can also get a small wood cart or some kind of wheeled transport device and carry a week plus worth of water.
> because going to a store is not a car trip, you can do it every day, or every other day. You don't need a insanely large fridge and freezers that Americans seem to have.
I don't want to go to the store that often. Going to the store twice takes way longer than going once and buying twice as much stuff, even if you don't count driving time.
> You can also take advantage of temporary price reductions.
I can do that now, by buying a bunch of food when it's on sale, then loading it all into my car and putting it in my fridge and freezer that have room for all of it. In your world, I couldn't do that.
What you are missing is that you think of going to the store as a trip in off itself. If you like in a walkable community, going to store is just something you do on the side.
I might bring some of my recycling to the center, go to a friends place to hang out then on my way home I quickly go to the store and pick up a few thing that I am missing.
Or simply on my way home from work.
Or sometimes I just go because its a nice couple minutes walk in the fresh hair and I can get some fresh bread.
> I can do that now, by buying a bunch of food when it's on sale, then loading it all into my car and putting it in my fridge and freezer that have room for all of it. In your world, I couldn't do that.
You realize that you just said that you need a car and a large fridge and freezer to save money right? I have neither of those and pretty sure that saves money.
Often those lower priced things are not huge bulk products that you can buy at lower price in unlimited quantity. What I am talking about is that usually there is a box with lots of stuff that is close to expiry date that you can pick up for cheap.
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
Even if the poor are smart and well behaved this will still apply.
Te actual example is pretty bad. And the general case doesn't actually hold up.
You can get really decent pair of stable boots that can last many years for pretty reasonable price. The increase in quality compared to price of some super custom boots isn't actually sensable.
99% of what rich people buy is not of some massively superior quality. Specially in terms of clothing.
Maybe some really good winter clothing is a exception, but even then layering is probably a better solution to stay warm.
So really I don't buy this explanation unless people can give me some better examples.
It's from a novel in a fantasy setting. I don't think it's meant to literally reflect what happens with boots in the real world, it's meant to be a metaphor.
It does happen quite literally in the real world with umbrellas, by the way. I live in a quite rainy area. Around 7 or 8 years ago I spent around €60 on a good Knirps umbrella, haven't needed another at the moment. When I bought cheaper umbrellas (not really due to skimping, but I didn't really know the good ones) they only lasted 1-2 years before totally breaking and becoming unusable.
Manufacturing has gotten substantially better even in the last thirty years - things that used to be absolute crap at the low end are usually good enough to be thrown out before they wear out.
Two cases where it can still apply are toys (Lego lasts forever even if some pieces get lost/broken but damn is it spendy) and things like https://saddlebackleather.com/mens-leather-backpacks/ - I have one that has lasted 10+ years so far and none of the previous Walmart specials lasted more than three years. Could a middle ground be found? Sure.
Another example these days might be energy related - if you’re “well off” you can afford to get a well insulated house with solar and such to offset future energy costs.
I am assuming you never heard of "I'm not rich enough to buy cheap shoes" or some variation of that and this doesn't intuitively make sense for you. And I hope this doesn't come off like I'm mansplaining or smartsplaining or whatever :)
- Renting in San Francisco and New York. $$$ gets you way bigger and better places than $. It's not thrice the value. It's over 5x the value. This becomes very obvious as you move up the salary ladder.
- To plagiarise a Reddit post on this exact topic (which the OP article was plagirising but...) "poor people can't buy in bulk, so they never get to enjoy the savings of Costco"
- A whole cow costs less than the sum of the prices of its parts. Same applies to poultry and fish. Vegetables seem to have a linear price to amount ratio but that's largely priced in way earlier so it's kind of an illusion.
There is no evil force at work. Simple economics really.
- Economics of scale. This probably applies so widely that it's hard to overstate. e.g. Costco, better boot, whole cow. There are fixed costs to transport, customs, maintaining a store, sales people etc. Cheap stuff has to sacrifice quality so you come back more often - frequent enough to help with the fixed costs.
- Money today > money tomorrow. Not sure if there is an economic principle behind this because it doesn't always hold, but everyone except banks believe it always holds. Maybe because we believe we can invest it real good, or we enjoy the security of it (unless you're better than banks at collecting and/or selling debt). E.g. rent in SF. It takes longer to find tenants for $$$ apartments. And landlords lose more money when they let $$$ apartments sit empty. So, they can't expect to charge 2x the rent for 2x the square footage. Usually 2x the rent offers >= 2x square footage AND more amenities.
Apologies for errors. Had to write this on mobile.
From an example that I watched: He just got out of prison. He had very little money. He bought a cheap car that kept breaking because he couldn't afford payments on a good one, but the repair bills kept costing him. He couldn't pay the car insurance six months in advance, so he had to pay month-by-month, which is more expensive. Those are the ones I remember, but it seems that there were others. It was literally more expensive for him to do things than it was for me to do the same things.
I've had it happen to me quite literally; I've had two pairs of cheap boots not even last a month before the soles detached.
There's always a point of diminishing returns, but it doesn't really make much odds where that is if you've not got the money. If you've only got £20, it doesn't really matter that good long lasting boots can be bought for £50 not £300.
It's not necessarily the case that paying more gives you a longer lasting product. You can pay more for a car and actually end up with the exact opposite, for example. Expensive often means more capacity for things to go wrong. The one thing that guarantees poor purchasing is thinking rules like 'it costs more, and is thus less likely to break' always, or even mostly, apply.
The automotive equivalent to the cheap pair of boots is a beater off craigslist, not a cheaper new car from the dealer. It’s not a choice between a Toyota and an entry level BMW but between a 20 year old gas guzzler that can break down at any time and an eight year old entry level sedan from a used car dealer (or whatever the age cutoff is for used car loans).
If you have a good credit score you can put down a few thousand on a down payment and get a Toyota Corolla with 50k miles for $10-15k that is likely to last for another 200k miles without major repair. If you don’t have a good credit score, the most that downpayment will buy you without a loan is a total crapshoot that can break down and total itself at any time.
The ability to pay more gives you more choice and thus, in general, the option of buying better products. Of course, you can also use the extra choice to choose wrong.
Reminds me how my mother used to say that we’re not rich enough to buy cheap things. I think it must be some proverb somewhere, but I only ever heard it from her.
This is a very niche text book example. If you want to make this point you need a real world example. And prove that poor people are diligently spending those $10.
Nope. It does not. I've read this many times, and it isn't true. Not in reality, as opposed to the theory it states. It is completely wrong. Not always, but mostly.
I went to the dollar store today looking for stocking stuffer items. It's now the "dollar twenty-five store" due to inflation, with some items four and five dollars.
Here are my observations.
* The food will likely make you sick if you eat it regularly, the food options are highly processed and made of cheap, poor quality ingredients.
* Kids, lots of kids. Lots of lower income families have multiple kids and the dollar store is one way to stretch the budget.
* Dollar stores do a decent job at keeping things at $1.25. There were definitely some products that I would see 2x or 3x the price at other stores.
Nutritious food can be very cheap. Others have mentioned beans and rice. Beans are an amazing source of nutrition. Dried beans are dirt cheap and require little work to prepare. Organic bananas from Whole Foods are about $0.50 each. I'm pretty sure you can find a cheaper banana elsewhere. Broccoli costs less than a $1 per head, typically. Organic rainbow carrots are $1.50 a pound. I could go on.
The point is, good food can be cheap. And yes, food deserts exist. And yes, people buy poor quality food from stores like Dollar General. But perhaps there is a correlation here? Maybe (some) food deserts exists because there is little demand for fresh food in those regions.
As mentioned in the article, some low income housing units literally don’t have kitchens or don’t allow cooking.
This blew my mind and is a facet of poverty I hadn’t even considered.
Also, are you actually making the point that food deserts exist because all the people in the area just decided not to buy groceries? I haven’t read such a blatant “blame the poors for their situation” take in a while.
Pretty much all the food you mention are extremely expensive when your basic caloric needs arent met. $1 for broccoli that will give me basically zero energy is a really awful deal. If you have enough calories, then yeah, buy the broccoli.
Beans are great, but require time to cook that not everyone has, especially when very poor. They also cost money to cook, require a kitchen, time to clean dishes, a place to store em if cooked in bulk, etc.
Bananas though, are wonderful, sent from heaven.
To some of your other posts, it’s not really sufficient that this food merely exists. otherwise, yeah, problemo solved, trivial.
The bridge that has to be gapped is:
- foods gotta be accessible
- people gotta have enough time to cook the food, this is a biggy
- people gotta have time to clean up from the food
- people gotta have enough of the healthy food and with enough macronutrient diversity to not get sick. $1 worth of bananas ain’t gonna hold you like that $1 cheeseburger.
Somewhere in all of this is that eating healthy is way more cognitive overload when you’re poor than when you’re stable. Now that I’m stable I have enough time on a Sunday to cook a weeks worth of meals. I don’t really have to scrunch to do it, I’m not cutting into sleep time to do it. Lotta folks don’t have that luxury.
I bring up this example because if you try hard enough, $5 will buy you an entire (unhealthy) meal. It's really hard to tell someone to spend their entire meal budget on a single head of broccoli!
I don't disagree that it's possible to eat healthily on a thin budget, but we're sadly past the point where this can be accomplished by buying fresh vegetables at the supermarket.
Dry beans and fresh food like you described cost a large amount of time to prepare compared to processed food, and time is a luxury poor people do not have.
If you take a bus to work, you probably don’t have time cook.
As I wrote in my other post, its about city planning.
> And yes, food deserts exist.
Yes because car dependency and long distances involved. If you have a mixed use walkable area there is almost always access to freshish foods at least basic vegis.
Being depended on big box stores in some commercial district with a gigantic parking lot that you can't walk to that you only go to once every week or two is the problem.
Yeah poor people know about Bananas for the most part.
You’re gonna need to eat well over ten pounds of broccoli and carrots to get a full days calories. This is going to be something most are going to see more as supplemental, or as means to dip.
Beans and rice are well and good but they’re not actually very nutrient dense. I know people who QUIT rice due to concerns that a bowl of rice raises blood sugar. In fact a lot of the foods you suggested are fairly high in sugar. I’ve known others who quit beans because they’re notoriously harsh on digestion.
When poor it’s hard to get sufficient nutrients or avoid excessive carbs and sugars, and you don’t have the luxury of playing around with things like speciality diets because you just can’t afford to.
Food is really cheap. In my experience, American born people assume that immigrants and poor people are buying packaged foods. In my experience as a child of immigrants, my parents bought actual bulk food items and produce at stores. It's exceptionally cheap unless you're shopping at a DINK store like whole foods.
Dollar stores are amazing for kids things. For example, balloons are a dollar at the dollar store and ten dollars for the same balloon at Safeway.
I kind of hate that your being downvoted b/c your perspective here is a very common one.
It’s not just a matter of unit price, but also time, convenience, and cal/$. Fruit / veg in general is pretty expensive when looked at from a cal/$ perspective — you pay for a lot of water there. Potatoes, beans, rice are pretty slow cooking, and require dealing with dishes after.
So for my single mom, it was pretty hard to provide anything but
1) fast food (decent cal/$, extremely convenient)
2) microwaveable tv dinners (Meh cal per dollar, but long shelf life, extremely convenient)
3) PB / lunch meat sandwiches (basically god tier for poor chow)
For reference, my mom worked many jobs and got maybe 4-5 hrs sleep a night. Adding 30 minutes for a days worth of meals was a lot.
You clearly haven't bought eggs, beans, rice, etc. at the grocery store and been on a budget. In the last two years the price of eggs have easily doubled--a dozen large store brand eggs are over 3 bucks now vs maybe 99 cents pre-pandemic. Every single staple you mention has gone up in price significantly. Food inflation is astronomical and if you don't feel it then it's quite a privilege. If you were struggling to make ends meet two years ago, you are in deep deep trouble or probably completely forgotten by society and/or dead now.
But you see people with SNAP pushing around carts full of things that aren't eggs and beans and potatoes... and why would they? The maximum monthly benefit for a family of 4 is $939/month, you can buy whatever you want with that.
<insert excuse that poor people can't cook or don't have time or ...>
Thrift stores in rich neighborhoods have significantly higher quality of items than ones in poor neighborhoods. I would not recommend shopping at poor thrift stores.
I always got the impression that it was largely things with a long shelf life, to minimise waste. Which doesn't discount what you've said, but just worth asserting that it's a subset (not always healthy) of regular grocery stuff AND in smaller packages.
Dollar stores are awesome. If you buy crap at the dollar stores, then you are buying crap, but if you buy Cheetos at the dollar store or at the regular grocery shop, they are the same crap. Crap is crap no matter where you buy it.
Any food will make you sick. You can find crap food at any store. Dollar stores don't have the monopoly on that. I think that 90% of "food" at ANY store is crap.
Food is extremely inexpensive if you learn how to make stuff yourself and don't buy anything that is prepackaged. Don't buy Thousand Island dressing for example, make it from base ingredients. Instead of paying $3 at a regular grocery store, you can make it for 25 cents, if that. Croutons? Costs $2.50 at the store, or make them at home in your oven for 10 cents or whatever. All you need is bread and spices, and as I said, this is not a $2.40 savings, oh no. it is a 2,500% return on your money.
Simple things that have little effect for an upper middle class family can completely devastate a poor one.
If you own a 20 y.o. car that you bought for 3k to commute to work it will for sure break down. You go to the mechanic and they quote you 4k, while you live paycheck by paycheck.
Now you cannot drive to work. In non coastal America, that typically has 0 public transportation, you are now convicted to bankruptcy.
An upper middle class family just buys a new car every 5-6 years and they avoid most of the maintenance.
You aren't convicted to bankruptcy, that would be too nice if it were just that. In reality no work = no income = evicted or foreclosed and kicked out on the street with no belongings = no permanent address = no way to pass a job interview or get a job = no way to survive and get back to where you were.
There are certain cliffs in American society where if you fall off you will almost certainly never get back on top without someone stepping in and giving you direct support.
Note that this problem also ties into American (really post WW2) cultural expectations, which are completely out of sync with the rest of the world. In the rest of the world, you either have a social-safety net from your community of your govt.
Somehow, America has neither.
In the rest of the world, if you lose your job -> you move back in with your parents.
In completely individualistic societies -> your govt. provides welfare by taxing the generation with wealth (your parents generation, ie. Age. 50+ people)
___
On the contrary, America allows the age 50+ homeowners to place unprecedented restrictions on housing stock, further increasing their wealth while paying a minority of taxes (prop 13). At the same time, it's the generation that 'kicks their child out at 18', in an era when gas, infrastructure maintenance, university & housing are no longer 'practically free'.
I spent half my twenties driving beater 20 year old cars in non-costal America. Both of which I carried fire extinguishers in - because one of them had a habit of springing exciting fuel leaks in the engine compartment.
The answer to making it work, was of course community. That and $99 per year triple A's free towing. People to get you places when the car is down, friends who look under your car, see that the stick is disconnected from the transmission, and bolt it back on with some bolts they find by the side of the road. Friends with the same model of car who know where the good garage mechanics are.
And here I am driving a 17 year old car which is worth less than I make in a week. It doesn’t really break ever either, just some small stuff over the years.
Our 2005 Honda CR-V was ~$7K 11 years ago and all the maintenance (except tires) has been easily done by me with no unusual tools needed. It’s probably a $3K car now and there’s literally thousands of them around.
It’s not that hard nor time-consuming to do basic maintenance and it saves low four-figures per year.
Where are you going to do maintenance? In your garage or driveway in the home you own? That's a pretty big privilege.
The reality is a low income person is living in low income housing, typically large apartment complexes. These places have strict rules against doing car maintenance and work in their parking lots. In addition it's a huge privilege to have weekend and free time to do car work yourself, not to mention buying the tools and materials necessary for it.
Working on cars is a hobby for middle class folks nowadays, it's not a solution to the general problem that low income people need reliable transportation in most of America.
The assumption that a 2005 CR-V in reasonable condition is a $3k car was probably a decent one 3 years ago. Less so now if my recent auto shopping is any indication.
I like driving older cars into the well-maintained 200-300k mile range myself and I heartily agree that it’s the economical choice. I’ve financed a year-long sabbatical by driving a ‘93 sedan, so the potential gains really are not only four figures per year, they can reach into five figures.
At the same time the GP’s projection of catastrophic failure rings true to me — almost every car I’ve had reached this point. Each time I’ve also either had the resources to deal with the problem or generous help to fall back on, but it’s easy to imagine what it would be like if that had not been the case and it isn’t pretty. And it’s usually time-consuming and inconvenient to find the next bargain old auto as well.
The labor shortage impacted mechanics available too, it's now a $75/hr job; which inclines one to work more paying gigs.
Even historically, you often got what you paid for. Turns out that the friend that takes beer as payment and doesn't have a shop manual is less likely to figure out the vacuum system correctly in not their car.
Heck, I don't even trust many of the $75/hr oil change place to not bugar up my drain bolt.
It is worse than the bar chart implies. If you are rich and your housing is costing $5k a month, because you want to live centrally, or in a massive house, you have the choice to downsize and put up with living not so centrally, or a smaller house. The poor person might already be in the cheapest accommodation it is possible to get.
In Australia for example, if someone gets a government allowance due to unemployment, it will cover renting a room, and then maybe $10 or $20 a week for food or something like that. Basically it doesn't cover the cost of living. They can't downsize. To what? There is a base level of accommodation cost.
Similarly there are a bunch of other jettisonable features of the rich person's life. Their health insurance is better, they buy convenient and funky food that is delivered fresh, they have nicer cars and so on.
True, but many of them think they're richer than they are, and develop dependencies on things that max out all of their income and going into so much debt that they don't realize how little volatility they can actually handle.
We need to reiterate that, as humans, we are all the same in that our struggles emit terrible emotions that either deprive us of our liberties or freedoms (freedom to spend time doing what you want when you want to do it). And doing this might turn people to different political parties, causes, and charities that will help achieve this.
But going straight to "everyone gets free rent" isn't exactly likely, so throwing out ideas that might only requires maybe 10 years of political shenanigans to move the needle is better than going far into the unrealistic category.
We haven’t really moved the needle on anything in regards to lowering the COL (except, maybe and in only some circumstances, healthcare, but look at how far we have to go and how bad the political backlash was) in… at least two decades? Maybe three?
Federal minimum wage hasn’t even increased from $7.25 since 2009. In 1997 it was $5.15 (or $9.55 in 2022 dollars, so even 25 years ago we paid workers more than we do today)
Maybe it’s time to start putting those crazy ideas out there, because the status quo is proving more and more unsustainable
I've never been poor in the sense that when I was young and didn't have much or any money to my name, my parents were well into the middle class and if my back was against the wall (or even near it), they were a phone call away. That being said, at that time, fucking overdraft fees. I remember doing the math of whether I could afford something on my debit card and the times I was wrong, not realizing it for a few days (had to go to an ATM to check balance back in the day) and each transaction with a balance below 0 incurred a $35 penalty. How could that be legal? It said everything you needed to know about our laws really.
I spent far too long in a job where I was supposedly earning around the average salary for my city. But I had almost zero disposable income because the cost of rent was so high. People just one paygrade higher than me were able to afford vacations all over the place, because a tiny bit of extra pay each payday meant more disposable income.
If( (salary - requirements) == 0 ){
You are screwed.
}
If( (salary - requirements) > 0 ){
It snowballs.
}
Luckily I quit, and now earn more than the directors where I worked before. :)
That reminds me of the quote from David Copperfield: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
Translation for those unfamiliar with obsolete English currency: 19 pounds 19 shillings 6 pence is 6 pence short of 20 pounds. 20 pounds 0 shillings 6 pence is 6 pence over 20 pounds. The point is that the very small amount of 6 pence over or under your income makes all the difference.
Readit News
Car dependency and bad city planning.
This is literally the majority of the problem.
If you have a walkable town, you don't need a car for your basic you need to live. You just walk to the store. Also, because going to a store is not a car trip, you can do it every day, or every other day. You don't need a insanely large fridge and freezers that Americans seem to have. You can also take advantage of temporary price reductions.
Towns built around walkability, bikes and public transport are just superior in every way that we can measure, from health to water use and so on.
The US needs to fundamentally change its approach to cities and towns. You can't have poor people working in cities to provide services and then force them to live in some Cul-de-Sac cheap house 1-2h drive outside of the city.
I highly suggest people listen to Peter Calthorpe, who coined the turn Transit Oriented Development. Here some great videos that are worth checking out, one general, one about California:
- General/China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqldZhxl86I
- Cali: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUtdFbK4YG4
This article is missing the forest while talking about trees.
It is doubly sad, because the political and economic dominance of the boomer era was so pronounced, that many Americans now dream of a future (suburban white picket fence house) that is derived from exactly this unsustainable past that made the 'dream' unachievable in the first place. American suburbia works if you live in a unipolar era of unprecedented wealth that's unmatched almost anywhere else in the world or in history. Well, duh. It's no different to considering Dubai's abandoned Palm Islands or World Islands a sensible infrastructure because they haven't yet bankrupted a country with practically infinite per-capita wealth. The first sign of economic troubles will decisively doom your nation. It's started for America, and other unsustainable cities will follow suit.
it is staring Americans in their face too. Every private money-conscious closed-system mini-govt ensure that transit and density are in order. People rave about the convenience of buses in college towns and Disneyland's metro system, as if either of those are unrealistic outside of those contexts.
I have said it before and will say it again. American urban infrastructure (or lack there of) is the closest thing we have to a monocausal root of all of America's problems. Obesity, loneliness, cost of living, low trust, Govt. debt etc etc.
The problem with monocausal issue is that it also touches everything.
To really address it, there is no monocausal solution.
- Taxation policy (Land Value Tax)
- Transportation policy local and federal level
- Services policy (police, social services)
- Land use policy (mixed-use, multi-fam homes and so on)
Problem is many of these institutional systems were developed or revolutionized in the exact wrong moment, in the 50/60. So that many standards and standard way of doing things have encoded the exact wrong solution.
Traffic engineering is a particular victim of this. Everything is done by a book of standards, and the standards are just totally wrong.
Average Annual Cost of Car Ownership:
$9,282: https://www.aaa.com/autorepair/articles/average-annual-cost-...
$5,264: https://www.move.org/average-cost-owning-a-car/#data
$11,756 the first year, $7517 the fifth year, $5914 the tenth year: https://www.caranddriver.com/research/a31267529/cost-of-car-...
Cost of a top-of-the line cargo bike:
$6,499.00 (Dual battery, 1,000Wh), Bosch dual-battery system (500/1000 Wh) for a range of up to 206 km (128 mi): https://www.ternbicycles.com/us/bikes/472/gsd-s10-lx
If you live within 20m of where you work, and cargo-centric ebike will suffice (or farther if you can charge it at work). You can take kids to school on one, you can go grocery shopping on one, you effectively do every single trip in a modern city.
For the few things you can't do, the occasional cost of short term car rentals are drops in a bucket.
The point I'm trying to make is this. Yes, public transit is important, yes we need to make our cities interconnected with trains. However, if we want to create a functional system for transit alternatives... we can do it literally today, by creating network of low-car/car-free streets for ebike traffic.
Edit: As a point of illustration that I'm not overstating the issue, my city actually has a thriving e/bike rental market for 5-6 months/year and for the other part of the year, the rentals literally disappear and you can't find a single one until part way through spring season.
And you don't even need an e-bike in most situations.
I completely agree that there would be a lot of benefits if the US focused on making urban areas more walkable and less car-dependent, but I feel it's often presented as though it would solve every problem that the US has.
1. Driving children to schools and other activities is a huge cost in time and money. If children could walk and bike, it would be much cheaper. I walked to school (even back home for launch) and then took the bicycle to soccer practice.
2. Children can spend time alone much earlier and travel alone much earlier. My parents were comfortable with me being alone at home for launch and after school, risk of car accidents was vanishingly small.
3. Mother helping each other out in a walkable neighborhood is trivial. My mother worked, I would simply walk home with a friend and would it at his house. And then later when my parents were home from work I would walk home. No big deal.
4. Having distributed housing policy with lots of option leads to cheaper apartments being available next to richer neighborhoods, means that its easier for low paid child care workers to live closer (walking distance) from the people who have children to take care off.
5. Having mixed use zoning allows for buildings that have child care facilty closer to actual housing in general.
> but I feel it's often presented as though it would solve every problem that the US has
I doesn't solve every problem, but it impacts most problems positively.
Those stores could have different variety if more people relied on them, but they simply don't have the space to compete with the larger store. One gets by selling alcohol and convenience items, the other is really a meat counter.
Not to mention that many/most Americans don’t want to live in your utopia. I’ve lived in walkable, lively parts of cities. Now I live in a stand-alone house and drive everywhere and I much prefer it.
You don't actually need to do this! Its a fantasy that you somehow need to re-design your city to make improvements.
In fact, by simply removing some harmful regulation you can already do 100x better. Removing the function based zoning. Allow mixed use as default. Removing lots of the other regulation such as minimum lot size, offsets and so on.
US city were not designed for cars, and mostly they are simple grids, and that's totally fine.
Changes in pricing for things like water, move to block pricing and increase price depending on how much infrastructure is required.
The tax system should move from property based to land based.
Cars need to be slowed down, lanes need to be made thinner, and add a protected bike lane. This is actually a case where US insane wide streets come in handy, space for bike-lanes is already there.
> Not to mention that many/most Americans don’t want to live in your utopia. I’ve lived in walkable, lively parts of cities. Now I live in a stand-alone house and drive everywhere and I much prefer it.
Even rural and small towns or even villages can be walkable.
And your taxes are likely not covering the infrastructure required for you live-style, you are subsidized by the poorer parts of the city you live in.
Also evidence shows, that areas such as I suggest are getting a huge amount of demand and are really expensive. So I think evidence is clear that there is a huge amount for such development.
And evidence also shows that where they happen they actually make sense for cities in terms of taxation.
This playlist compiles a lot of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ...
> Find something else to pour your energy into.
I'm not 'pouring my energy into it'. I'm simply commenting on an article. That seems to miss the forest because of the trees.
We did it before when we ripped out all the street cars and replaced them with stroads.
I barely leave the house. And when I do, I've mostly always taken as much precautions as I could. I get curbside pickup for all of my groceries. I can't drink the water locally, so I'm dependent on bottled water.
All of this would have been a disaster if I had to cram myself on public transit to go places (definitely would have caught COVID then) or lug a fucking case of water to my house 4 times a week.
Ähh no idea what you are talking about. There is no evidence that less car depended places have higher death rates. You can't just throw out something like that without explanation.
How many people have been saved because they had a neighbor who was one apartment below and was able to help very quickly.
I would argue to opposite of what you suggest is true. More dense less car depended places have a far easier and cheaper time getting medical care to people.
Getting medical care to some far flung subburbs is part of the issue.
> I barely leave the house. And when I do, I've mostly always taken as much precautions as I could.
Why? What crazy situation is this? Most people in most places in the world are not afraid to leave the place where they live. And that was even true for most poor cities. Locals are usually not afraid to walk to the store down the street in their neighborhood.
> I can't drink the water locally, so I'm dependent on bottled water.
That again is a problem of infrastructure. Infrastructure problems are very hard to solve in far flung suburbs and are very expensive because the amount of piping goes up per person.
So I agree, that's a very bad situation, but the solution to that is infrastructure, and not car dependency.
> All of this would have been a disaster if I had to cram myself on public transit to go places
First of all, there is this thing called walking. Also a think called, a bike.
Also talking about public transport in terms of 'cram' is funny, because often you have more space in public transit then in a car and you can work or watch movies.
You seem to have a US perspective of public transit being some dingy lower class thing.
> definitely would have caught COVID then
Funny I never had COVID and I live in Switzerland, the most public transport orient place in the world maybe.
> or lug a fucking case of water to my house 4 times a week.
I actually do that with Cola Light an it isn't that big a deal.
If you want to do really big one time deliveries for some bulk items every week, that's fine. Or you can can also get a small wood cart or some kind of wheeled transport device and carry a week plus worth of water.
I don't want to go to the store that often. Going to the store twice takes way longer than going once and buying twice as much stuff, even if you don't count driving time.
> You can also take advantage of temporary price reductions.
I can do that now, by buying a bunch of food when it's on sale, then loading it all into my car and putting it in my fridge and freezer that have room for all of it. In your world, I couldn't do that.
Then don't, its not forced on anybody.
What you are missing is that you think of going to the store as a trip in off itself. If you like in a walkable community, going to store is just something you do on the side.
I might bring some of my recycling to the center, go to a friends place to hang out then on my way home I quickly go to the store and pick up a few thing that I am missing.
Or simply on my way home from work.
Or sometimes I just go because its a nice couple minutes walk in the fresh hair and I can get some fresh bread.
> I can do that now, by buying a bunch of food when it's on sale, then loading it all into my car and putting it in my fridge and freezer that have room for all of it. In your world, I couldn't do that.
You realize that you just said that you need a car and a large fridge and freezer to save money right? I have neither of those and pretty sure that saves money.
Often those lower priced things are not huge bulk products that you can buy at lower price in unlimited quantity. What I am talking about is that usually there is a box with lots of stuff that is close to expiry date that you can pick up for cheap.
Even if the poor are smart and well behaved this will still apply.
You can get really decent pair of stable boots that can last many years for pretty reasonable price. The increase in quality compared to price of some super custom boots isn't actually sensable.
99% of what rich people buy is not of some massively superior quality. Specially in terms of clothing.
Maybe some really good winter clothing is a exception, but even then layering is probably a better solution to stay warm.
So really I don't buy this explanation unless people can give me some better examples.
It does happen quite literally in the real world with umbrellas, by the way. I live in a quite rainy area. Around 7 or 8 years ago I spent around €60 on a good Knirps umbrella, haven't needed another at the moment. When I bought cheaper umbrellas (not really due to skimping, but I didn't really know the good ones) they only lasted 1-2 years before totally breaking and becoming unusable.
Two cases where it can still apply are toys (Lego lasts forever even if some pieces get lost/broken but damn is it spendy) and things like https://saddlebackleather.com/mens-leather-backpacks/ - I have one that has lasted 10+ years so far and none of the previous Walmart specials lasted more than three years. Could a middle ground be found? Sure.
Another example these days might be energy related - if you’re “well off” you can afford to get a well insulated house with solar and such to offset future energy costs.
- Renting in San Francisco and New York. $$$ gets you way bigger and better places than $. It's not thrice the value. It's over 5x the value. This becomes very obvious as you move up the salary ladder.
- To plagiarise a Reddit post on this exact topic (which the OP article was plagirising but...) "poor people can't buy in bulk, so they never get to enjoy the savings of Costco"
- A whole cow costs less than the sum of the prices of its parts. Same applies to poultry and fish. Vegetables seem to have a linear price to amount ratio but that's largely priced in way earlier so it's kind of an illusion.
There is no evil force at work. Simple economics really.
- Economics of scale. This probably applies so widely that it's hard to overstate. e.g. Costco, better boot, whole cow. There are fixed costs to transport, customs, maintaining a store, sales people etc. Cheap stuff has to sacrifice quality so you come back more often - frequent enough to help with the fixed costs.
- Money today > money tomorrow. Not sure if there is an economic principle behind this because it doesn't always hold, but everyone except banks believe it always holds. Maybe because we believe we can invest it real good, or we enjoy the security of it (unless you're better than banks at collecting and/or selling debt). E.g. rent in SF. It takes longer to find tenants for $$$ apartments. And landlords lose more money when they let $$$ apartments sit empty. So, they can't expect to charge 2x the rent for 2x the square footage. Usually 2x the rent offers >= 2x square footage AND more amenities.
Apologies for errors. Had to write this on mobile.
There's always a point of diminishing returns, but it doesn't really make much odds where that is if you've not got the money. If you've only got £20, it doesn't really matter that good long lasting boots can be bought for £50 not £300.
An example is generally a way to solidify or convey an idea.
Why do some people think that attacking the example somehow invalidates the idea?
It's an excerpt from a fantasy book.
If you have a good credit score you can put down a few thousand on a down payment and get a Toyota Corolla with 50k miles for $10-15k that is likely to last for another 200k miles without major repair. If you don’t have a good credit score, the most that downpayment will buy you without a loan is a total crapshoot that can break down and total itself at any time.
I heard exact same anecdote about boots from my grandfather loooong time ago. It’s possible that author hadn’t had chance to hear in “in the wild”.
I believe it’s one of those wisdoms passed from generation to generation.
Deleted Comment
Here are my observations.
* The food will likely make you sick if you eat it regularly, the food options are highly processed and made of cheap, poor quality ingredients.
* Kids, lots of kids. Lots of lower income families have multiple kids and the dollar store is one way to stretch the budget.
* Dollar stores do a decent job at keeping things at $1.25. There were definitely some products that I would see 2x or 3x the price at other stores.
* It was busy, very busy.
The point is, good food can be cheap. And yes, food deserts exist. And yes, people buy poor quality food from stores like Dollar General. But perhaps there is a correlation here? Maybe (some) food deserts exists because there is little demand for fresh food in those regions.
This blew my mind and is a facet of poverty I hadn’t even considered.
Also, are you actually making the point that food deserts exist because all the people in the area just decided not to buy groceries? I haven’t read such a blatant “blame the poors for their situation” take in a while.
Beans are great, but require time to cook that not everyone has, especially when very poor. They also cost money to cook, require a kitchen, time to clean dishes, a place to store em if cooked in bulk, etc.
Bananas though, are wonderful, sent from heaven.
To some of your other posts, it’s not really sufficient that this food merely exists. otherwise, yeah, problemo solved, trivial.
The bridge that has to be gapped is: - foods gotta be accessible - people gotta have enough time to cook the food, this is a biggy - people gotta have time to clean up from the food - people gotta have enough of the healthy food and with enough macronutrient diversity to not get sick. $1 worth of bananas ain’t gonna hold you like that $1 cheeseburger.
Somewhere in all of this is that eating healthy is way more cognitive overload when you’re poor than when you’re stable. Now that I’m stable I have enough time on a Sunday to cook a weeks worth of meals. I don’t really have to scrunch to do it, I’m not cutting into sleep time to do it. Lotta folks don’t have that luxury.
A head of broccoli is going for ~$5 at Loblaws in Canada. It's not much cheaper at shops in NYC.
https://www.loblaws.ca/broccoli/p/20145621001_EA
I bring up this example because if you try hard enough, $5 will buy you an entire (unhealthy) meal. It's really hard to tell someone to spend their entire meal budget on a single head of broccoli!
> Organic rainbow carrots are $1.50 a pound
https://www.loblaws.ca/organic-carrots-bunched/p/20056027001...
Sold by the bunch, but really more like ~$10/lb.
I don't disagree that it's possible to eat healthily on a thin budget, but we're sadly past the point where this can be accomplished by buying fresh vegetables at the supermarket.
If you take a bus to work, you probably don’t have time cook.
> And yes, food deserts exist.
Yes because car dependency and long distances involved. If you have a mixed use walkable area there is almost always access to freshish foods at least basic vegis.
Being depended on big box stores in some commercial district with a gigantic parking lot that you can't walk to that you only go to once every week or two is the problem.
You’re gonna need to eat well over ten pounds of broccoli and carrots to get a full days calories. This is going to be something most are going to see more as supplemental, or as means to dip.
Beans and rice are well and good but they’re not actually very nutrient dense. I know people who QUIT rice due to concerns that a bowl of rice raises blood sugar. In fact a lot of the foods you suggested are fairly high in sugar. I’ve known others who quit beans because they’re notoriously harsh on digestion.
When poor it’s hard to get sufficient nutrients or avoid excessive carbs and sugars, and you don’t have the luxury of playing around with things like speciality diets because you just can’t afford to.
Dollar stores are amazing for kids things. For example, balloons are a dollar at the dollar store and ten dollars for the same balloon at Safeway.
Eggs, beans, rice, bread, potatoes, apples, bananas, are among the cheapest foods at any grocery store or supermarket.
It’s not just a matter of unit price, but also time, convenience, and cal/$. Fruit / veg in general is pretty expensive when looked at from a cal/$ perspective — you pay for a lot of water there. Potatoes, beans, rice are pretty slow cooking, and require dealing with dishes after.
So for my single mom, it was pretty hard to provide anything but
1) fast food (decent cal/$, extremely convenient)
2) microwaveable tv dinners (Meh cal per dollar, but long shelf life, extremely convenient)
3) PB / lunch meat sandwiches (basically god tier for poor chow)
For reference, my mom worked many jobs and got maybe 4-5 hrs sleep a night. Adding 30 minutes for a days worth of meals was a lot.
If DOLLAR GENERAL qualifies, for many poor communities it's the only option in town.
But you see people with SNAP pushing around carts full of things that aren't eggs and beans and potatoes... and why would they? The maximum monthly benefit for a family of 4 is $939/month, you can buy whatever you want with that.
<insert excuse that poor people can't cook or don't have time or ...>
Any food will make you sick. You can find crap food at any store. Dollar stores don't have the monopoly on that. I think that 90% of "food" at ANY store is crap.
Food is extremely inexpensive if you learn how to make stuff yourself and don't buy anything that is prepackaged. Don't buy Thousand Island dressing for example, make it from base ingredients. Instead of paying $3 at a regular grocery store, you can make it for 25 cents, if that. Croutons? Costs $2.50 at the store, or make them at home in your oven for 10 cents or whatever. All you need is bread and spices, and as I said, this is not a $2.40 savings, oh no. it is a 2,500% return on your money.
Hence, the entire point of the article. Beginning with the boots paradox.
If you own a 20 y.o. car that you bought for 3k to commute to work it will for sure break down. You go to the mechanic and they quote you 4k, while you live paycheck by paycheck.
Now you cannot drive to work. In non coastal America, that typically has 0 public transportation, you are now convicted to bankruptcy.
An upper middle class family just buys a new car every 5-6 years and they avoid most of the maintenance.
There are certain cliffs in American society where if you fall off you will almost certainly never get back on top without someone stepping in and giving you direct support.
Somehow, America has neither.
In the rest of the world, if you lose your job -> you move back in with your parents.
In completely individualistic societies -> your govt. provides welfare by taxing the generation with wealth (your parents generation, ie. Age. 50+ people)
___
On the contrary, America allows the age 50+ homeowners to place unprecedented restrictions on housing stock, further increasing their wealth while paying a minority of taxes (prop 13). At the same time, it's the generation that 'kicks their child out at 18', in an era when gas, infrastructure maintenance, university & housing are no longer 'practically free'.
The answer to making it work, was of course community. That and $99 per year triple A's free towing. People to get you places when the car is down, friends who look under your car, see that the stick is disconnected from the transmission, and bolt it back on with some bolts they find by the side of the road. Friends with the same model of car who know where the good garage mechanics are.
But I also grew up dirt poor and understand the difference between where I'm at now and where my family was at when I was young, in terms of vehicles.
There's a world of difference between an older, well-maintained, vehicle, and buying a car for $300 off the side of the road.
It’s not that hard nor time-consuming to do basic maintenance and it saves low four-figures per year.
The reality is a low income person is living in low income housing, typically large apartment complexes. These places have strict rules against doing car maintenance and work in their parking lots. In addition it's a huge privilege to have weekend and free time to do car work yourself, not to mention buying the tools and materials necessary for it.
Working on cars is a hobby for middle class folks nowadays, it's not a solution to the general problem that low income people need reliable transportation in most of America.
I like driving older cars into the well-maintained 200-300k mile range myself and I heartily agree that it’s the economical choice. I’ve financed a year-long sabbatical by driving a ‘93 sedan, so the potential gains really are not only four figures per year, they can reach into five figures.
At the same time the GP’s projection of catastrophic failure rings true to me — almost every car I’ve had reached this point. Each time I’ve also either had the resources to deal with the problem or generous help to fall back on, but it’s easy to imagine what it would be like if that had not been the case and it isn’t pretty. And it’s usually time-consuming and inconvenient to find the next bargain old auto as well.
There are lots of these.
Even historically, you often got what you paid for. Turns out that the friend that takes beer as payment and doesn't have a shop manual is less likely to figure out the vacuum system correctly in not their car.
Heck, I don't even trust many of the $75/hr oil change place to not bugar up my drain bolt.
In Australia for example, if someone gets a government allowance due to unemployment, it will cover renting a room, and then maybe $10 or $20 a week for food or something like that. Basically it doesn't cover the cost of living. They can't downsize. To what? There is a base level of accommodation cost.
Similarly there are a bunch of other jettisonable features of the rich person's life. Their health insurance is better, they buy convenient and funky food that is delivered fresh, they have nicer cars and so on.
- the first level commenter: Empathetically describes the problems of a person/family in poverty.
This reminds me of how much divided our society is, the have's vs have-notsWe need to reiterate that, as humans, we are all the same in that our struggles emit terrible emotions that either deprive us of our liberties or freedoms (freedom to spend time doing what you want when you want to do it). And doing this might turn people to different political parties, causes, and charities that will help achieve this.
But going straight to "everyone gets free rent" isn't exactly likely, so throwing out ideas that might only requires maybe 10 years of political shenanigans to move the needle is better than going far into the unrealistic category.
Federal minimum wage hasn’t even increased from $7.25 since 2009. In 1997 it was $5.15 (or $9.55 in 2022 dollars, so even 25 years ago we paid workers more than we do today)
Maybe it’s time to start putting those crazy ideas out there, because the status quo is proving more and more unsustainable
"You're poor? Work harder. Get a better job. First principles."
"You're unhealthy? Exercise more. Eat better food. First principles."
If( (salary - requirements) == 0 ){ You are screwed. }
If( (salary - requirements) > 0 ){ It snowballs. }
Luckily I quit, and now earn more than the directors where I worked before. :)
Translation for those unfamiliar with obsolete English currency: 19 pounds 19 shillings 6 pence is 6 pence short of 20 pounds. 20 pounds 0 shillings 6 pence is 6 pence over 20 pounds. The point is that the very small amount of 6 pence over or under your income makes all the difference.