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What are your tips for saving money and reducing waste?
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2023
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Asklemmy
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If only I could afford to live near transit...
The real question is, can you afford not to?
Cheapest city with moderately decent public transit is probably Washington DC. With an average home price comparable to the one I live in without public transit of about $600,000 more than my current home. Even if I didn't own my truck outright (8 years old, 58k miles) and the price of gasoline doubled, my payback period for 100% free public transit is greater than infinity with a 5% cost of money calculated in.
It's a bit like solar. I've run the numbers, and had others run the numbers, and the conclusion is that it would require replacing solar panels twice before I made back my investment, even with a 0% loan for the panels and install.
I'd love to be part of it. I'd love to have European-style public transit. Even in the few places where viable public transit exists in the US, it's not affordable to move to those places. shrug
Cheapest city with decent pubtrans is almost certainly Chicago, where you can still buy a SFH for under 200K pretty easily.
The weasel words in your reply are "comparable to the one I live in". Of course dense areas have the best transit, and if course homes and especially lot sizes are smaller in dense areas, and prohibitively expensive at the scale of lots you see in less urbanized areas. It's ridiculous to compare.
The fact is, the large homes far away from city centers are heavily subsidized by the convenience of personal automotives. If we're going to unravel car dependency or even the current high level of car incentivization we currently experience, the true cost of that lifestyle will be shown to be much higher.