[I] live in New York City ... and don't care to own a car.
Your lack of desire for a car has a LOT more to do with living in NYC than your age or social status. You sound just like friends of mine from NYC.
Your lack of desire for a car has a LOT more to do with living in NYC than your age or social status. You sound just like friends of mine from NYC.
Thus our (and my) psychological shift could be explained as simply as a preference for the hyper-connected urban lifestyle, with decreasing home and car ownership flowing from that change in preferences rather than a direct change in beliefs about cars or houses. Either way, the symptoms look set to persist.
Until you have kids, and you see how most urban school districts are run. This is the same reason our parents left the city and moved to the burbs. Things are not really as different now as we think.
Though now there is a huge opportunity to reduce the cost and drastically improve K12 education. If our generation can break the entrenched bureaucracy of public education, then I would say urbanization in the US could be more than a consequence of Gen Y being poor and delaying starting a family.
As soon as you even think about having kids, absolutely everything about how the suburbs are designed suddenly makes sense.
I still prefer an urban setting though.
The thing with age that young(er) people will never believe is that you change. It really doesn't matter what you think or believe now. It is unlikely to remain constant for 20 years.
Edit: last sentence was unclear
And wanting to not be reliant on a car is a big part of the reason I moved into the city in the first place. I did the calculation many years ago, and figured out that even from a purely financial perspective it's better - the rent's higher, but cars are impressively expensive to own, fuel, and maintain. And there are a bunch of other financial perks. Living within walking distance of numerous bars saves a mint in cab fares, for example. (Not to mention that suburban taxi service tends to be an enormous PITA.)