Less than a week into 2026, "affordability" is already emerging as a frontrunner for the word of the year. So why are so few people talking about the unaffordable costs of car ownership, never mind policies that could finally make it optional?
For the last few months, a chorus of politicians and pundits have warned of a growing "affordability" crisis in America, and blamed their political opponents for failing to curb prices for everyday Americans. In November, New York City's incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani and President Trump even formed a surprising bond over "the central themes of ... the cost of housing, cost of child care, the cost of groceries, the cost of utilities," as Mamdani told Meet the Press.
Jared Bernstein, a former economic adviser to President Biden, echoed that sentiment in the New York Times earlier this week, when he declared "affordability" to be "the most important word in politics and economics right now"; he also called on politicians to focus on the same four pillars as Mamdani and Trump, with only the cost of healthcare swapped for the cost of groceries.
If you're a transportation reform advocate who's noticing car dependence conspicuously absent from both those lists, you're not alone. (Though, to be clear, Mamdani emphasizes it plenty when he isn't searching for common ground with the president.)
Time and again, the conversation about affordability omits transportation cost burden, despite the fact that getting around is the second-largest expense for the average American household, gobbling up 17 percent of the average paycheck. And more accurately, the burden of car ownership is the elephant in the proverbial room for Americans struggling to afford to pay rent, considering that 92 percent of U.S. households have at least one car.
It's no secret why. After nearly a century of auto-centric planning, the vast majority of us simply have no choice but to drive to the vast majority of our destinations, and policymakers have trouble imaging a world where constituents could bike, walk or take the bus for any significant fraction of those trips. Add decades of lobbying and manipulative culture-building have made private cars seem synonymous with freedom, security, and status in the American consciousness, and questioning the cost of automobiles can feel a little like questioning the cost of oxygen.
But those planning decisions and that culture can be reimagined in our lifetime — and if we take a hard look at our wallets, it's clear that we can't afford not to.
In 2023, the last year for which federal data is available, the average U.S. household spent $13,174 just to get around, thanks in large part to the inherent unaffordability of purchasing, maintaining, insuring, parking, registering and fueling a private automobile, even if it's a cheap, used model.
That amount has risen, too: one October 2025 analysis noted that the cost of owning a car has gone up 40.6 percent since January 2020 as insurance, maintenance and repair costs spike. And it's also an average, which includes the one-third of Americans who belong to households that don't or can't rely on automobiles to meet their basic needs.
For the growing number of U.S. residents living in poverty, that amount isn't just unsustainable; it's devastating. Households from the lowest income quintile that have access to a private vehicle — often because their car dependent landscapes force them to own or lease a car just to get to work, school, or the grocery store — can expect to spend around 40 percent of their after-tax pay on their cars. For these families, feeding the fuel tank or paying a predatory car loan often consumes the same scarce pool of money they need to feed their kids.
And regardless of the current federal edict against acknowledging the impacts of racism, that burden falls disproportionately on Black motorists, three-quarters of whom are struggling with the costs of car ownership.
If many Americans can't imagine a world where they can get around without cars or the mountain of costs that come with them, it often is easier for them to imagine their single largest household expense — housing — going down. Greedy landlords, headlines about private equity firms buying up single family homes, and that vacant lot at the end of the block where no one can seem to build an apartment building are all concrete reminders of why so few of us have shelter that matches our budgets.
But it's also important to remember the role that car dependency itself plays in our housing crisis, and how inextricably intertwined the two crises are. Mass car use requires building driveways and garages where high-rises could be, tearing down intergenerational family homes to expand highways, and replacing dense, walkable neighborhoods where throngs of people have apartments on every block with sprawling suburbs that house astonishingly few families per square foot.
One 2024 study found that when we add up all the urbanized land currently we devote to roads — much of which could be easily rededicated to building housing — we're sacrificing an astonishing $4.1 trillion, or 22 percent of American gross domestic product.
Residents of cities that have made better choices, though, are already receiving dividends.
With a handful of exceptions where housing prices have been depressed by rampant, racist disinvestment, the least car-dependent large cities in America routinely rank as its most affordable places to live, at least when the combined cost of transportation and housing are divided by the median household income. Residents of car-dependent metros like Phoenix and San Diego, meanwhile, spend around half of their take-home pay on shelter and transportation alone, leaving them little money left to eat, save, and enjoy life.
Bernstein was right when he wrote in the New York Times that "zoning rules and other regulatory sludge discourage developers from building affordable homes," but it's important to name just how much of the vision behind that "sludge" was motivated by the automobile industry and those who profit from it. Too many American cities were built around the ideal that housing should be driving-distance away from everything else — and there should always an ocean of parking waiting when you arrive.
Of course, these kind of direct household costs aren't the only ways that compulsory car dependency burdens our communities, whether or not we ever spend a dollar at the auto dealership or a penny at the gas pump. We all pay for the public health costs of traffic violence and mass air pollution; we all pay to expand and maintain overbuilt infrastructure in a futile quest to curb traffic; we all pay to bolster bloated police forces to patrol those massive roads; we all pay the uncountable costs of lost social connections, and joy; and as climate change accelerates, the odds that our entire species will pay the ultimate price are increasing, too.
But even if we focus only on the narrowest possible meaning of "affordability," America can no longer afford to ignore the urgency of providing more mobility options and recentering automobiles in our day to day life. Because if we don't, we won't just find ourselves broke; we'll find our whole country broken.
