I don't think many apartment dwellers pay for storage unless they have moved to an apartment from a house. If you are talking about car "storage" I am pretty sure it's free when you own a house.
I was talking about car storage: you get a bill if you park at a garage for work but at home it’s far from free since you’re paying for a significant amount of land and structure on your property and if you live on a private driveway you’re paying some fraction of that as well.
If you live in an outer suburb or more rural area the land costs are pretty low but if you live anywhere near a city it’s not uncommon for that to be adding 20-30% to your housing costs. Even if that’s available a la carte at an apartment complex it means land not being used for people, increasing the per-resident overhead costs, and since parking and traffic concerns are often used to prevent density it reduces the overall supply.
AAA number includes all expenses of owning the car regardless. I am not sure where you live but in the US we don't buy property by a square foot, we buy lots. You cannot really buy a house on a lot of land and strike out a car-sized portion of driveway for a discount.
I live in a city and would not get any discount on my property if I decided to park on the street (also free) instead of parking off street.
> AAA selects top-selling, mid-priced models and compares them across six categories: fuel, maintenance/repair/tire costs, insurance, license/registration/taxes, depreciation, and finance charges.
> I am not sure where you live but in the US we don't buy property by a square foot, we buy lots. You cannot really buy a house on a lot of land and strike out a car-sized portion of driveway for a discount.
Here in the U.S. the lots are sized with the assumption that a large fraction of the space will be used for a driveway and parking spaces or garages and that often is required by zoning codes (the term is “parking minimum”). That means that the decision to focus modern life around car travel instead of other means is implicitly increasing those costs because your house, employer, most businesses, etc. involve extra land purchased to store cars for the ~90-95% of the day where they're idle.
In my neighborhood, that often means roughly half of the total lot size. A transit-oriented design could have significantly more homes available at lower cost since the land is worth more than the structure here.
> I live in a city and would not get any discount on my property if I decided to park on the street (also free) instead of parking off street.
Yes. This is the city subsidizing private car owners — it comes out of your taxes, you just don't get an itemized bill or an explanation of the amenities you're not getting because the space and budget are being devoted to car storage.
If you travel around the country, notice how many cities have narrow sidewalks crowded with people while at most half as many people drive by — that's because the decision was made (probably in the 1950s) that the highest status people would be driving and so things like sidewalks were allocated the space which remains after putting in a wide road and street parking.
It's bad for business but we're so used to it we don't even see the other potential uses of that space and money. It took those pandemic closures to get a lot people to reconsider land allocation in cities and it's generally lead to upticks in sales for adjacent business every time space devoted to cars has been reduced because most of those people driving by never stop on their commute home.
I am still not seeing how am I paying for parking. In my city the lot size and the impervious coverage (you cannot build to cover more than 40% of the land) is caused by preventing flooding, if people built more houses and covered more land it would cause more flooding and has nothing to do with the cars.
