The High Cost of Having No Choice

We live inside a maze that we didn’t design, don’t fully understand, and have mostly given up on changing. We call it “the system” as if it were weather: something that just happens to us. But systems are built, revised, and defended by people, often for reasons that sounded reasonable at the time, and they can be unbuilt and rebuilt, too.

Across housing, transportation, and energy, the United States has quietly normalized a politics of “no alternatives, ”and the price of that is paid in both dollars and in diminished freedom of movement. Not just movement as in “Can I get to work?” but “Can I leave my apartment if I’m in a wheelchair?” “Can I change my gas provider?” “Can I buy a car that doesn’t sentence me to years of debt?”

I want to talk about elevators, cars, and utility bills—three things that sound unrelated until you look at what they have in common.

The elevator that never gets built

Start with something as mundane as an elevator in a mid‑rise apartment building.

If you build a five‑story apartment building in much of Europe, the elevator is an expected feature but not a financial crisis. It’s a modestly sized machine that carries people up and down; it’s not cheap, but it doesn’t blow up the pro forma. Developers can more or less assume they’ll put one in.

In the United States, by contrast, an elevator for the same kind of building can cost several times as much. A basic four‑stop elevator that costs somewhere around 36,000 dollars in Switzerland can run about 158,000 dollars in New York City. A six‑stop elevator that might be roughly 60,000 dollars in Belgium can end up well into the 170,000‑dollar range here. Analyses of mid‑rise construction find that installing an elevator in North America is roughly three times as expensive as in Western Europe.

The reasons are “technical” and “regulatory” and “safety‑related”—all words that tend to shut down discussion. The cab must be bigger, the shaft larger, the whole system built to accommodate a fully extended stretcher and multiple emergency personnel, not just someone in a wheelchair and an attendant, which is the common European standard. There are only a handful of major manufacturers. The maintenance market is dominated by a specialized, tightly controlled labor force. The technical codes are a fragmented, North‑America‑only ecosystem that diverges from harmonized international standards.

Individually, each of these choices can be defended. Of course we want elevators to be safe. Of course we care about first responders being able to do their jobs. Of course specialized labor should be paid well.

But stack those choices together, over decades, and you end up with a simple fact: a basic elevator in a small apartment building is eye‑wateringly expensive. For a mid‑rise building in a city that is not deeply resourced, the elevator can be the thing that tips the project into “we can’t afford it.”

So some developers respond in the most rational but morally disturbing way possible: they just don’t build the elevator. The New York Times describes a five‑story building in Philadelphia where the developer skipped the elevator altogether because the cost and complexity of complying with American elevator rules made the numbers not pencil out. The building went up; the units got rented. If you’re disabled, or become disabled, or break your leg, or simply age out of bounding up four flights of stairs, you’re out of luck. The building works fine for the young and able‑bodied and effectively excludes everyone else.

The elevator rules were partly justified as accessibility. They can be defended in the language of safety and inclusion. But the lived result is that many people get no elevator at all.

The affordable car that disappeared

Cars are easier to get mad about, because the pain is right there in the monthly payment.

If you bought a new car in the early 2010s, there were genuine options for small, relatively inexpensive vehicles: Honda Fit, Fiat 500, Toyota Yaris, Ford Fiesta, Chevrolet Sonic, Hyundai Accent, Kia Rio. They weren’t glamorous, but they were workable. Many of them sold new in the teens or low‑20,000‑dollar range; adjusted for inflation, those prices would now feel like a blessed relief compared with “entry‑level” today.

Now, many of those models no longer exist in the U.S. market. The Fit is gone. The Fiesta is gone. The Sonic is gone. Several of the bare‑bones sedans and hatchbacks that used to populate rental fleets and first‑car stories have quietly disappeared. In 2012, there were roughly a dozen truly affordable small‑car models; today there are only a handful left.

Dealers’ lots are full of crossover SUVs and trucks festooned with screens and “features” that add to the margin and the sticker price. The average transaction price for a new vehicle hovers around 49,000–50,000 dollars, and a standard new‑car purchase is now regularly described as a “debt sentence” for many households. Monthly payments in the 700–800‑dollar range are common; a significant share of buyers pay more than 1,000 dollars a month, often on six‑ or seven‑year loans. Car repossessions have surged to their highest levels since 2009, with over 2.2 million vehicles repossessed in 2025.

The usual explanation is cultural: Americans like big cars. There’s some truth in that. But culture doesn’t float in a vacuum; it’s shaped by what’s on offer and what’s incentivized.

For decades, U.S. policy has treated trucks and SUVs more leniently than small cars in terms of fuel‑economy rules and other regulations. “Light truck” became a magic category that covers a huge share of the SUVs and crossovers you see on the road. If you were a manufacturer, you could sell bigger vehicles, profit more from each unit, and face a softer compliance burden than if you focused on tiny hatchbacks. Add cheap credit, stagnant wages, and a built environment that forces people to drive whether they want to or not, and you get a car market where the “normal” choice is a very large, very expensive vehicle and the genuinely affordable new car is endangered.

No one stood up in Congress and said, “Let’s quietly eliminate simple, cheap new cars and push everyone into high‑debt, high‑margin vehicles.” It looked like technical tweaks, exemptions, incentives, and industry‑friendly compromises. It looked like “what consumers want,” as defined by the firms that profit from manufacturing and financing those wants.

Meanwhile, on a typical street in a mid‑sized European city, you still see small cars everywhere. Tiny hatchbacks parallel‑parked like Tetris pieces. Modest sedans that fit into compact spaces. The difference is not that Europeans are inherently more virtuous or frugal. It’s that their policy choices, fuel taxes, urban design, and market structures keep small, cheap cars as a real option instead of a nostalgic memory.

The utility you can’t escape

Now let’s talk about something even less visible: your gas bill.

I have a small apartment in Italy, in Umbria just north of Rome. There, I discovered something that felt almost subversive: I could shop for gas providers. The physical pipes are owned and maintained by a big, incumbent infrastructure company. But layered on top of that, there’s a competitive market for retail gas and electricity providers. When I realized my original provider—Umbria Gas—was charging high rates, I could switch to another company using the same underlying infrastructure and pay less. It wasn’t activism; it was an online form.

Back home in suburban Minnesota, my gas situation is different. I have CenterPoint. That’s it. I did not choose them. I cannot un‑choose them. The only meaningful “choice” would be to move out of my home and into a different service territory, assuming I can even find one that offers better options.

Utilities are often described as “natural monopolies.” There’s some real logic there: it isn’t efficient to have multiple overlapping sets of pipes or wires. The standard American bargain has been: we grant a single company monopoly rights in a territory, and in exchange, the state regulates it to ensure fair rates and reliable service.

In theory, that’s a compact between the public and the private provider. In practice, it often turns into a very comfortable situation for the utility and a very constrained one for the customer. The regulator is underfunded, overmatched, or politically captured. The utility has the money, the lobbyists, the technical experts. It shapes the rules of the game, often behind closed doors.

Meanwhile, the European Union has spent decades trying to separate infrastructure from the retail function, so that households can have some meaningful choice about providers. It’s not utopia, and not every country has done it well. But the principle is clear: “one company forever” is a choice, not a law of nature.

Here, we largely accept that monopoly as natural. We gripe about rates, but we complain to the company as if it were a moody god, not a franchisee operating under a political charter that could be rewritten.

The politics of “no alternatives”

What ties together the oversized elevator that never gets built, the missing cheap car, and the monopoly gas provider?

Each involves a sector with real safety, complexity, or infrastructure concerns; a long history of policy and regulatory decisions made in the name of safety, efficiency, or growth; and a resulting market structure that gives ordinary people very few meaningful options while funneling money and power toward a concentrated set of corporate actors.

Then add a culture of resignation. We don’t remember that the elevator code was written by a committee that could have chosen differently. We don’t connect our car payment to decades of policy that nudged the industry toward big vehicles. We don’t see our utility bill as the product of a franchise that the state granted and could, at least in principle, restructure.

We are encouraged to think in the language of “there is no alternative.” Of course elevators are expensive here. Of course new cars cost a fortune. Of course you can’t choose your gas company. That’s just how it is.

But it isn’t just how it is. It’s how we’ve arranged it.

Democratic accountability, not fatalism

We are living with the consequences of a kind of democratic sleepwalking.

We outsource vast swaths of policy to technical processes and specialized bodies, then never check back in to see whether those processes are serving us. We treat phrases like “safety code” or “natural monopoly” or “industry standard” as conversation‑enders instead of conversation‑starters. We hear that some regulation or subsidy was adopted with good intentions and stop short of asking whether those intentions are still being honored in the world we actually inhabit.

Regulation itself is not the villain. Many rules were created in response to genuine problems: fires, accidents, market failures, abusive practices. Elevators used to be dangerous; cars used to be rolling coffins; utilities used to gouge customers with no oversight.

The villain is complacency, as well as the way powerful interests thrive in the fog that complacency creates.

The flip side of “systems are built” is that systems can be changed. Not easily, not quickly, and not without a fight—but they can be changed. We could decide that our elevator codes should prioritize real accessibility at reasonable cost, rather than assumptions that result in no elevator at all. We could decide that our vehicle regulations should protect the option of owning a modest, inexpensive car that doesn’t require a seven‑year loan. We could decide that the franchise we grant to utilities comes with clearer obligations, sharper oversight, and, where feasible, some form of customer choice.

Those are political decisions. They belong in the civic arena, not just in the engineering manual or the rate case docket.

Democratic accountability here means asking candidates how they think about market structure, not just tax rates; treating regulatory appointments as politically consequential; supporting local and state‑level reforms that expand options; and being suspicious, in a healthy way, whenever you’re told, “That’s just how it has to be,” especially when “how it has to be” seems to work out beautifully for a small number of corporations.

We are not doomed to a politics of “no alternatives.” We’re already exercising democratic power all the time; we’re just often doing it blindly, by letting others make the small, technical decisions that turn into big, lived realities. The first step is noticing that the elevator that never got built, the cheap car that vanished, and the utility you can’t escape are three faces of the same problem. Once you see that, it’s hard to unsee. And that’s where change starts.