You can also choose how many and why type of cars to have, what food to eat, how much to spend on vacations, etc.
Hell, you can even choose where and what you do for work! What a country!
Many people will choose higher spending power with two incomes rather than take a step down to live on one.
The (mental) cost of moving is sometimes hard. Here are only two main things:
- you lose your support system (friends, family)
- you lose your time (and maybe cost) saving tricks/knowledge (where to go to buy things, medicine, …)
All these are not impossible to solve but they are way harder for single parent family.
Yet Detroit's unemployment rate is 3.8%. For comparison, New York's unemployment rate is 4.6% and San Francisco's unemployment rate is 4.0%.
See that's an interesting example. In most places in the US[^1] you have no realistic choice but to have at least 1 car per adult in the household. That's not quite the full extend of choice for "how many cars" one would wish for.
> what food to eat
Have you heard of "food deserts"?
[^1] this is false in a few places that were not bulldozed in the 1960s and still allow for non-car centric life. These places tend to have very high cost of living because they're desirable.
We also lived in what was barely not a food desert at that time, and we walked to the grocery store all the time. "Food desert" can mean it takes 10 minutes to walk to the store. Like for a low income urban census tract it means 0.5 miles. We go on afternoon walks 3-5x that every day.