Warmest month on record(!)
That sounds ominous.
Until you remember that the records don't go back that far, a mere blink of the eye in the life of the planet.
There have been lots of hotter months, the planet will be just fine, thank you.

@1

Indeed, the planet has only had multicellular life on it for a paltry 1/3 of its existence. If we go back to conditions before overprivileged lifeforms started feeling entitled to things like oxygen and sexual reproduction, why, that will probably be an imprevement over the sorry state of affairs today.

By God yes, let's toughen up these emasculated organisms, and make them work a little for their daily adenosine triphosphate!

And how many of those 3 and 4 car garages had room enough to park more than one car? The number of door slots doesn't indicate how most folks with multicar garages actually use them.

@3

These figures are for new construction.

If there were greater demand for a workshop, a storage room, an extended pantry, and/or an extra bedroom, then builders would be adding "utility rooms" to their floor plans, not extra car-holes.

And demand surveys show a desire for more garage space, not for more general-purpose or unfinished space.

@1:

The planet may do just fine - but most of the living things residing on it, not so much.

@4:

Not necessarily. People who live in McMansions want their living areas to look pristine and uncluttered, for appearances sake if nothing else, so all the stuff they never (or very seldom) use goes into the garage. Drive through any development more than five years old on any given weekend when residents are likely to have those garage doors open and it becomes obvious pretty quickly that "more garage space = more room to store crap, not cars".

I just spent a few weeks in Texas McMansion land, and my experience is that in a 3-car garage, at least one, often two of the bays are used for non-car storage: bikes, exercise equipment, a workbench, junk, etc.

Speaking as a guy who owns three cars, plus an unbuilt kit car, a note on climate impact: aspiring automobile hoarders like myself can still only drive one car at a time.

@3: You are going to be sorely disappointed if you came here looking for thoughtful analysis.

For example,if you looked at the Bloomberg article that prompted Charles to write this piece, you'd find that your question had been addressed:

"Even when buyers do prefer bigger garages, it's not clear that they're any likelier to own three cars. The share of households that own three or more cars has remained comparatively flat, ticking up from 17.3 percent in 1990 to 19.7 percent in 2013, according to data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics."

But that doesn't fit with Charles' narrative, so he elected to omit it from his piece. Charles wants the Bloomberg article to stand for the proposition that due to the evils of capitalism, the average American is more concerned with sheltering his/her multi-car fleet of personal vehicles than combating climate change or homelessness. So, even though there's no evidence to suggest that multi-car households have increased--probably because they haven't--Charles nonetheless writes as if that was true.

I'd love to sit in a meeting with a production homebuilder and hear Charles talk them out of 3 car garages.

@2
If our single celled ancestors survived the erratic weather of the Pre-Cambrian era by pulling themselves up by their flagella, so can we!

How did Marxism go from mass industrialization and steel mills and Five Year Plans to Charles' brand of bizarre neo-Luddism? It's really retrograde actually.

Garages are also very cheap to build so it's an economic equation of return on capital spent building that extra garage space. It pencils out quite well when you're building in the suburbs and exurbs.

@4 That doesn't ring true to me. I build wood furniture and restore antique motorcycles. Up to now, I've been borrowing and renting space in various friends' (wait for it) garages. I'm really interested in a project space, and am looking into to adding a workshop to our house. If we go forward with the project, It will almost certainly be added to our house as a "garage". A garage offers roll-in bike storage, easy loading and unloading of project materials, and adds more value to house resale than a "utility room". It just happens that garages make great project rooms.

I'm not claiming desire for project space is behind the boom, I'm sure that many people are actually storing cars, but at the same time, garages are such ideal do-it-all project spaces, that may account for some of it.

Also, as with all the things that are bigger in America (cars, refrigerators, kitchens, garages, etc.), it's much more about status than need. The only real impact the 3 car garage has on greenhouse gases is the fact that they could've divided the land into more lots if they houses were smaller.

We seem to have a consensus among people who have never wanted a home with more than two garages that the people looking for homes with more than two garages do not want to park more than two cars in their garages.

God but do I ever love the internet.

@16:

It's not about whether people WANT a home with more than two garages, but rather what they actually DO with the extra space once they have it. And yes, this is mainly anecdotal, but observation and collection of data is how theories are validated, and based on my - as well as others, apparently - observations, at least one conclusion that can be drawn from the observed data is that most people in fact do NOT want to park more than two cars in their three car garages. Alternately, one might postulate that they possibly would like to park a third car in there, but their over-accumulation of other things, combined with their apparent inability to divest themselves of these things once accumulated, simply prevents them from using that third bay for its intended purpose. Either way it's the same result: no third (or often second) car in the three-car garage.

@17

I don't think you're quite picking up what I'm putting down here, COMTE.

Think for a minute, if it's not too painful: how often would all of these internet experts who don't have or want three-car garages get a peek inside a three-car garage that's mainly being used to garage three cars?

My Seattle neighborhood is full of *single* car garages with no cars in them--it's all storage, project rooms, or they've been converted to dens/offices/bedrooms.

@19

I, too, know quite a few Seattle residents who don't park their cars in their garages-- because the garages are falling apart, or are too small for the SUV/midsize pickup, or the door is too much of a pain to open and shut, or the driveway is too steep, or the garage floods every year, or backing into the street is too hair-raising... this city is practically a museum of single-space garages that can't be used to store cars.

And if you can't store a car in it, then yeah, you probably just throw your old mattresses and scrap lumber and broken water heaters and other junk in there until it fills up every ten years and you haul it all off to the transfer station and start over again. But that's not at all what people with accessible, usable garages in new construction are doing with them.

@4 As someone who grew up in a suburb where 'everyone' had a 3-car garage, most of these homes also had full basements (often finished) and laundry / pantry rooms and bonus rooms. For their extra stuff. A third bay for a car allows for the easy storage of a lawn mower, snow blower, bikes etc etc. So, my parents large two car garage (they later wished they had built a 3 car garage) was pretty crowded once you fit all of this in 800 sf. Why not a shed? Because many of these subdivisions do not allow sheds or accessory structures in backyards, so everything goes into the garage. I guess it makes the rich people feel fancier to have a big garage and no sheds.

Homelessness is caused by drug addiction, if these cars start shooting heroin they will likely be parked curbside too.

@21

What decade was this?

From the '50s through 2008, the number of cars per household in the US increased steadily (see table 8.2) after which it fell off slightly to 2013's 2.06 per household. Keep in mind that this average includes renters as well as homeowners, and includes all zero-car and one-car households.

Another source tells us that in 2009, more than 20% of all American households owned three or more cars.

But hey, keep trusting your own personal experience and anecdotal accounts from SLOG's panel of internet experts, if you're more comfortable with that.

i'm going to upsize soon from a 2200 sq ft to something like 3000 sq ft, with at least a 3 car garage, and hopefully a barn. on 10 acres. suck it.

@24: Just remember, you can't take all that with you when you go, but you can moon your kids from Elysium. Enjoy your sunburn and skin cancer.

@19 & @20: Single-car garages abound where I live, too. And people are not using them for storing cars for the same reasons you just said, but for storage of accumulated household items instead. And what garage rental space is available in my community is on the other side of town 6 miles out of my way if not further out in the toolies, and the rent managers can name their own exorbitant rates because of the dearth in spaces.
So it's durable car covers for us unless there's a windstorm. But we've weathered 42 years of 80 mph gales, and many power outages so far.