More expensive? With an automobile at 20K and still costing .10+ per mile and rising?

It's quite a bit less for me and my wife who have switched to a one car, one scooter family. The scooter is for trips to work and around town. We even manage groceries. I guess it's a bit easier for me since I'm a writer and work from home. The car is only for long trips.

As for homeownership. Well, we live in a multilevel and energy really is pretty efficient. The one thing I'm looking at right now is a deck garden. The deck is actually pretty large and I could get about 120 square feet out of it and still have space. Gardens, I know, can be a bit heavy so we're looking at putting together a gird for it. All in all, not too much heavier than a waterbed and spread over a larger area.

I know this sounds silly, but I've put together a little emergency stash of food + water. 3 weeks and building right now. Mostly pasta, dried fruits, jerky, hard tack, MREs when I can get them and vitamins to fill in the gaps.

HiH, what is your total household energy consumption from all sources in BTU/square feet/year? I am running at around 80,000 BTU/sf/yr, down from about 110,000 before building envelope improvements. Heating Degree Days average about 6400/year where I live near Boston.

After suggesting several times the idea of a "winter apartment" within a larger house, we have moved to a 3000 sf factory loft apartment in upstate New York (cold!). The loft has so many windows and high ceilings that it is impossible to heat, although it does pretty well with passive solar on the sunny days. Inside this loft is a 500sf (or so) separately-insulated "apartment" consisting of a bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and office (no living room). This is heated, most of the time, with a single 1500W electric heater in the kitchen, plus another 400W heater under the desk in the office. There are still some things that could be done, particularly adding insulated curtains not only to exterior windows but interior windows as well (didn't get to it this year).

No air conditioning, dehumidifiers, etc. I'm aiming for 40kwh/day in the winter and 10kwh/day in the rest of the year, for a total of about 6,650 kwh/year.

I now work in the office, cutting my commute time (from 12 months ago) from 3 hours/day to zero. There is a bank, grocery store and post office within a 3 minute walk. We are going to plant a vegetable garden in the spring, although this is something of a hobby considering the profusion of organic farms in the immediate area.

You have to use every space you can for food, and think of landscaping as another opportunity for food production. We have a fifth of an acre lot, with about a quarter of that taken up by the house, the sidewalk, compost pile, pathways, etc. We have two long (18 by 6 feet) bed gardens for veggies: tomatoes, lettuce, squash, beans, etc. We use a sort of french intensive method, to plant things nearly right on top of each other. We stack as much stuff on trellises and frames as possible. I haven't had any success with pumpkins that way, but we are trying. We have a large cold frame, about half the size of one of the raised beds, so we get to start everything three weeks early. We have a "hedge" of a dozen dwarf apple trees in the front yard, and blueberries and elderberries down one side of the house, and hazelnuts and greens down the other side. We put strawberries and tomatoes in pots whereever we can, but the strawberries have never done well for us. We have a potato plot in the back yard, and someday, if I can figure out how, we are going to plant half of the front yard in wheat or some other grain, perhaps in undulating waves for landscaping effects.
We can do pretty well, particularly with the tomoatoes and potatoes, calorie wise.
I'm keeping a better journal this year on how we are eating, so maybe by December I'll have a precise number of how much we bought in calories, and how much we produced ourselves. Our purchases are mostly flour, couscous, rice, sugar and dairy products.