That’s what I thought too. Having grown up in rural Idaho I am very familiar with the homestead full of junker cars. But when I lived in Seattle, I saw it quite often in city neighborhoods too. My wife and I used to take note of our neighbors who were obviously on the low end of the socio-economic scale. They lived in a rental with a big back yard full of weeds and blackberries. They couldn’t afford a car worth more than a few hundred dollars, so all the vehicles they owned were on their last legs. When one would die and the cost of fixing it exceded the cost of a new junker car, they would just push the hulk into the blackberries out behind the house and come home driving a new beater.
I do a lot of kayaking in rural, moutainous areas and have seen many times the situation you describe. Not just cars but appliances and sometimes just trash. I always assumed it had to do with the cost of having someone come all the way out there to haul away the junkers. I wonder if the higher prices these days for scrap metal will result in more old clunkers getting hauled away.
It is true. I grew up in the boonies too and you have to have one or more cars per driving person in those circumstances even if some of the drivers are 16 years old (or 15 when I got my license). Otherwise, you will just be trapped and housebound sometimes because you certainly aren’t taking any public transportation, taxis, or even walking anywhere even in case of emergency because those options are not available.
The standard baseline for those conditions is one vehicle per driving person in the household plus any recreational vehicles or utility vehicles like old pickup trucks for serious work and that applies even even if they are all well-maintained. There is no requirement to have any beaters or non-running cars in your yard (that is white-trash or car enthusiast redneck material). You can easily end up with 4 - 5 vehicles under such circumstances for an average sized family if you have older kids that can drive. That applies whether they are $1500 scrap yard rescues or newer, well-maintained vehicles.
Driving age was 14 in the state I consider my ‘home state’, and nearly all the country kids had learned to drive long before that age.
On our little 5-acre plot in the country, our yard contains a pile of old galvanized chicken feeders/nest boxes, a clawfoot bathtub, a cast-iron kitchen sink (which we dug out of the yard), eight feet of old countertop with another kitchen sink in it, various and sundry scraps of plywood and sheet metal, a disker, and a manure spreader. The only reason we don’t have old cars is that we were able to sell both of them for scrap. This fall, we’re planning to call the scrap metal guy to come and pick most of the yard junk up, and we’ll burn the unusable wood after the snow flies.
This has nothing to do with whether we can afford to do anything about it; it has to do with whether it is worthwhile for the scrap man to make the trip. He’s not going to want to come out just to get a single bathtub. We have the space to put these items and let them wait until there’s enough for either a call to the scrap guy or a trip to the dump. IMHO, people in the country have more cars lying around because they can (and possibly because people who want to have lots of cars lying around choose to live in the country).
BTW, I’m not sure where you all are from, but there are very few poor people who can afford to live in the truly rural areas here in Minnesota. Most of our po’ folk rent houses in town.
Same here, and I got my license as soon as I could. Stuck out in the boondocks, without a license and car, is a lonely life for a teenager. I had a part time job, school (most students drove themselves to my high school) and buddies I wanted to hang out with. Virtually all my friends got a part time job as soon as they could and saved up for a car. Very different from today.
I grew up in rural NE Indiana. When I got my license, my folks added a vehicle to the fleet. We were 15 miles from school, a store bigger than a convenience market, a doctor or most services. We were 20 miles from Dad’s work and 12 in the other direction from Mom’s. There were no cab services in our town. No public transportation of any kind.
Most of our vehicles were older than five years, but kept in decent repair. They were tools in our toolboxes to do what we had to do.
In cities where I’ve lived, there’s tons of “We buy junk cars!” outfits going around putting fliers on any old-ish car they see in the street. They’ll give you a few hundred bucks and haul away your car for free even if it doesn’t run, even if you’ve lost the keys or title.
I’m not sure, but are those as common in rural areas? I’d imagine the cost of hauling cars to a distant junkyard would make it a lot less profitable.
When I was living in Hawaii, the newspaper told of a Big Island family living near a lava flow. A flow cut them off, and they could drive only as far as the hardened lava. They bought a car and parked it on the other side, so they would drive to the hardened lava, walk across it, then use the other car. Comes another flow, and they bought another car, this time using the second car to drive between the two flows to walk across the second flow to a third car parked on the other side. This may have happened one or two more times. So that’s why they had multiple cars.
There are 2 or 3 listings in every small-town newspaper where I live.
Sure hope there was a gas station between each flow. 
I like to see the parked in a row history of cars & trucks on the ‘old home places.’
Trash around the house, not so much.
Exurb-er here. We usually have more vehicles than people, but it’s because we need them for different tasks. The following are a current list. This is a subset of what we’ve had in the past. We’ve downsized considerably over the last few years.
Camry - Decent compact car, but with room for 4 if we head into town to eat.
Corolla - High mileage subcompact for commuting
Pickup truck - for hauling trailers, or the boat to the lake, and 4WD for getting in to my deer stands (and obviously for hauling dead animals back)
Boat - The other cars aren’t real good on the water, and are hell to fish from.
RV - 'cause I hate hotels, and like having all my stuff with me when I travel.
Don’t know if this answers the OPs question entirely, but it’s one data point. All are fairly new and in excellent shape. Even though I’m a DIY repairman in a lot of cases, none of the vehicles are there as spares.
I live sort of rural and I have a truck and a car because sometimes you need a truck and sometimes you need a car. It makes perfect sense to me. It’s also a great safety measure. It makes people think the house is occupied when no one is at home.
I once drove by a multiple car house in the country and when I looked more closely, I could see baby goats in two of the cars side by side–lol.
There are practical reasons like having a junker to drive to work (especially if the roads are in bad shape…or muddy after a big rain) and a good car for other things. Then on top of that, you could have a pickup truck for choring around the farm. Add multiple people, and you could have 5 or 6 vehicles for 4 people.
Then you have the guys who are in demolition derbies with 2 or 3 crashed demo cars in the yard, the people who are “working on cars” (which usually means having a junk car or two sitting in the yard with the motor taken out), then sometimes people drive their cars until they are totally worn out, and leave them in the yard for some reason instead of getting rid of them. The life of a redneck is a good mix of the practical and the impractical.
The thing about a beater is you never know when it’s going to stop working. So it’s good to have a back-up, just in case. Especially of the back ups don’t work either.
We joke that it’s a local ordinance in Washington (state) that each residence in an unincorporated area must have 1 junked or inoperable car for each resident over the age of 16. A bonus of 1.5 is granted for cars/trucks on blocks with no wheels, but a penalty of 0.75 is charged for vehicles used as chicken coops or goat pens or used as dumpsters for household garbage. Dead boats in the yard are not covered as these can be easily converted into decorative flower beds.
Remember - “It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law”
Well, no, it’s because I can only drive one car at a time, and couldn’t afford to own a great many cars.
Space would be the LEAST of my concerns. You can get space here for a fraction of what the insurance or payment on the car would be. But there is only one of me. Why do I want more than one vehicle? I could understand having a utility or work vehicle if my job necessitated such a thing, but how could I afford multiple cars?
Echoing #1 and #2 in small towns too, adding in “one for better fuel economy in warmer months and one all wheel or 4 wheel drive for inclement weather, which does double duty for Moving Things when needed”.
Many old and ostensibly “extra” vehicles still provide more value in function than they would in being sold/towed away. If you have room, the cost for a paid-off older vehicle is pretty low. Insurance on multiple vehicles is cheap. Registration fees are relatively cheap in many states. It might cost $100 a year to keep a car around. Maybe you have an old pickup you use for certain errands or a car you use for specific types of trips. For example, I have a car (it’s only the 2nd car in a home of 4, though) I will use for short trips by myself but I never take my kids in it. It gets better MPG even though it’s older, and saves wear and tear on newer vehicle.
Sometimes you can’t get rid of an old vehicle, or the laws make it difficult. for example, as far as I know I don’t think my wife’s car can ever be legally sold. Maybe it can, but it seems like it would be too much hassle. There’s another person on the title that she hasn’t seen in 12 years. My grandfather’s car sat in my Father’s yard for many years with no title. I don’t think anyone would or could take it, but I don’t know how that works exactly.