This behavior is probably overrepresented in the bougie places reporters live.

I live in Redmond, WA. Bougie? My rube Midwestern ass thinks so. And there are feral kids all over my neighborhood. Plenty of kids walking to school in groups, or solo. Neighbor kids talk about riding the bus/train to places. Granted, there are a lot of immigrant families around here (hello, Microsoft, et al.), and I'm sure that skews things.

https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/shoot-the-messenger

> But I actually find ideological bias to be less concerning than the more fundamental problem that the class of people who determine the boundaries of debate share a set of demographic and experiential traits that they don’t recognize as distinctive.

> This class of people includes journalists, yes, but also people who work in the tech industry, academics, nonprofit leaders, influencers, and those who work in politics. From now on, I’ll refer to this group broadly as “the messenger class.”

> The messenger class’s distinctive experiences — like living in downtown Washington, D.C., or living in one of the parts of New York highlighted in red — shape the boundaries of normal in ways harder to counteract than pure ideological or partisan bias.

> The messenger class plays a fundamental role in any democracy. Democratic self-governance requires not just fair procedures for making decisions but an accurate and shared picture of social reality to reason about. That picture is revealed through the communicated experiences of citizens, filtered through the messenger class, which decides which experiences are urgent and require intervention.

Do journalists live in bougie places? It's not a particularly well-paying job.

From the mall story, you also seem to be living in a "bougie" place. What makes you think that places other than where you live are different?

One would expect that after your first sentence, the second sentence would be a counterexample.