>Meanwhile, houses in the boonies are cheap. If you can remote-work your way into a boonie lifestyle, you can own a home on a rather modest income indeed. You

>Meanwhile, houses in the boonies are cheap. If you can remote-work your way into a boonie lifestyle, you can own a home on a rather modest income indeed. You can, but then you're stuck with all the downsides of living in the boonies: you're far away from any cultural activities, shopping, good grocery stores (i.e. not Walmart), and all the people around you are probably culturally very different and even downright distasteful, unless you happen to like extremely religious and conservative people asking you about your personal relationship with Jesus or what kind of guns you like. And this isn't all "boonies" either; some of them are pretty pricey. I live about 75 minutes from DC in a pretty rural area currently, and houses here are not that cheap. However, if I moved near some family members (about an hour SW of Richmond VA) houses there are much cheaper. And the benefits are somewhat similar: either way it's roughly an hour to get to some decent shopping, though DC's stuff is much better than RVA's, but RVA does have some cultural attractions plus some higher-end shops, just not as much as DC. But being surrounded by people you have no interest in meeting kinda sucks; at least when you're right in a city it's easier to find groups or people you get along well with who aren't too far away. Anyway, this all assumes remote work. For the Millenials, this might not be that helpful. Most jobs still require you to be on-site, and that's not going to be doable if you live in the boonies and don't want a long commute. And that's just computer work; very little non-computer work can be done remotely. What we really need is real estate development laws which push for the construction of more affordable housing, though that would probably mean more high-rise condos, rather than single-family houses. Instead, developers always target the high end of the market, building "luxury condos" and the like. There's a limited amount of real estate anywhere, so the obvious solution is to build up, not out. Finally, another thing about those "cheap" houses in the boonies. I live in one of those currently, and the heating bills are atrocious. New, nice houses out here are expensive; the cheap ones are older and horribly inefficient. They're not building a lot of new houses in the boonies, so it's mainly older stuff. The new houses in the boonies are giant mansions built by rich people as getaways. Any "new" houses in the boonies are crappy little manufactured homes.