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When I looked into it the top locations were in the Pacific Northwest (extending down to the Lost Coast in California) or Northern New England. Ample rainfall,

When I looked into it the top locations were in the Pacific Northwest (extending down to the Lost Coast in California) or Northern New England. Ample rainfall, surrounded by mountains, lots of timber, sea routes to reestablish trade or for fishing, and potentially farmable. Some runners-up included the Bay Area & Coastal California (easily defensible & fertile, but has overpopulation, water issues and limited timber), the Great Salt Lake valley (ditto), and the Colorado & Wyoming foothills (pretty dry, but a great mining/oil shale area). The worst areas were in the Southwest (which already has a migrant crisis and is going to get totally screwed by global warming) and the Great Lakes area (overpopulated relative to its natural carrying capacity). Suburbia could be a decent place, if the population density is low enough and it's surrounded by arable land and resources. Livermore, for example, wouldn't be a bad place. But the rows upon rows of tract houses (say San Jose or LA) would become a miserable place without the rest of society to support it, as would the inner cities. I think that the ideal density would be a small self-contained city of say 50-80K people: small enough to maintain social cohesion, but large enough to support some division of labor and have enough of a workforce to support & defend the region.

ericd 6y ago
Thanks for the comprehensive reply! I hope you’re wrong, but I can’t say that I haven’t considered a lot of the same things, and I had similar thoughts about PNW and New England being relatively good options. Hard to really look at this kind of scenario and come to any conclusions with enough confidence to act on them, though - so many unknowns and fundamentally different rules.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Not the Great Salt Lake valley - too many people for the available food supply. That's not going to go well. My own answer is Delta/Montrose, Colorado. It has water, good farmland, nearby mountains (timber) and coal fields. You could even do some hydro power from the river. It's somewhat defensible - an attacker would have to cross a fair amount of inhospitable terrain to get there, unless they came from the south, and the San Juans would not be that difficult to defend. The one issue would be oil - there's oilfields around Aztec, New Mexico, but that's kind of a long way in a collapsed society.

ericd 6y ago

Thanks for the comprehensive reply! I hope you’re wrong, but I can’t say that I haven’t considered a lot of the same things, and I had similar thoughts about PNW and New England being relatively good options. Hard to really look at this kind of scenario and come to any conclusions with enough confidence to act on them, though - so many unknowns and fundamentally different rules.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

Not the Great Salt Lake valley - too many people for the available food supply. That's not going to go well. My own answer is Delta/Montrose, Colorado. It has water, good farmland, nearby mountains (timber) and coal fields. You could even do some hydro power from the river. It's somewhat defensible - an attacker would have to cross a fair amount of inhospitable terrain to get there, unless they came from the south, and the San Juans would not be that difficult to defend. The one issue would be oil - there's oilfields around Aztec, New Mexico, but that's kind of a long way in a collapsed society.