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Would you take free land in rural America?
- Dah00n 5y agoIsn't this pretty much a question of how well off the person you ask is? If they can afford better they likely already have, if they can't this question might get a yes, but it will likely trap people isolated and worse off than before. I can't see how this would ever be a good idea.
- Ansil849 5y agoThis is such a crucial point that I think many people are entirely overlooking. Even the case examples in the article moved because they needed to find affordable places to live. It wasn't really a free 'if I could move anywhere in the country...would I pick rural Kansas' kind of choice.
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- JoeAltmaier 5y agoSmall towns mortgaged their future on big box stores out by the freeway. Now they have half the tax revenue to support their infrastructure (roads, power, sewer, water). Expect decay followed by large property tax hikes.
- dleslie 5y agoThe cities didn't have much choice when those stores were built outside of city limits or in a neighboring town. Lay the blame where the responsibility resides: with the consumers who chose bulk over local.
- thr0wawayf00 5y agoIt feels really disingenuous to put all of the blame on consumers that are motivated to find the best price for basic goods like food instead of the companies that operate at the scale which enables them to undercut local business to lethal degree. You're essentially arguing that consumers are at fault for acting the way that the consumer-driven capitalist business model expects them to behave. Major investment in cheap, nationwide retail caused this, not consumers.
- chana_masala 5y agoCan you even really blame the consumers? That's like blaming the birds who eat at bird feeders instead of the people who put out bird feeders in cities [1]. Blame the corporations and builders. [1] Bird feeders can contribute to the decline of native plants when birds who disperse the seeds in their scat feed at the feeders, their scat often lands somewhere where the seeds have no chance at germinating (sidewalk, mowed lawn etc)
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- Cornelius267 5y agoWhile it's true that individual consumers make choices like this, it's not fair to blame individuals for systemic problems. If a person making a low wage is given the choice between feeling good about supporting local business, and being able to afford enough food to survive by shopping at a big box store, it's not really a fair choice.
- bradleyjg 5y agoMaybe blame neither. Which entity set up the tax system such that this kind of freeloading was possible? State governments, I’d guess.
- sokoloff 5y agoWhen a consumer is offered a choice that is more attractive to them, it seems unreasonable to blame them for taking it.
- rinron 5y agoif you follow the motivation of the different groups the motivation is the same for everyone and its best to focus on people rather than entities. business owners have an insatiable desire for profits and are willing to sacrifice society and individuals to do so. Consumers value saving money over supporting local or dont see the value in the local offerings real or perceived (big companies have both economies of scale and generally more effective advertising) suppliers crater better to big businesses because they make them more money and exert more power over them. a more personal one on one contact of a small business is a pain to them and takes more resources. local politicians are presented with a choice of getting nothing or allowing them to go to an area that will, and then they get nothing. not to mention potential personal kickbacks, short term positive press with the consequences being on the next politician. The root of the problem is society valuing their own money/things over people. one person or organization changing wouldn't change things significantly, and the rest in the chain will probably pressure them back. Sadly society is moving further away from valuing people. online shopping, crypto currency, automation as much as i love all these advancements they enable and increases the value of things over people, and in turn a concentration of wealth and power.
- Lammy 5y agoHow dare those consumers not have enough wealth to shop based on anything but lowest price
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoNot my point. Tax income for small towns no long match infrastructure support costs. Never mind who's buying what where. It's the small town buckling to the WalGetCo corporate negotiators, giving them tax breaks and new roads and water and sewer expansion. With just one business served by the new infrastructure: the big box store. Sure the taxable property goes up, city income goes up; but the density is way less than the old downtown, the new income doesn't come close to paying for the new outflows, and the old downtown businesses find themselves subsidizing their competition on the edge of town.
- beerandt 5y agoSo wrong. For places with sales tax, a big box moving in can easily double a small towns tax revenue overnight. I don't dispute that small business suffers, but its far from zero-sum. The increased revenue benefits the town far more than the town pays for any infrastructure upkeep. Especially since most cities require the developer to pay for all the initial upgrades in the first place, including their own utilities tie-ins and improvements to extant public roads (eg traffic studies, adding lanes, installing signals).
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoSo right. This was covered on a post here on HN last week. An in-depth review of an (Illinois?) town and the hole they'd dug for themselves. Read it, and reconsider.
- MattGaiser 5y agoSmall businesses selling generic items are just not capable of excellence for the same reason that I would not be a competent doctor, lawyer, and software engineer compared to people who did just one of those things. I knew of a small town grocery store where my grandparents used to have a vacation property. They got a delivery of food once a week, so anything fresh had deteriorated halfway through the week. Technicians needed to be booked weeks in advance to fix things like fridges as it was several hours outside the city, so for a month they didn't have space for cheese. They couldn't buy anything that had a large minimum order and couldn't get bulk prices, so it was expensive. Locals didn't shop there was it was cheaper to burn half a tank of gas. They get hit the hardest during supply chain challenges as their understanding of logistics is to place an order and hope it shows up. They can exist for niche food products, but selling milk, grapes, and cereal? No, as they will dramatically underperform a business that specializes in dealing with those.
- beerandt 5y agoDidn't realize Associated Grocers type distributors/co-ops weren't a nationally universal thing.
- redisman 5y agoIt’s hardly the small towns fault that countries urbanize as they get wealthier
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoIt is their fault when they redistrict to expand their borders into the county, then realize they haven't the means to pay for all that infrastructure. Simple accounting mistakes can bankrupt them. Enthusiastic starry-eyed town councils want everything, but never even think about paying for it. We're talking small towns here. Their council is a fireman, a baker, an insurance salesperson. Not a professional city planner. It seems inevitable they will over-reach and bankrupt the city treasury. It's a real risk.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago> In the mid-1800s, the United States had thousands of miles of open land in the middle of the country and almost nobody who wanted to live there. > Then, in 1862, Abraham Lincoln pulled the ultimate Manifest Destiny power move with the Homestead Act. That's… not how my history book says it happened. Wikipedia seems to agree, though it doesn't go into much detail: > The act depleted the Native Americans in the United States of much of their land and natural resources as a result of it being allocated and sold to settlers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Acts#Homestead_Act_of_1862 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Acts#Homestead_Act_o... I'm no history buff, but I'm pretty sure the Homestead Act of 1862 violated some treaties in a major way, and soldiers were involved.
- pirate787 5y agoIt was a populist law passed in the middle of the Civil War. The entire continent was on fire. And the Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, Catawba, and Creek tribes sided with the Confederacy against the United States.
- Naga 5y agoI don't remember a lot of impact in the top half of the continent, other than fear of invasion spurring the British colonies towards confederation.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago> And the Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, Catawba, and Creek tribes sided with the Confederacy against the United States. I knew they were opposing the United States (at the time, an aggressively-expansionist neighbour with an order of magnitude more arms manufacturing), but were they all definitely allied with the Confederacy? Your enemies aren't necessarily friends with each other. (Also, keep in mind: Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, Catawba and Creek weren't countries. I vaguely remember that internal Cherokee politics was complicated, and that the US acted as though certain people were representatives when they weren't.)
- jcranmer 5y ago
- MomoXenosaga 5y agoYou make your money in civilization then when you're retired you can have a nice ranch or villa somewhere quiet, green and sunny. I used to be somewhat upset at the ECB bailing out Greece but then I realized all that prime real estate coast line for Northern European boomers lol. Who has the last laugh?
- polotics 5y agoHow the hell do you get the notion that the ECB bailed out Greece? Don't you know the "bailout" money went straight to the German and French banks, the only thing Greece got was more loans at worst conditions, more prostitutes in the streets, more suicides, more brain drain.
- User23 5y agoThe price of farmland in the USA has more than doubled per acre in the past 18 months. It’s at the point now where without significant price increases for the outputs, farming won’t be worth doing unless you’re a giant ADM style cartel that makes up the difference in ethanol subsidies, regulatory capture, or some other flavor of cronyism.
- nikanj 5y agoIs there anything that hasn’t doubled in price in the last 18 months?
- dleslie 5y agoOil and gas stocks.
- tmiahm 5y agoXOM 10/30/2020: 32.62 01/28/2022: 75.28
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- iso1631 5y agoPretty much everything normal people buy
- Denvercoder9 5y agoJust about everything. The consumer price index has risen just slightly less than 10% over the last 18 months.
- mythrwy 5y agoSilver
- nradov 5y agoADM doesn't really do any farming themselves (except for small experimental plots).
- MattGaiser 5y agoI would be curious to see how much you would need to spend to replicate all the services that large cities generally have for a typical upper middle class family. Local school probably doesn't have AP classes or anyone to meaningfully help with SAT prep. Or a computer science teacher. Got to hire tutors to do all that or send the kids to boarding school. Probably cannot get childcare. Got to import a nanny if you want full time childcare. And the nanny will need a car as nothing is in walking distance. Airports. You are going to spend a bunch extra flying out of whatever little regional airport is nearby. No low cost carriers in these small towns. Then there are the things that cannot be replicated, like ambulances: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/there-s-shortage-volunteer-ems-workers-ambulances-rural-america-n1068556 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/there-s-shortage-...
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- gedy 5y agoYou seem to be trying to replicate a dual income urban lifestyle in the country. If you’re willing to live in rural areas do your kids really need to go to an in person school for all this information and tutoring? Do both parents need to work full-time to even require daycare?
- watwut 5y agoRural should not imply "homeschooled".
- MattGaiser 5y agoI am not sure what to think of homeschooling. I was homeschooled until grade 8 and even after did a ton of courses online. Worked out great for me, but only because I am not a social person. I am not certain that I can be lonely as long as I have an internet connection, as I spent days by myself in university. How that worked out for some other people I know was much more mixed.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
- Supermancho 5y agoIn the 90's, there were rural towns in the Dakotas, which were auctioning off land. This permafrost land was left in the hands of the municipalities/banks who were trying to avoid paying taxes on the land. Any sizable plots north and east of Kansas out to Ohio (not including West Virginia), is pretty easy to sell, since you can lease it out to farmers for the foreseeable future.
- temp-dude-87844 5y agoJust as the article notes, free lots in out-of-the-way towns aren't too attractive because you still have to spend many dozens of thousands of dollars to put on a house on it, and then you live in an out-of-the-way town with few ways to resell. At that point, you could move to the rural fringe of a populous area, and be a lot closer to amenities, entertainment, good schools, healthcare, childcare, shopping, etc. In dense and popular areas, it's the land prices that contribute to high housing prices. In less popular areas, it's construction prices that dominate the cost.
- floren 5y ago> and then you live in an out-of-the-way town with few ways to resell Why do we always buy/update our house for the next owner?
- Dylan16807 5y agoDesigning to resell at a high price is overrated, but wanting the ability to resell at all isn't a bad idea.
- romanovcode 5y agoYeah. What happened to passing the house in the family?
- MattGaiser 5y agoBy the time you end up dying nowadays, your kids have long owned a home and potentially your grandkids as well.
- lifeplusplus 5y agono
- Geonode 5y agoAs a new Nebraskan, there's just something unnerving about vast flat land, at least for me. After three years the biggest reason I look for jobs is to get off of the big dining room table I live on.
- blackearl 5y agoEven a completely free piece of land and free housing isn't a substitution for basic infrastructure and diverse local culture. Maybe if you have a growing family or are retirement age, but with the childless 35 and under crowd growing I can't imagine wanting to move to the middle of nowhere.
- tjr225 5y agoI can’t think of any sane reason a parent would want to isolate their children from socialization; either. It would be to deprive them from their own nature and it would set them back, probably irreparably.
- vitaflo 5y agoWe live in an age where it’s easier than ever to socialize. Lincoln, the town in this article has a population of 1.2k. I grew up in the rural Midwest in a town of 800 before the internet was a thing. I had plenty of opportunities for socialization. In many ways rural communities are more social than urban ones because the community is the only thing they have.
- ryukafalz 5y ago> We live in an age where it’s easier than ever to socialize. Do we? Online, maybe, but that's no substitute. In large parts of the country, kids can't go see their friends without their parents shuttling them around, in part because the terrain is near-impassable without a car. Maybe if the rural community is still somewhat walkable - the core of many small town would qualify - but my feeling is that many/most are not. (That said, this applies to most suburbs these days too, and even many cities. Unfortunately.)
- vitaflo 5y agoRural communities don't need to be walkable. I would regularly bike 5+ miles to visit my friends in our rural area (all farm country) and did so about as soon as I learned to ride a bike (6 or 7 years old). Kids biking wherever they wanted to go was very common. So was riding ATV's when they got to be preteens. In rural communities, parents aren't always chaperoning and shuttling their kids everywhere. You're given a lot more freedom as a child.
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- silisili 5y agoOne thing I didn't see mentioned are taxes. Kansas has both relatively high side income and property taxes. Building a modest house(200k) on a good income (150k) would yield something around 12k a year in taxes, if my mental heavily rounding math is right. That may not sound like much to many of us, but compare that with say, TN, where you'd pay closer to 2k in taxes AND have much better weather, amenities, and scenery.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoAnd with Tennessee, you can get relatively close to the smokey mountains national parks for a reasonable price for a house. You’re then a short hop to Asheville, there are multiple regional airports, and StarLink works there.
- silisili 5y agoAgree, but better act fast! Asheville already boomed, and Knoxville is mid-boom at the moment. What was 160ish k in 2019 is hitting the mid 3s today.
- N1H1L 5y agoKnoxville has a lot going for it too.
- cbfrench 5y agoDitto Chattanooga. Two great sleeper cities when Nashville is getting all the hype.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoMy wife really liked Chattanooga when we were considering where to move. The downsides from my perspective: deathly humidity in the summer time, and according to the locals I asked, no food culture to speak of, particularly in terms of ingredients. Otherwise, pretty, nice size, great river ... we ended up near Santa Fe.
- somehnacct3757 5y agoI think you could attract a bunch of well-off remote workers to homestead if you promised them a stable high speed internet connection when they got there. Free land isn't enough; it shouldn't feel like I'm moving backward in time.
- pphysch 5y agoDoes it have water security, electricity, access to social services, access to logistics networks, and so on?
- jacurtis 5y agotl;dr - No.
- ineedasername 5y agoNo, I couldn't do it. Even apart from local family connections it would be difficult professionally. If I wanted to switch jobs or was let go for some reason then I would be limited to jobs that were completely remote, or I'd have to relocate again. 100% remote is more common these days, but not enough for me to limit myself to those options. And in some cases those 100% remote jobs will/are going away as COVID becomes more normalized as the status quo. (That has happened where I work. Partial remote yes. Full remote no.)
- micromacrofoot 5y agoMy hometown is large enough to be considered a city, and is just somewhat rural. You couldn't pay me to live there because it's very depressing. You've got one main highway with a walmart and a couple chain restaurants (Applebees and Olive Garden). There's an old downtown area that's pure blight. Businesses that were just abandoned 10+ years ago and were never filled... and some still-operating businesses that look like they were abandoned 10 years ago. All local jobs are menial. Factory work dried up 50 years ago. 5 people I went to high school with (that I'm aware of) have died from overdoses. The education system is mediocre at best and there are lots of racists and bullies. If you go more rural it gets better simply because you're living in the woods. At that point you're dealing with well water, septic, satellite internet (maybe starlink?), frequent electricity loss after storms, and general isolation. Maybe I'll retire to a place like this.
- betwixthewires 5y agoI wouldn't. I've looked into it. There are lots of places where you can get a free place in the US. They're nice places, pretty, if you like being outside like me it's got a lot going for it. Still, I don't want to move to a place with nothing going on and bet on a town that may just get worse. And Kansas in particular, I wouldn't want to pay those taxes. I did abandon cities though. Cities are sirens. They attract you with the promise of lots of economic and social activity, then you wind up locked on a treadmill full of people navigating around you like an obstacle. You wind up isolated, having to wait in traffic for extended periods to go anywhere, paying outrageous sums to live. The natural world is mostly dead in them. I can get Netflix and tinder and all that other virtual stuff anywhere, which seems to be all there is in cities anyway, plus when I go outside there are butterflies and fire flies and weird birds everywhere and people leave me alone about my business, they're not used to being packed like sardines so they don't navigate around you like an obstacle, they are usually eager to be friendly. And you can make a decent life happen with very little money.
- pkdpic 5y agoYeah, there're a lot of factors you dont see coming that make poetic middle of nowhere life feel not super sustainable long term. Me and my partner lived in the CA desert for a long time for reasons similar to what you list about problematic big cities and benefits listed in the post but once we felt like we conquered it (?) we ended up wanting to return to family / friends / civilization / 6 dollar cappuccinos / brick oven pizzas / walkable resources etc. That said I wouldnt trade that time for anything and theres a strong chance Ill be back when im done futilely participating in humanity.
- betwixthewires 5y agoWhat sort of factors? If it's going to suck for me in the coming years I could use a heads up. What's not sustainable about it?
- alar44 5y agoLack of culture and education mostly. Lack of anonymity. Tribalism. Gossip. Conservatism. Racism. Good ol boys. Local government corruption. Brain drain. Shrinking populations. Low wage jobs. Tiny or non-existent dating pool. Hospital far away, possibly no ambulance service. No childcare. No decent stores other than Walmart or Dollar General. Have to drive literally everywhere. The only thing "small town living" has going for it is the scenery.
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- butwhywhyoh 5y agoThe biggest thing stopping me from doing it would be a lack of quality healthcare. I can't imagine many top doctors hanging around a place like Kansas.
- Dah00n 5y agoKansas population, almost 3 million. Small nations in Scandinavia have some of the best healthcare, social security, internet, wages, etc. so if what you say is true (I have no idea) then it is a problem with America at large and not Kansas per se since Kansas have everything needed to be at the top if allowed by the systems in place.
- lost_soul 5y agoThere's a good reason it's free.
- jacurtis 5y agoAnd even being free, no one is taking it. Hell I could put a nasty mattress on the curb with bed bugs on it and a "free" sign and it would be gone in an hour. But these free houses and free land lots have been free for years and still no one wants them. So yes, to your point "There's a good reason it's free".
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- darth_avocado 5y agoIn my case, I could and I want to, but I wouldn’t. Unfortunately my experience as someone who would immediately be identified as an “outsider” in rural America has been not that great. Unless it’s a tourist town, or an immigrant one (like those straight to the factory from the boat towns), it’s usually not that great.
- betwixthewires 5y agoTowns suffering from depopulation to such a degree that they've decided to give part of it away just to have neighbors to do business with are probably welcoming of outsiders to the point of desperation. I highly doubt you'll be treated like an outsider in one of these towns that is giving away land.
- Ansil849 5y agoNo, not in my experience living in a rural small town. Desperation doesn't make xenophobia and racism go away, if anything it further entrenches resentment ('why does the foreigner get a job while we're unemployed').
- yread 5y agoSure, build a shooting range and watch the money fly in
- Ancapistani 5y agoI have a sneaking suspicion that you’ve never spent any significant time seeing what it takes to build a shooting range. You’re looking at a half million dollar investment to start a reasonably-equipped outdoor range. $2m+ for an indoor handgun range. That’s before dealing with insurance and operating expenses.
- jedberg 5y agoI could never do it, but I had a friend who did exactly that. He was from Kansas though. Went to Boston after college in Kansas, worked for five years moving up in title, came to the Bay Area, started as a staff engineer and quickly moved up to principle, and after working a total of 15 years, retired at 37 back to Kansas. Lived in the smallest studio he could find the whole time he was in the cities and had $1M+ saved up, which was more than enough to sustain his lifestyle in Kansas after spending $100,000 on a house (land + construction).
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- stjohnswarts 5y agoIf I could get a great internet connection either via satellite or otherwise, sure. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to make a living the way I want.
- aussiegreenie 5y agoMany countries have offered similar deals. Italy had hundreds of houses for € 1 but you needed to fix them up to a liveable state, often € 10-12K. Australian country towns offered land for AUD 1 (USD 0.72). It has also occurred in Spain and even Japan. Japan is destroying hundreds of empty houses a year.
- Ansil849 5y agoI used to live in a rural farming town for a few years. I'll be blunt. The people in the town were racist. Not everyone, but enough to make life extremely uncomfortable. And not the 'burn a cross on your lawn' kind of racist (well, mostly, some of the youth were precisely that kind of overt racist - I was called various racial slurs by drunk teenagers, and one time had them swerve their car to almost hit me), but the 'it takes five times as long to take my order at the diner as anyone else' or 'postal clerk keeps insisting on multiple forms of ID to hand over a package, despite not asking for any ID from anyone else who came up to the window' kind of racism. That's not pleasant to put up with daily nonstop. This throwaway factoid in the article is supremely important: > small towns in north central and northwest Kansas are usually 90%+ white. This kind of extreme homogeneity breeds racism and xenophobia.
- BizarroLand 5y agoYep, the random people following you around every store you shop at, always double and triple checking up on you every 5 minutes, random people side-eyeing you everywhere you go but being nice to your face and you couldn't convince them that their actions qualified as racism if you held them before a 12-panel jury with video evidence and Jesus Christ as your prosecutor. But they're not generally mean to you, they didn't kill you or anything, just made you feel unwelcome everywhere you go every day of your life always, and they did it so effortlessly they weren't even aware they were doing it. That's deep south racism and it sucks so much because I didn't even have the tools to recognize what they were doing until I got away from it. Since it always happened to me, I just assumed that's the way people were. Moving to the PNW and being treated as part of the background and not a circus side show was such an eye opener. I now think everyone should get away from their hometown for a few years at least once in their lives, because otherwise they may never know how much of what they take as normal is actually weird, evil, odd, or strange about their version of "normal".