A reminder for those of us seeking to leave the rat race and live in the middle of nowhere: The article describes Mr. Conover's decision to purchase 5 acres in the area, and reading between the lines, his neighbors have decided to do the same. Which is to say that no one is living all alone in the middle of hundreds of miles of forest, this is just very low-density housing with some hobby farming. This also means that houses are about 500' from each other. That is plenty close enough to be annoying if a neighbor or guest decides to play music at a bonfire party or spend the morning target shooting. You don't get to live in the middle of nowhere unless you are rich and can afford the upfront cost of hundreds of acres of undeveloped land.
Aside: It' a little unclear what area exactly the article is talking about. When I look up San Luis Valley, I see an area of mostly center-pivot irrigation (near 37.698, -106.009), so I assume that there is a non-arable part of the valley with low property values.
> You don't get to live in the middle of nowhere unless you are rich and can afford the upfront cost of hundreds of acres of undeveloped land.
However, this level of rich is pretty obtainable for West Coast programmer. In parts of northeast Oregon an undeveloped acre goes for 1-2K, when you buy a few hundred. And couple hundred acres can be purchased with an on grid, but remote house for under $1 million.
—-
(You probably won’t like the house, and the nice properties mainly sell inside families, and the bank won’t likely give you a mortgage with less than 50% down, and insurance will not be fun. But this is all surmountable.)
This is just so bizarre by German standards. It shows we live in a densely populated country: my 3 acres are considered a "kingdom" over here by many, and while it is as remote as it can get neighbours would still be in shouting distance. Probably not possible to be really remote here.
Anyway, even such a property goes for several 100k here and is advertised for the "vast area".
100 acres would not be possible under 7 figures, I think.
Yes, but new england is tiny. It only take four hours to drive across the width of the length of it. (As the crow flies, no accounting for road geography here)
Population density of NZ is 20/km2 compared against Germany at 234/km2.
Germans seem to like Golden Bay: they make up about 10% of the population there - cross between hippy and farmer and lifestylers. I think https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tākaka is the biggest town in that area with 1400 people.
If you really want to get away from it all, I can recommend areas around the Chiricahua wilderness in AZ. My brother picked up 40 acres for $20k and it’s really beautiful country out there. You can get a few hundred acres for $100k or so if you time it right. On the down side it’s about an hour to the nearest real town.
Stress should be on the fact that 5 acres is just tiny in this context. Even Texas, very lax gun laws, has a 10 acre minimum in most areas to be able to fire a gun or hunt. My family has 100 acres in remote part of Texas and neighbors can still be a pain in the ass. They also see your coming and going so unfortunately you will likely he burglarized by a neighbor at some point. We keep trained guard dogs on the property at all times and have video footage of them chasing off several people from trespassing (likely there to steal stuff).
I didn't see any mention of water rights in that article. You need a permit to drill a well. In Colorado, it is illegal to divert rain from your roof - to do so legally, among several other restrictions, you must have an existing well permit and can only use the rainwater for the same usage that the well permit is for.
These folks are going to find out their hobby is rather expensive.
Earlier this month, there were some articles on water issues in Arizona here in HN. The people in those articles were not happy about having to find new sources for water as the drought was forcing some cities to cut off water deliveries to communities outside their city limits.
It’s definitely not in the forest. This is a high desert, a destitute part of the state that seems to be a locale of last resort for some of the poorest folks. It’s bitter cold in winter, remote, and rotten agricultural conditions. There’s no running water or sewage, despite living 500’ apart, which has been an ongoing topic of debate. (In short, the residents can’t afford that infra, but it could become a real health & sanitation problem)
Very much the opposite of what people dream of when they imagine building a lux cabin by a pond, growing their own food, and naming the dog Thoreau.
> Aside: It' a little unclear what area exactly the article is talking about. When I look up San Luis Valley, I see an area of mostly center-pivot irrigation (near 37.698, -106.009), so I assume that there is a non-arable part of the valley with low property values.
There's some of this kind of land in Oregon, too. Subdivided into chunks that are small enough and remote enough to be affordable, but not large enough to live off due to scarce resources (not enough water, poor soils).
Closer to where I live in Bend, Oregon, there's one of those remote subdivided areas. A few years back, an article in the paper jumped out at me for a line in it. A guy had asked the sheriff's department to do a wellness check on his brother, who he hadn't heard from for several days. The deputy decided to wait to visit until the next day because it was after dark. I reread that when I saw it in the paper. The sheriff's deputy didn't want to go there after dark. Wow. Turned out the guy was already dead; his wife shot him after he allegedly beat her.
A couple of things stuck out from the Harpers article - it's 50 below in winter in that area of cheap land in Colorado and you cannot leave your home unattended for any period of time or it will be ransacked. It's rugged living (compared to most Americans' lives) combined with a sort of self enforced stay at home isolation which can appeal to a segment of population that may have grown larger after our Covid experience, though I feel like the kids in that article would not have agreed with it.
This is off-topic, but I just wanted to say hello and mention that last night I watched documentary about the Blockbuster Video that is still open in Bend, Oregon.
On-topic:
I used to subscribe to the newsletter from landio.com, which sells semi-remote land. It's fun to read about their different offerings. They do a pretty good job of listing whats in the area (towns, hospitals, grocery, building supply, hunting) and what resources (water, power, phone/Internet).
In the days of streaming, it is a curiosity to be sure, but in the end, it is just a video rental store. In the documentary, they really up the romanticism of video rental stores.
This is just my experience, but I was a kid when Blockbuster was a thing. Plus, I grew up in a college town where the neighbors we a bit dynamic. So I never experienced any of the sort of community feeling that the documentary portrays.
My most memorable Blockbuster Video experience is sort of a dark and morbid one. Not appropriate in this context. Think dark in a humorous Cohen brother's way, not dark in a life scaring way.
I never thought I would see the SLV in the New Yorker!
A friend and I purchased 5 acres in the SLV around 2008 from a guy on Craigslist for 5K. We had no serious intentions at the time. But I was laid off from aerospace in 2009 after the crash, and so I moved out there for a summer, living in a conversion Astro van (before #vanlife, and definitely still van-down-by-the-river and not cool), and started to build a cabin. I didn't finish it that summer, but I eventually moved out to Colorado the next year to do so.
I lived there for about 8 months straight in my longest stretch. It was the kind of difficult I wanted. I (and every one else living in the mountains) had major issues with theft, though. There were multiple break-ins, and the last time I visited, just a flat-out smashing of windows and stripping of siding. I never finished the cabin and abandoned the project after I moved from Colorado. It was perhaps one of the few times I utilized the sunk cost fallacy and didn't dig deeper :)
When I left the SLV, the folks I knew living in RVs were being pushed out for land use violations (or at least that's how I remember it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec8M2bZNEac . Most folks I knew moved out in RVs/vans first and then attempted to build after they were there (this includes me as well!). To my knowledge, RV living is "illegal" past a certain number of days on most residential properties in the US, but I do not know what prompted the code enforcement (if anything).
In the book, as far as I've read, the focus on septic violations was an effort by the county to get people off the land. They often gave 10 days to get a septic in place and daily fines after that, when getting someone to put one in if you had the money would take months and you needed a permit to do so which was often denied.
The reasoning was the people who lived in the towns around there didn't like off-griders buying the land on the flats and moving in, so were trying to push them out however they could.
In the book there is a group suing the county for it, but they can't really afford lawyers and also are sort of free-men-on-the-land loons, so it doesn't go well.
I’ll read the New Yorker for off-the-grid Intermountain West living info the same day I read the Alamosa News for insights into the latest Israeli elections.
Saying that, in NM in the 1980s, off-grid living was perfectly feasible with some of the same caveats you mention. If the local community accepted you (Latinos, First Nations), you could easily make it happen (and I assume you still can). If you get crosswised with the autochthonous spirits, you could find yourself burned out of your half-built cabin pretty quickly.
Communes help, but come with their own problems. Don’t know whether the Intentional Community movement has solved those problems yet.
The restrictions on indefinite RV living center around habitability. Sewage is a big part. Off grid sewage needs to be managed properly to avoid spreading disease. For example, you might need a proper leach field, which is addressed as part of building code.
Everything I’ve read leads me to believe theft will remain a problem- it’s a very poor area, with limited employment options and a weak law enforcement presence.
I agree with you to some degree, but if your statement were 100% true, you would be able to do both of these things below in my area:
- Store (not live in) an RV on an empty lot you own
- Use composting as a primary means of sewage disposal
Where I live now, you can do neither! This leads me to believe that _some_ building codes - and enforcement of them - is classist in nature.
Heck, even with blackwater tanks...people are capable of emptying them at an RV disposal etc. If this were just about management of cleanliness, we could all find a way to make it work.
How many RV disposals are nearby? Do they have the necessary volume? Will anyone pack up their entire permanent home once a week to tow it to the dump station? Composting is not sufficient to destroy human pathogens, and prohibiting storage of an empty RV on an otherwise empty plot of land prevents people from bouncing back and forth between two permanent RVs on two different plots of land (never permanently resident in either).
I agree the laws could be changed to provide more options instead of blanket bans, and choosing not to do so is probably somewhat classist, but as far as I can tell they are going after real problems. (Even if bluntly)
> How many RV disposals are nearby? Do they have the necessary volume? Will anyone pack up their entire permanent home once a week to tow it to the dump station?
Those are great questions! And those are the questions the local government should be asking, and working with those folks to solve waste management issues, not prevent them from living a certain way. House more, not less?
> prohibiting storage of an empty RV on an otherwise empty plot of land prevents people from bouncing back and forth between two permanent RVs on two different plots of land...
It prevents that (which I would argue is problematic because it sounds classist? - again, house more, not less!), but it also prevents someone from just storing an RV on a plot of land they own.
> Composting is not sufficient to destroy human pathogens.
The thing about composting..it's a system, just like septic, just like centralized waste management. Things can go wrong. And it is legal in some places (which suggests efficacy), but not accepted as a "primary" system where I live (or in the SLV to my knowledge), which I take issue with given that the current legal primary systems are not always sufficient to destroy human pathogens in practice (either because the systems lack capacity, aren't properly maintained, or both). Flush toilet waste management overflows into the local water systems when it rains or is over capacity. Septic systems also do environmental damage since a lot of them are not maintained (need a source, there was a book recently that came out). Septic systems are also not inspected by the government after they are built where I live (they tried to charge residents for inspections at one point and they said no).
>Everything I’ve read leads me to believe theft will remain a problem- it’s a very poor area, with limited employment options and a weak law enforcement presence.
I'm reading this book right now and its so good. Great to see a review in the new yorker but I'm a little surprised by somewhat negative take.
The land in the valley is like 5k for 5 acres and the people are struggling to survive and often almost dying in the winter. And Conover goes and lives with them, and meets with them, helps them, as an outreach person for a local rural help-the-poor organization and reports on their lives in a fairly neutral way considering some of the craziness going on.
He is definitely the center of the story, but he is also a somewhat benign character, like Nick the narrator in the great gatsby.
It's also interesting that there are more well healed off-griders in some the area he is in, on more expensive land with more resources, but because he is working as a rural outreach person and probably because those people are less exciting characters, the book's focus is more on the lower income off-griders, who come to it not from some ideological reason, but from a place of survival and adventure - more like pioneers who also have grow-opps.
I don't think that's an accurate representation of the criticism. The reviewer is primarily critical that he doesn't delve deeper into the backstories or structural forces that lead to people living there, and seems content with somewhat shallow descriptions of how their lives interact with the author's.
I want to stop writing software, build a low impact house and become a modern day peasant. No, really, I have given this years of thought. Unfortunately, this is impossible in England (legally), unless you have 1M pounds in cash.
Please share if you have some useful resources on how to do it, although I'd rather not buy land in Portugal, Spain or other country with friendlier laws - this is common advice.
While planning rules make it difficult to make new-builds in the countryside, you might look at fixer-uppers in rural Ireland. If you're a UK citizen you still have the right to live in Ireland.
In many cases councils are eager to have people fixing up vacant houses, and grants are available. This is how I came to have thatched cottage on 3.5 acres in Co. Offaly. And I had ~40,000 euro, not 1 million pounds! I made a site to find properties like this, go to gaffologist.com/ and choose "advanced" if you want to select for acreage (warning - it's buggy!)
https://www.youtube.com/@MossyBottom is worth watching on this topic as well; he lives off-grid in rural Ireland and is fixing up an old cottage.
Yes, I know Wales has some low impact development legislation but look at the history of many of those projects, years of court cases and several tens of thousands of pounds in fees. The successful ones (that I know of) are the ones that incorporated themselves or garnered enough media attention to stop the demolition. I know it sounds lazy but I don't want to start a movement, just build a house. I don't want to cut wheat with a scythe and live in a tipi (can't remember which one but it was one in England that did get permission).
Thanks for the website, I'm amazed how cheap plots are in Ireland. It does look like Ireland has what I'm looking for: reasonably priced house/plot with a couple of acres of land. Those villages even have most of the grid!
But see, that's the problem - all good advice boils down to "move out of England".
Canal boats. Apparently about a 50k UKP investment for the basic shell, then as much as you want/have on the build. Single-digit thousands per year for a mooring.
We considered it for a couple of minutes but we want some land for crops and animals both for their entertainment value and keeping costs down (this is something we already do in our garden and allotment).
Long established, I saw a piece about it on the television and it looked idyllic - at least outside of winter (cold, wet and muddy!). Might be a good community to contact for help about your dream.
Yes, I have but I haven't visited them yet. I find that those communities have too much political and ethical baggage and sacrifice pragmatic solutions because of that. There's some communities where you're not allowed a ICE car and I really don't like that.
I know what you mean. The extreme form is something like the Amish lifestyle, which appeals to me in lots of ways bar the entirety of the religious component.
I’d love a simple hut on a Portuguese hillside, with a loose confederation of nearby people helping each other out when convenient - sharing tools, ideas, contacts … whatever. No politics, no enforced veganism - just a simple life.
I also want this. We're renting in UK countryside with big enough garden to grow vegetables and have a happy toddler running around but we're a very long way off being able to buy land and build what we want here. It feels like there must be so many of us wanting to live this life but barred from it by our petty planning laws.
I'd love to find a loose but inclusive international community of people living life away from the bs without having to join a cult.
Hey, glad to see there's more people like that. Do you know of any communities where people share info on how to do it without signing up with a commune? (I am very happy for people who join them, it's just not for me and I don't want to pretend as that would be unfair to those good people.)
I hope that the current climate change legislation will have a happy side effect of easing the draconian zoning laws.
I want the same for my family. We rent in England and can just about afford a big (not US big) country house with a garden and poly tunnel to grow our food. Trouble is, I spend 40+ hours a week writing code to make the money to pay the rent and bills etc and don't have much time left to live the life we're trying to build. We'll never afford the £1m mortgage to own the kind of house we want.
My wife recently found the ecological land coop. You buy/rent your parcel of farmland in a small group of people doing the same thing. Rights to live and work on the land with some shared resources.
There's a couple of those companies doing this, I urge you to read carefully what they provide you and what the restrictions are. You might find that the benefits they provide are nothing you can't do yourself cheaper and the restrictions mean you are practically a tenant.
If you live in the UK and have similar goals I created a telegram group to share research on how to move to the countryside without a million pounds:
t.me/uk_rural_life
Maybe you can find a legal loophole. Something in British law granting freedom of choice of profession and livelihood, and the sue your way into peasanthood and land ownership.
My current plan is legal loopholes which I am researching. I want to know the odds I'm against.
There are plenty of loopholes if you just Google it but most of them are absolute nonsense and clickbait. There's one guy I know of who managed it through wood management building gray area. Looks most promising as it doesn't require 12 acres of land.
Zoning. There are exceptions for rich people (no joke, Paragraph 79) and commercial farmers (arduous 3+ year journey). Everyone else is limited to existing tiny plots (even in villages) which cost at minimum 200K. Any detached house with more than quarter of an acre land will cost you a million. Contrast that with many European countries where for a small fee you can convert some agricultural land and build a house yourself.
I’m assuming you’ve already thrown away your non-work computer, don’t watch television, and don’t own/use a smart phone? And you’re only eating meat you hunt/fish/raise yourself?
Why would I do any of that? I'd like to emphasize the word "modern" in my post. I don't want to live apart from society or modern technology. I embrace modern technology (I guess to a point, don't own anything smart or use clouds). I'm a woodworker and only use hand tools where they are genuinely better, otherwise it's machines all the way. I don't want to cosplay as a British Amish.
The crucial detail is "in England". I could do this in America no problem, I know. I'm surprised more Americans don't take advantage of this freedom they have.
Off grid is getting so much closer to plug and play, and I think it will dovetail with RV-EVs and (highway) self-driving.
Your RV will be likely a PHEV with a big honking battery and some compact generator (those inside-out rotaries look promising, or a fuel cell, even though I'm a major hydrogen skeptic).
It'll have solar on the RV roof, plus a fold-out solar array when parked (doubles as a canopy) that will provide ample power for an off-grid level of lifestyle. The EV battery doubles as a battery backup for the solar, and the PHEV hybrid range extender doubles as a backup generator.
You could even do some sort of fifth wheel + enhanced battery. Big problem with towing in an EV pickup is the range, but that's because we don't typically think about the possibility of the trailer RV having a big battery, and that can be linked to the Pickup truck's battery for enhanced all-electric range.
Communication? Starlink. In the area in the article, you don't even have trees that would intermittently block the satellite tracking.
For longer term offgrid, water collection and sanitation are the big challenges, well, and emergency services.
It's a shame the industry didn't go all-in on PHEVs when hybrids appeared ... TWENTY FIVE YEARS AGO. Five years after the Insight/Prius there should have been a plug in hybrid in every consumer segment, with subsidies to make them cheaper than pure ICE drivetrains. We would have likely electrified 60-90% of daily drive trips.
I still think an aggressive PHEV policy should complement policies for EV adoption, but I doubt automakers will invest in new hybrid drivetrains, given the choice of the massive engineering switch to EV drivetrain and a new hybrid drivetrain, most will just go EV and limp along with whatever legacy ICE drivetrains they have in the meantime.
Especially CEOs get fired if they don't adopt EV drivetrains. Hell they get fired if they don't switch over fast enough (see: VW).
Just an FYI (I know you were talking about PHEV): some people have tried & tested the EV-for-RV route and found it wanting, in the sense that you can rarely plan on driving more than 100 miles at a time despite huge battery systems for the engine. The extra weight really makes a huge difference.
Solar-for-everything-but-the-engine is already a conventional reality unless you need air conditioning, and even that is becoming possible.
Water collection is not a technical problem, but a climate one. West of the 100th meridian, not enough water falls from the sky to collect, most of the year. Even in wetter areas, however, collecting enough water between rainfalls for the needs of even two people is not completely trivial.
America: Where it seems easier to solve self-driving and live indefinitely in the commons of the Interstate Highway System, than it does to just own a reasonable goddamn house.
My wife and I were raised in the suburbs in Colorado, in relatively large homes/condos/apartments and we owned a decent sized home in the suburbs for a bit. We've steadily moved into smaller and smaller apartments, in denser and denser city areas until now when we live innthe heart of SF in a pretty small apartment. We're much happier. We also own an RV for when we need to get out of the city for a respite. If you look at total quality of life, at least how my wife and I see it, it's not really about maximizing your square footage and acreage, it's about maximizing your community and activities you love to do. The latter often points to a smaller more modest home, and more community and opportunity.
I'm in a similar situation, but instead of an RV I have a farm to retreat to.
There are plenty of cheap buildings further away where you can have space to tinker and spread out, which is fun. The city is for socializing and 20 square meters are more than enough. Splitting time between both (city on weekend and farm on weekdays when everyone is busy) is pretty ideal for me.
DIY furniture is not cheap compared with mass-produced even without considering time, so giving up the hobby is a sound financial decision. For huge cost savings, there is a large market of used furniture available private-party.
Edit: Hobbies certainly aren't practical, but there is often a practical aspect associated with them used as a justification, e.g. for having fresher vegetables or unusual varieties not sold in a supermarket/co-op. I bring up cost with woodworking as it's a notoriously expensive hobby, especially second-order costs such as the decision to own a single-family home or a larger vehicle.
Isn’t the “it’s not cheap compared to mass produced.” sort of the description of a hobby? I bake (on and off) as a hobby and while that is comparatively simple in terms of equipment, if I start considering the time and actual costs, the pretty expensive hipster bakery starts to look more and more appealing. Same for the vegetables we grow in our garden.
My most prized possessions are the quilts my mother made for us, the jewelry and furniture my father made for us and my grandparents (and I've since inherited) and us. I would rather have those things than all the money in the world. Yes, my parents could have traded in their stuff 30 years ago and invested the money, and handed me a pile of money instead, but I would have lost my soul, my heritage, my history. I'm grateful they didn't, and I hope that the parent commenter doesn't either. I hope the parent commenter keeps making furniture that is meaningful to them and theirs.
What if you don't want to inhale the stuff mass produced furniture is outgassing? With DIY you have at least a slight chance to avoid that, by choosing your materials accordingly.
Personally my goal is to put as many acres as I can afford between me and other people. Living in small apartment where I have to share a fucking stairwell with others is a kind of hell for me.
Get out of SF and you’ll find it’s a very normal and achievable to own a decent house by the time you’re 30, and you don’t need to be in software to make it happen.
That's becoming increasingly less true of anywhere with a reasonable quality of life, or that has any kind of desirable or interesting nature. Wages outlying areas and smaller towns are also quite a bit less.
This hasn't been true for a long time now. The cost of housing has far outpaced wages and even houses in and around smaller cities sell for high prices because they're catering to those software developers working remote but wanting to live somewhere near society.
Considering I'm in my 30s and have been working in a software job and cannot afford a home, I strongly suggest reevaluating your metrics.
The challenge with living like this is that it eliminates two of the things most people rely on - a social support network, and modern infrastructure.
The second one is less of a problem than the first one. As another commenter here pointed out, you can get relatively close to exurb living standards technology-wise with careful equipment purchases (and deep pockets). However, you will be without anyone to help you if things go even a little bit south.
In a city, if you break your arm, you'll be inconvenienced and in pain for awhile, but you'll be fine eventually.
In the middle of the wilderness, a broken arm may be a death sentence.
We rely on other people too much for the "off grid lifestyle" to be viable for most of us.
~5 years ago I moved rural. We put effort in meeting new people and now we have a strong social network. Its almost like family around us as in the country people are very close, and with more limited social options we are often at each others houses (rather than going out), and generally always there to lend a hand or be given one. Also it different in rather than knowing one person, we tend to know their wider family well, kids, parents, siblings etc so it makes a really good network.
> modern infrastructure
This is solved with star link now. Previously remote places are setup fine for water & septic. The last decades brought power as solar/batteries have become more accessible. With internet you had to hope for mobile reception or a repeater, but now we have star link that's the last hookup point solved.
> hospitals and other
Definitely a factor. In my country of Australia we have many families live remote for farming etc. We have a service called 'The Flying Doctors' and they service rural areas and get flights out to emergencies. Not sure if this is realistic for US on cost and availability.
Also another point is off grid doesn't have to be way out in the boonies. You get 20min from a tier 3 town with a hospital and you have all the amenities and are likely in the middle of nowhere. Probably less choice in that there might be 4 restaurants rather than 400, but everything is largely there. Me Im 50min from Brisbane CBD, 20mi form town services and live in a rural valley. Blocks here are not cheap being close to a major city but people can achieve the same by doing this around smaller towns.
And IM not saying its viable for all, but its definitely more viable than ever.
Infrastructure is about a lot more than water, power, and internet. Starlink doesn’t allow an ambulance to suddenly get you to a hospital any quicker.
Rural livings has a lot going for it but there are a lot of less obvious downsides like a smaller dating pool. There are real advantages to being within 3 hours of a city vs very remote areas.
This has been my conclusion. Access to good Healthcare, in less than an hour or two is one of thr greatest luxury there is. Choosing to go without that is a real concession.
> In a city, if you break your arm, you'll be inconvenienced and in pain for awhile, but you'll be fine eventually.
> In the middle of the wilderness, a broken arm may be a death sentence.
How on earth did Americans manage in the times of yore before cities?
Possibly so. Note I underspecified which times of yore.
Does this observation apply equally to 1990s as much as 1890s? Both are in the distant past depending on your vantage point.
Must be some crossover point for when the era of the rugged individual ended and we all became tethered to urban life by the belly button. I would think living in the boonies has never been easier nor safer what with all the progress, but guess not.
You specified a time "before cities" in the US. I assume you're ignoring Native American civilizations, in which case we'd be talking about the era between the late 1500s and mid-1600s.
> I would think living in the boonies has never been easier nor safer what with all the progress, but guess not.
I'm sure it's safer than it's ever been. The risk of randomly suffering and dying is low. Does that mean it's an acceptable risk for most people? Probably not, especially if they have children.
My wife and I recently purchased her father’s rural childhood home, and many of his stories about growing up here are about people dying in car accidents and house fires, both because of the consumer safety of the 60’s and 70’s as well as the lack of emergency services.
That was from a time when we knew comparatively nothing about medicine. Antibiotics were new back then. So people suffered and died from things that are trivially preventable today.
People used to routinely die from infections in the prime of their lives back then. The life expectancy at the turn of the 1900's was 47 (and much less if you were black.) People sometimes romanticize the past, which is really doing a huge disservice to how far we've come. I would not want to have been born at any previous time, I'm living in the best time yet. The future will likely be even better. We'll get off fossil fuels, push computers to their limits, expand industry into space, and gain ground on many of the diseases that have plagued us, including cancer and aging itself. The future belongs to the optimists, until it doesn't.
The people who WANT to go off-grid are often willing to be far from town - but it's perfectly possible to go off-grid and still be quite close to a town with reasonable healthcare; it just costs more and it's probably not worth going completely off-grid at that point.
It does help tremendously if you have more than one person, even a family will have two or more adults, and these people often have a smallish group.
Zoning can get tricky here, depending on the state and county. It can be done- in fact, my property could be fully off-grid, but I like having a grid backup for electricity, and fiber internet.
I'm about a 20 minute drive from two different hospitals (towns west and east), and 10 minutes from a clinic that doesn't have emergency services. My nearest neighbor is probably a half mile away.
Yeah septic is usually the hardest to utilize near the city, but rural towns will have septic setups just outside the boundaries (and sometimes inside if the town has grown).
This seems really compelling. I saw a few 20 acre lots for $20k or so, one even near the river. This spot seems remote but nothing like the cheap land Montana I used to look at. It seems like an interesting spot to get a plot, keep it for camping trips, have the option to build a small off-grid house or cabin once the tech improves (sat internet or availability of microwave network). It seems sunny enough in the summer months to use solar.
But given the slightly negative tone in the comments here, I sense it’s actually not a good idea. Are neighbor issues out there would be persistent and unresolvable? What are the environmental and construction restrictions? Do buildings just get ransacked often? Is there some ambiguity in ownership and limited state ability to defend your stake? I presume you can’t just build a factory but are there home size/material restrictions?
Aside: It' a little unclear what area exactly the article is talking about. When I look up San Luis Valley, I see an area of mostly center-pivot irrigation (near 37.698, -106.009), so I assume that there is a non-arable part of the valley with low property values.