Especially with COVID showing the downsides to living in urban areas.
https://theconversation.com/rural-america-is-more-vulnerable...
Being in urban environment means higher dependence on fragile supply chains- food security is totally dependent on JIT grocery store inventories.
Rural homes, by virtue of being isolated, are easier to self isolate.
If urban environments start seriously breaking down due to a food supply chain problem, rural areas won’t be safe from desperate people.
Anyway, both approaches have their pros and cons, but as someone who has a fairly severe back problem and not much inclination to try to live off the grid, I’d rather be in an urban area.
At least for America, most city folk don't seem to understand just how armed their rural counterparts are. They'd be pretty darn safe.
Mass hysteria + lots of guns = not a place I'd like to be.
That's why you need to buy yourself a private, remote island, or at least a farm on a remote island. Also, if you don't live on it alone (regardless of ownership), it may not import more food than it exports, otherwise the other inhabitants will want to get your food.
Of course this is hard to find such an island as there aren't many such places and unless you're very rich it'll be beyond your budget anyways.
Also want to stress again that it won't be enough to just have an island, it has to be remote as well otherwise people just swim over. The number of boats is limited usually so likely few people will get to you.
I mean, there's a decent supply of islands (many with houses) that go for barely more than a Bay Area single-family home.
Something more remote is even cheaper, because there's a ton of supply of islands that are only accessible by float plane, and not much demand.
Consider yourself an outlier. I subscribe to several regional real estate newsletters, and for the last five months they've been all about people moving out of the cities and into small towns.
It's counter-intuitive but the access to testing and hospitals is very important.
As with any disease, the best treatment is prevention. Which is what being rural gives you.
Depends what kind of pandemic. If being in a city increased your exposure and infection rates 10 fold, and the disease is a killer without treatment, it's a lot worse to live in a city.
Some of this is simple variance, but rural areas are surprisingly dangerous over time where cities simply show up sooner.
Several factors at play:
- people thought COVID19 was not a thing outside of cities so people were more careless in rural areas
- wearing of masks is much less in rural areas than cities
- more local communities in rural areas (religious services for example)
But if you NEED to isolate yourself it's much easier to do it in the countryside than in a city.
In practice there are several flaws in that assumption. The lack of grocery deliveries is one major issue with rural isolation. Keep digging and you find several short vs long term issues. Consider, if you need a car you then need to eventually take it in for repairs etc.
Further, going to work is a larger concern. A higher percentage of people in cities can WFH indefinitely.
Yeah, I worked out the space requirements once, and it's actually feasible to stock a lifetime's worth of Calories in a fairly small apartment.