Hacker News Reader

Comment by cookieswumchorr | Hacker News Reader

even in the US, i'm sure there are places where land is still cheap. Thinking globally, there's even more of them. That's the beauty of it being opensource: you can build in any part of the earth

View on HN

It's cheap because noone wants to live there.

Nobody wants to live there because there is no local work. If you work remote it's an amazing value proposition.

It's not just work though. It's shops, supermarkets, schools, community groups, cinemas, bars, ... you get the idea!

I thought living in huge estates (or even suburbs) with none of those things was fairly common in much of the US? There are examples of it here (Australia) too and there still seems to be plenty of demand to live in such places, despite the fact that everybody who does so after a few months or years starts complaining about it (in fairness, often such facilities are sold as "coming soon").

Suburbs in US almost universally have these things, even suburbs of decaying cities like Detroit or Cleveland (which often offer more facilities than than the city cores themselves).

I certainly got the impression that there were newer suburban housing developments with many 1000s of houses and basically nothing else. I gathered Texas was particularly prone to this so randomly browsing Google Maps found "Ridglea hills" and suburbs to the south of it in Fort Worth which appear to house 10s of 1000s of people without a single supermarket and barely even a cafe etc.

I looked at this neighborhood. It’s around 1 mile in diameter, and there are many restaurants at its north edge, and a Walmart at the south tip. This means that residents can reach it in less than 20 minutes walk, or 2-3 minute drive. This is really rather accessible, and I can’t imagine how you can get much better than that while still living in a large house with a yard. Seems like a pretty sweet place to live, if you ask me.

Yeah I saw the shopping strip at the northern boundary, which is why I said Ridglea hills and suburbs to the south of it (not a single supermarket shows up in a 5x5 km area, though part of the problem is Maps, it seems quite inconsistent at what scales anything shows up). It may well not be as barren as it appears on Google maps, but it certainly doesn't appear "rather" accessible to me. I'm curious how it compares to the blocks of land in Florida mentioned a few posts up.

This whole comment thread is weird. That neighborhood is surrounded by shopping, probably more so than the worst suburb "developments". And that isn't a normal walmart, as you can see from the maps if you click on it: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Walmart+Neighborhood+Marke...

It's a walmart "Neighborhood Market" which looks like a grocery store to me. There's even pictures of the inside.

Ridglea Hills has a stinking Walmart heh! The "Acres of suburbia" usually mean that it's a pain to walk to the store, not that the store doesn't exist.

I'd be surprised if there are many suburban areas that are more than 5/10 miles from "stores" for some value of store. Taking some central place of Ridglea gets me a 2 mile walk to Walmart. But there are no sidewalks.

The surburban hellscape you're imagining is probably like this: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Granada+Hills+North,+Los+A...

The nearest grocery stores appear to be on the other side of the highway, and like an hour's walk from inside the neighborhood. Although literally no one here is walking to Trader Joe's. Just having a Trader Joe's here kind of implies that.

I've been to the San Fernando valley, but only really around Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks, which definitely weren't like that. But it wouldn't surprise me that parts of LA would be.

well, schools become irrelevant once kids grow up (that is, if you have any). A lack of shopping is good for the wallet, when you grow accustomed to buying in bulk and stacking food. the rest is all about your lifestyle preferences

There 0.5+ Acre lots that you can buy for something like 20-30k$ in Cleveland, OH and I'm planning to move there.

Here in Florida, large parcels were bought up by developers and then subdivided into .25/.33/.50 acre lots. These were then sold off to people who eventually wanted to retire here. The problem is the building codes here are probably the most stringent in the US. So there are a lot of these parcels for sale on the cheap ($10k-$25k) but it’s still not worth doing anything with them.

Would a prefab house (which normally satisfies various codes' requirements) be worth putting there?

Even with a fully legal prefab house, you're often looking at anywhere between 20-100k in "other costs" besides delivery and installation.

You have to connect to water, sewer, power (or build a well and septic), you still have to get it permitted and inspected, etc, etc, etc.

The issue with much of Floridas land is it’s wetlands. It doesn’t so much matter what you build on it as it is about minimizing impact to the environment.

This is the exact issue I've run into. Land in good location is cheap near me. But only a handful of counties in the entire nation have building codes loose enough that let you make use of it affordably.

I've heard that parts (most?) of Wyoming is pretty lax about requirements.

You may find land that is cheap, but you will only be able to build a single house on it. This incentivizes building large.

Your chance of finding a sub-dividable lot in a suburban area is essentially 0.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com