Cheap Land Colorado: What going off the grid really looks like
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
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.
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.
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(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.)
Germany is twice the size of New England and 16x the size of Massachusetts.
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.
About 30% of the population of New Zealand is immigrants (Australia is similar): https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-with-the-highest-...
Try looking at areas like around San Luis Valley Ranches: https://www.google.com/maps/place/San+Luis+Valley+Ranches/@3...
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.
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.
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).
This story is particularly tragic: https://magazine.atavist.com/outlaw-country-klamath-county-o...
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.
Along the lines of developers selling off land in crazy places, Christmas Valley, OR is also an interesting story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Valley,_Oregon#Penn_...
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).
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.
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.
My experience in the SLV can't really be summed up in a comment - you could write a book :D - but I think this picture captures the beauty of the place: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hlvnsofo4leiseo/img_0012.jpg?dl=0
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).
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.
- 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.
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)
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 studies aggregated in the Humanure Handbook suggest otherwise?: https://weblife.org/humanure/references.html
Here is a link to just 1 study outside those references: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288724214_A_pilot_s... (there are better links than this particular one, no time to dig up more ATM)
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).
How is the region's pest control policies?
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.
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 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.
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.
It sounds more like you want to live like a rich person lol.
I live on a farm in the Midwest; there's a reason most people prefer life in the city/suburbs: it's simply much easier.
You can't live off grid with a day job/living in the city, you can't farm until you have land, &c.
https://diggersanddreamers.org.uk/community/tipi-valley/
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.
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 hope that the current climate change legislation will have a happy side effect of easing the draconian zoning laws.
I created a group. If you want to join and discuss ways you found to achieve a comfortable rural life:
t.me/uk_rural_life
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.
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".
(Half joking)
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.
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.
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).
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.
Next is this :
> DIY furniture is not cheap compared with mass-produced even without considering time,
Do you honestly believe that "mass-produced" furniture is anywhere near the same quality as DIY?
Ikea - Where you can buy a bookshelf which will not be able to hold the weight of books.
DiY - Where you use dado's and plywood and end up with bookshelf's which can easily hold a few hundred pounds.
There are things worth far more than money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How on earth did Americans manage in the times of yore before cities?
https://www.life.com/history/w-eugene-smiths-landmark-photo-...
They suffered and died at high rates for reasons that are now often preventable.
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.
But since family sizes were huge back then, it's not like the families would disappear.
I'm already terrified of the current US 6‰ infant mortality rate; the historical rate of 250-500‰ is incomprehensible to me.
Life expectancy at age 10+ in 1900 was closer to 60 years (total); still shortened by infection and accident, but not quite so extreme.
That number is terrifying.
> a social support network
~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.
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.
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?