Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be better to buy some cheap land and throw up a yurt (or maybe a Quonset hut if you're more fancy), rather than take on a 30-year mortgage.
Can you share the lots you were looking at?
For typical Texas land priced around the same per acre as Alaskan land:
https://www.land.com/property/Fox-Hunters-Club-Rd-Bon-Wier-T...
$19,708 - 3.79 acres On a public road, with electricity (water you'd need a well). Remote East Texas, and by remote I mean you're 20 min drive from the nearest city (Kirbyville with some gas, food, small department stores) and 40 min drive from the nearest Walmart SuperCenter (the real sign of civilization in rural America).
Or if you prefer something closer to a city, the desert just outside Del Rio, you can see:
https://www.land.com/property/Windmill-Rd-Del-Rio-Texas-7884...
$15,997 - 2.05 acres On a public road, I see electricity nearby but you'd have to run it to your land ($15k+ probably), or just do solar since there's plenty of sun there. Well water and septic. Bordering the Rough Canyon national recreation area and Lake Amistad, if you like boating and hiking (watch out for rattlesnakes). I'd say a "suburb" of Del Rio, an apartment building and single family homes 7 min drive away as well as a cafe. The nearest Walmart Supercenter is 30 min drive away in Del Rio, as well as the city of Del Rio and the general aviation airport is by the Walmart, if you wanted to fly to San Antonio or Monterrey.
Now you might be saying, I want true suburban land, like surrounded by other single family homes, with water hookups and neighbors, and commuting distance to a major city. That's going to cost you more - but not much more, especially given it's already got all utilities:
https://www.land.com/property/1631-Old-Henry-Court-Angleton-...
$33,000 - 1 acres About 15 minutes drive from the nearest Walmart Supercenter in Angleton, as well as an HEB (gotta have that HEB), and 40 min commute to Pearland where you could actually find city jobs, or 60 min if you want to go all the way to downtown Houston (I used to have a manager who did just this drive every day for 10+ years, so she could live on a working horse farm).
That's where my disconnect is for Alaskan land prices. I can only surmise it's because the federal and state government own like 99%+ of the land in Alaska and only sell a very small amount at any time to rigidly control the prices and development. Like an Uber-California in that way.
I think the killer app is finding a place that lets you do graywater and an incinerating toilet. I just hope they drop in price. $4k for the nice ones, but can still be cheaper than running septic for light-use.
However, please tell me only :)
I’d add lack of internet to your list. Much harder (but not impossible) to provide yourself.
That's the real problem. HN forgets not everyone is remote.
The "yourself" bit is a tricky bit, as where it comes to utilities, you can sort of DIY your own supply of everything else, but Internet is as much a social construct as it is technical.
terminal, HN would be fine, a console reddit and the carbonyl chromium browser for everything else you need 'live'.
Too bad things have moved onto Discord from IRC.
We have some really far out places that are still "unorganized" in Ontario Canada and therefore no permitting req'd, but you're still supposed to follow the building code for anything over 108sqft.
That said, many might face some challenges in doing so in a place they want to live. It's non-trivial to find a cheap piece of livable land in a city. In a more rural areas, you can expect some possible complications in things like water, electricity, and internet access.
Electricity: solar panels + batteries. You will need a lot of them if you want to run a small fridge. Forget about a gaming desktop.
Internet access: LTE via a tall antenna if you're lucky, Starlink otherwise. Add more solar panels.
You'll have to limit your diet mostly to foods that store well without a fridge. A tiny fridge can still fit the power budget.
I'd say that sewage and trash disposal are going to be bigger problems. Having a shower, too, especially in winter.
Start a compost pile and get the correct Carbon:Nitrogen ratio (~24:1). Using the Berkeley method it can reach heats of up to 200°F (93°C) within a week. You'd be surprised how quickly something like human feces can neutralized in conditions like these. The recommended wait time before direct handling is usually about 2 months but this is mostly because it's hard to be sure you've got the right ratios, temperatures, etc.
Regardless, anyone trying an "offgrid" life would be wise to stop pouring effort into throwing away one of the most valuable resources humans produce
Vermicompost setups never reach those temperatures so I don't see how it could possibly be safe to vermicompost human feces in them...
A quick search turned up this...
> As for pathogens, while there has been considerable research demonstrating the effectiveness of vermicomposting as a means of destroying pathogens, I still recommend taking a cautious approach with any material removed from the system. You may want to further process it via hot composting before using it – and you may want to avoid using it as fertilizer for food crops (even with additional measures being taken).
https://www.redwormcomposting.com/worm-composting/human-wast...
As much as HN loves obsessing over prions they're still an extremely rare phenomenon and there's few real solutions to resolving them regardless of how you deal with organic matter. Your poop is also not the only way it spreads. Saliva, urine, blood, etc all spread it. Ultimately a prion is just a protein malformed in a very specific configuration. If anything, exposing organic matter to high heat might actually reduce the risk of prions spreading than collecting all sewage together and washing it many miles away in underground tunnels
But yes, there are definitely other pathogens worth thinking about that can be spread from human organic products and I would really caution against relying on any composting strategy that doesn't get hot for treating it.
That being said, vermicomposting is a wonderful way to quickly turn food waste and other less dangerous organic waste products into usable soil
> I would really caution against relying on any composting strategy that doesn't get hot for treating it.
Oh yeah. If I were to use this system for human poop I'd probably go a step further and use the resulting compost only on plants that were themselves destined to be (hot) composted.
But as I said in sib comment, it's mostly a joke.
Digging a well can end up costing more than the price of the land if you have to dig multiple times to find water
Not an actual bathtub, of course, but at least a shower and a toilet.