Want to buy a West Texas ghost town? Now’s your chance
texasmonthly.com
texasmonthly.com
The biggest issue for me, other than the massive amount of work and capital required to build something here, is that you are RIGHT on the highway. It's not a freeway, but there is enough traffic on that Big Bend route to Marfa that every minute or two during the day, you'll have some truck hauling it at 75mph past you.
I think you could demo most of the land and turn it into some fun outdoor concert venue with food trucks and bathrooms, but you won't be able to draw more than 100-200 people max because you would have to eat up so much of the land for parking.
I really can't think of any killer use case for Lobo, which is unfortunate because it's actually quite gorgeous there. You can see the mountainous border with Mexico in the distance and I'm sure it's stunningly beautiful at night.
Closeness to a highway could be beneficial for a factory, too.
Next to an highway ? With headlights and road lights it seems like a bad place for that.
Well it turns out Clearlake was heavily contaminated with mercury when there was an active mine right on the lake…
Buyer beware!
But yeah lots of gotchas when buying land. Floods, fires etc.
He could probably get away with this at the hostel (which is in a popular city), but hiring people for minimum wage in the middle of nowhere is a different story.
A friend went back to CG after the sale and told me that everything there is now off limits. In a video from the YT channel I saw a sign that said 'private property - trespassers will be prosecuted' [0]. It's sad and lame, and I'm getting douchy vibes when I watch the guys videos. But hey, good luck to him.
EDIT: I just watched the hilarious and insightful Maggie Mae Fish video[1] linked by Spellmann. I retract what I said before. The guy is a full on douche and fuck him.
I also think the video you linked is nonsense and totally unfair. If you look at the history of CG and how big the town used to be, it would have been losing several buildings a year on average consistently for the last century! Losing only one in the last 3 years is incredible luck, and this frames it as fraud with zero evidence.
I own a decently sized house in a major city. It's about 100 years old but in above average condition. It still requires considerable time and maintenence. Fortunately I have water, gas, electric hookups from the city. They pick up the trash and maintain the roads too (not well, but they do it).
Now imagine you have to do all your regular maintenence, but on 30 buildings. And there are no contractors willing to come out. And the nearest hardware store is 100 miles away. That sounds like several full time jobs. Now let's make it worse. You also need to manage the electricity, water, gas, trash, road maintenence, and anything else that comes up. Awful. Another couple of full time jobs. Only all these jobs you now have produce no income.
Want a place to throw weird parties? Get a field somewhere with water and electricity and build a small structure for bathrooms and storage. Don't plague yourself with endless maintenence of ancient buildings.
Artists, religious cults, left-wing activists, right-wing/sovereign citizen activists, preppers, eco activists - all these groups tend to like such opportunities, because the heavy lifting (initial infrastructure construction, road access, legal issues and general paperwork) has all been sorted out already.
The biggest issues for them tend to be Internet access (although Starlink changes the equation seriously here) and access to essential services - you can/have to self-organize a volunteer firefighter corps and basic shops, in the US you can even run your own police force (although it raises serious ethical concerns), but medical services and mail is a massive hurdle.
It's only about 50 miles north of Marfa, which has a lot of art world stuff going on.
> Jeff Bazo’s Blue Origin spaceport is 40 miles north of Lobo.
I'm not sure which is funnier: honest mistake or intentional dig.
It's definitely a unique area, the people who live there either have lived there for generations or live there because they don't want to be found (for various reasons). Marfa gets especially strange because it's full of rich people, artists, and grad students but also literal cowboys and bandits.
All of the towns around here have a population of 2000 or less, save for Alpine at a whopping 20k. Personally, I have zero concerns about being in the radius of any of all that.
I don’t think it’s over the Permian Basin.
That said, I haven't been in awhile and I hear it was impacted by the recent fires.
If there is a museum of bad writing, this belongs there.
there is at least one county out there that doesn't have ANY building codes...you can build whatever you want
forewarned, it is expensive to get anything done in the middle of nowhere