I'm in a similar high-priced environment, but we get a fair amount of sun. I'm getting around a 16% return on capital based on electricity usage reduction.
Lots of cold places in northern latitudes have short winter days that are overcast more often than not yielding only a little solar energy for a big chunk of the year.
Ground mount is also an option in many places.
Definitely doable.
NREL has solar availability maps. Alas the scale sucks; there's great monthly average views, but all done with the same yearly average scale, so during the summer everything is the same full-red potential (>5.75 kWh/m^2/d) and during the winter everything is (mostly) the same low potential (<4kWh/m^2/d). Still, one can kind of read some pattern from fall/spring & see how a lot of NE looks a lot like, say, Seattle (<<4 average). https://www.nrel.gov/gis/solar-resource-maps.html