> If indeed our lives were better back when we lived in roving bands, would it be wise to consider how we might revive aspects of our deep past?
This pings something about modern existence that bothers me. If you want stop participating in the rat race, the only accepted way to do that is to have acquired enough money to retire. You can't just go find an unused plot of land to exist on. And if you did you'd be there illegally.
You also can't just construct your own shelter that you find adequate. It has to reach the very stringent and remarkably expensive building codes that exist virtually everywhere.
All these modernities come together as if to say "either learn how to exist like us or you have no right to exist."
> You also can't just construct your own shelter that you find adequate. It has to reach the very stringent and remarkably expensive building codes that exist virtually everywhere.
Are you in the US? Most of the US is incredibly cheap and has virtually no building codes. You don't see it if you never get out of the major metro areas, but there is like a million miles of undeveloped cheap land.
A quick search reveals a pile of websites that specifically cater to this offering acres in the middle of nowhere for less than a thousand bucks.
Of course, you're in the middle of fucking nowhere so all of the benefits of modernity don't go with you. But if your goal is opt out of much of the social contract, there is plenty of places in the US to do it.
Woodland is relatively cheap in the UK. Certainly for what you pay, you can get an unmanageably large amount of land. You can get a few acres for 10-20k, up to hundreds of acres for < 200k. Prices have gone up quite a lot recently. You pay more for things like ancient/hardwoods, features like river frontage/streams (which may have fishing rights) and occasionally some come with outbuildings.
The catch is that you are extremely unlikely to get planning permission (hence cheap) for a building and you can legally only stay there for a certain period of time each year. On the other hand, you can put up a small cabin if it's for "forestry activities" and if appropriate you can make a profit out of the land (e.g. lumber, forest crops, charcoal). There's also a reasonable chance there will be public access routes through your land.
Big benefits though. It's yours, freehold, and it's convenient for tax purposes (no inheritance tax). You can camp on it, or have a caravan, and it's essentially your playground. You are liable for some maintenance like boundary fencing, but aside from that its' really up to you what you do with it.
In Scotland it's a bit different, you can build a hut (technical term) and the only real constraint is that it must be removable without leaving a trace - so you can't put in permanent plumbing, for example. It also can't be your main residence.
Nope. I spent the last year looking to do this and it’s not as simple as you say. If you buy a plot in the middle of Arizona or something, you might be responsible for road upkeep or charged for other things. And you still have to pay taxes every year as well as follow building codes. And there are hidden problems. You have no privacy, you will be in a wash and get flooded, you will probably get robbed, an industrial farm might move in nearby and spray fecal matter upwind of you. You’ll need an off-road vehicle just to get there and you’re going to have to off-road truck all your building supplies to the site. Oh and you want water? Good luck. And you have to pay tens of thousands at least to get the land. By the end, it’s not even close to being cost effective. Back in the day you could buy land in Texas with no zoning or building codes and get a huge area for almost no money. That just doesn’t exist anymore.
And plus, you are at the mercy of the county. If they want to raise taxes or make your life hell with some kind of development like a highway or something, it’s them vs little old you. And guess who’s gonna win. Oh and if you have a small medical problem you are 100% dead.
If you want to get out of the rat race, you should move to a midwestern city. You can find houses for less than 50k in safe neighborhoods by California standards. For 50k you get low property taxes, decent neighborhood, reliable internet, nearby hospital, Costco, cheap gas and cheap electricity. And plus, when the county wants to fuck people over with taxes or developments, they have to deal with half a million angry people rather than just you. That’s crucially important. I’ve been researching this intensely for a year and casually for almost a decade.
And you can live cheaper than you think. If you live in your house and aren’t selling in the next two years, you can perform almost any alteration to your house yourself. You don’t have to hire an electrician or plumber as long as you pull permits yourself and follow code. You could build a whole house yourself in most places — just need an engineer to draw plans. People have no clue about this, they just assume you have to pay thousands to do anything. You can live quite well outside the rat race if you are smart.
I hope you have been saving because the next 6 months will probably be the best time to do this in the last decade. I bought a cheap house just like this a month ago and while I still paid very little, I am kicking myself.
Would you be willing to share which states you've considered?I've been looking into this myself, and although cost is not the only factor I'm considering, I find it's intertwined with other social factors.
I’ve visited almost every state at least briefly. In the past couple months I visited El Paso, New Orleans, Huntsville, Lincoln and Omaha, Wichita and Des Moines. Des Moines was the best by a mile.
Absolutely. I know someone who bought 5 (I think, it might have been a bit more) acres of land about 90 miles north of Minneapolis for $15,000 back around 2009. It went cheap because it's too rocky for farming and would cost too much to get utilities put in.
I also know some other people who bought cheap land in the same area. They have a trailer home up there for a weekend getaway.
Isn't Alaskan real-estate wildly expensive? This lifestyle appeals to me, but any time I've looked into it the prices seem greater than other comparable west-coast land (e.g. Republic, Washington).
It wasn't that long ago that you could homestead in Alaska (end in the 80s). Go out, parcel out a piece of land, improve it and give the gov't $100 and it's yours.
How hard is this if you want land that is road accessible (so that I don't have to trespass in order to reach it), and has a source of water like a creek?
Last year, we bought a 40 acres in Colorado with a creek and a half-finished cabin for 100k. The land is about 45 min from our house in town, last 2 miles are 4wd only dirt road. There is 1-2 acre that is flat enough to farm, the rest is too steep. In the mountains, if it is steep it will be cheap.
As far as the no building codes dream, good luck finding that. Expect the county to do whatever it can to make your life difficult and extract the maximum of fees from you.
I guess the main use of the steep land is to provide physical distance from the neighbors. We do have some trails and lots of trees for hiking and firewood. Hunting is an option when in season. The animals tend to walk on the trails because it is easier, same as humans do. Assuming the virus does not get me I will plant some fruit trees.
It took us about a year of looking to find land that met our requirements at a reasonable price. It is possible to find deals but it takes a while.
We found an agent in our area that specializes in land/cabin properties. You want an agent that is willing to drive with you for an hour or more to view property, and is not afraid to help get the car un-stuck on muddy roads. The advantage of having a relationship with a buyer's agent is that you can move more quickly when a good listing comes on the market. Land with good value will not stay on the market long.
Also google earth is useful, or your county may have a GIS tool on their website you can use to view property boundaries, example: http://maps.boco.solutions/propertysearch/
I did a search on this a couple years ago and found a table of property tax data (no idea where now). From what I recall, Mississippi, Alaska and Nevada were all pretty low. There weren't as many low-tax areas as you might expect, though, and I'm sure a few of those are less than hospitable.
Property taxes really are the hardest part of this idea. You can find ways to unload almost every other expense (if you have enough time & energy, that is!). I guess you could be a nomad, moving your campsite around a national forest every couple weeks-- but you'd still need permits for any kind of hunting or fishing, and too much gathering might also be frowned upon.
Honestly, this lady was right when she said the only way to really live completely free in this age is to do it illegally. To be fair, though, there are probably a lot of places where you could do it & be unlikely to get caught.
Alaska is an outlier in a lot of ways; they pay you to be a resident. I know a few military/coast guard folks who went up there -- Alaska is one of the top requested posts in the Coast Guard, btw -- and retained their AK residency even after moving elsewhere because of the tax benefit.
You don't even need to be in a big empty country like that...Even here in Germany there are plenty of depressed rural areas especially in the east.
As long as it doesn't have convenient access to the rail network or an autobahn you can find a plot with a small, old house on it even 2-3 hours drive from Berlin for next to nothing in a village that had 2x today's population in 1990 (and everyone left there today are old people).
It has fewer people living in it today than it had in 1875 (earliest available data) & half as much as it had in its peak in 1950. It is about 2 hours drive from Berlin according to google maps.
It will not be a comfy home for a family but for the type of stuff discussed above it would do (e.g. a formerly abandoned but still standing/stable house).
In Canada though you're gonna be 1) very VERY remote, and 2) you're gonna be extremely cold. It's no surprise that the most expensive cities in Canada are also the furthest south.
> This pings something about modern existence that bothers me. If you want stop participating in the rat race, the only accepted way to do that is to have acquired enough money to retire. You can't just go find an unused plot of land to exist on. And if you did you'd be there illegally.
Before modern times, you couldn’t just “exist” on a plot of land. Ask the Native Americans or any other indigenous populations what happens if you try that. All animals have to participate in the rat race, lest someone higher up the food chain comes around.
I assume there were plenty of survival challenges back then. Knowledge about farming, lack of food and clean water security, heat, natural predators, other tribes, medicine etc.
Even in a little,tiny country I'm from, one could go into the forest owned by the state, build some stone age shelter and live there as long as he'd like to. Someone would probably discover at some point, check if he's not in a need of a medical assistance, call him a nutter and leave alone. Mileage may vary depending on a country.
Lithuania.Not sure what the law is really like, however people can freely move in forests irrespective of who owns it as long as one doesn't start some sort of crazy activity in there.To be honest,I very much doubt that majority of private owners would mind too much if someone would be living Flintstones style as long as it's fairly reasonable and not like ' let me litter as much as I can around my tent' type of living. Yes,one would have issues with permanent structure,if it's like a house, however a few planks and some bushes on top of it would hardly pass as a perm structure..
Interesting. I've checked out the Lithuanian forests after hearing much of them. I remember, we drove for about 1h to get into as much into 'middle of nowhere' as we could. Didn't strike me as a place where you wouldn't be found by a forester quite quickly. But that could be just my perception, from growing up in Germany and building places in the forest as a child.
Where is that? I'd say in Europe forests are so well utilized that you will be discovered by a professional forester in no time - and likely asked to leave.
I'm in NJ, which is the most densely populated state, and you could get away with this in many places. Your biggest problem would be having someone detect your fires.
Most of these constraints are there because there are a lot of humans and there is really no such thing as unused land. Land that isn't being used commercially is either someone's investment or actively bring reserved for nature. Life as described in the article isn't available for a meaningful amount of people since it requires an enormous amount of space per person. That's a large reason why we stopped being hunter gatherers and started farming. It's boring and reduces your freedom, but if you want to feed billions of people it's needed.
> You also can't just construct your own shelter that you find adequate. It has to reach the very stringent and remarkably expensive building codes that exist virtually everywhere.
Not really. Most of California has no building codes. From what I understand, you could buy land in the desert (or honestly, just squat, no one cares) and even if you went the legal route, no one cares if you do whatever you want.
Of course, all the desirable land is taken and expensive because you'll have to convince someone else to give up its use to you.
> Of course, all the desirable land is taken and expensive because you'll have to convince someone else to give up its use to you.
This is also crucial to the point I'm trying to make. Everything is already owned by somebody. Some of this "owned" land hasn't had anything done to it yet and likely won't for another hundred years, but you still can't use it, because it's "owned".
Well this is no different than hunter gatherer society where land was 'owned' by those willing able to defend it. If your tribe couldn't defend your land from invading tribes, the other tribe would take ownership of it.
What you're ultimately complaining about is that other people exist, which is often noteworthy of complaint, but you'll be hardpressed to find a solution.
OK, but, knowing this, how is it somehow "unfair" that you can't... what... steal this land from the people who have it now so you can drop out of society?
That seems just as unfair, but from a different perspective.
Well, if we're talking "fairness", why is it "fair" that someone gets to permanently deny a piece of the Earth to everyone else? It's not like they made it in the first place, it's not even possible to make more. I argue that every fenced-off area incurs a debt to every citizen of the Earth.
The state possesses a monopoly on the use of force, so the only way to acquire a useful place to live is to have money or expose yourself to the state’s wrath.
Verified. In particular if you try to "get away from it all", you need to pay close attention to the California wildland urban interface code.
That says things like what materials are acceptable for your house, and how you have to clear brush within 100' (or to your property line) of your house.
I live in Washington and my uncle was a state inspector for years. I assure you, there are places in certain areas of the state where you can build whatever you want as long as you keep a low profile. Officials are afraid to drive their official vehicles, let alone attempt to flex their influence or rules.
He went berserk, and started murdering people, because one day he went to his favorite, most remote, unsullied spot of nature that he could possibly find - a symbol of his ability to escape a toxic civilization - and found that it had been razed and there was now a logging road through it.
I don't think that example quite supports the point you were trying to make.
Taxes also pay for things that people rarely think about, like police. And yes, I know some people have guns in their house, and live in places where police take ages to get there. But I'm not aware of anyone in America that has to stress over a local warlord.
> You can't just go find an unused plot of land to exist on. And if you did you'd be there illegally.
If you've somehow managed to squat there long enough without anyone asserting their ownership, you might gain title of the land thanks to adverse possession laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession
A friend of mine did this, in the legal way, with his wife and children. The police brutally beat him and he later died of complications associated with the beating.
I'll google the incident and post links, edit forthcoming.
> If you want stop participating in the rat race, the only accepted way to do that is to have acquired enough money to retire. You can't just go find an unused plot of land to exist on.
I mean this is only "modernity" if you talk about modernity going back thousands of years. People have staked out land for millennia (and people who wanted land would have to kill the people on the land to take their land).
i remember articles about people being taken out of their properties because they made their own repairs and extensions. A double penalty because even it wasn't made by a NEC code company, the work was said to be safer.
All in all it's another side of the 'burden is others' coin. You can't live in simple means because it will cost the rest more than if you were dancing the same beat. Unless you create your own insulate independant country :)
This pings something about modern existence that bothers me. If you want stop participating in the rat race, the only accepted way to do that is to have acquired enough money to retire. You can't just go find an unused plot of land to exist on. And if you did you'd be there illegally.
You also can't just construct your own shelter that you find adequate. It has to reach the very stringent and remarkably expensive building codes that exist virtually everywhere.
All these modernities come together as if to say "either learn how to exist like us or you have no right to exist."