Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cohousing-L Digest, Vol 217, Issue 8

[treadway (treadway]

I'm afraid free land in rural areas may not be worth what you pay for 
it.  Please keep your eyes open.

Here in Iowa, since settlement 150 years or so ago, mechanization of 
agriculture has and continues relentlessly reduced the amount of labor 
it takes to farm a given plot of land.  In my great-great grandfather's 
day, 80 acres of land could support a family.  Now it takes at least a 
thousand, and this number will continue to go up.  John Deere is no 
advertising tractors that drive themselves so now a farmer will be able 
to till or harvest multiple fields at once.

The supply of farm land is going down as cities grow.  Fewer farmers, 
generation after generation, means fewer merchants in rural towns, fewer 
teachers, fewer churches.  Town after town is disheartening.  The free 
land programs I have heard of are efforts to resist this trend, but I 
don't see it ending soon.


> Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2022 11:10:44 -0500
> From: Sharon Villines <sharon [at] sharonvillines.com>
> To: Cohousing-L <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
> Subject: [C-L]_ Free Land in Kansas
> Message-ID: <1612383D-31BE-45B8-BF5D-3FD031D27617 [at] sharonvillines.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain;       charset=utf-8
>
> Would you take free land in rural America?
>
> https://thehustle.co/would-you-take-free-land-in-rural-america/
>
> > Sitting in the basement of a historic courthouse in Lincoln ? a 
> > wind-swept town in north central Kansas ? Bradley Roberts laughs while 
> > comparing his current situation to his previous life in San Francisco. 
> > Roberts was like many people in the Bay Area: Savvy, successful, and 
> > drowning in housing expenses. When he bought a house ~15 years ago, he 
> > and his partner went $300k over their budget. Rent at his last place 
> > in San Francisco was nearly $4k a month.
> >
> > ?It was awful,? Roberts, 50, told The Hustle.
> >
> > Roberts, whose grandparents were from Lincoln, bought a converted barn 
> > home in the middle of town last year for $22k. His annual housing 
> > costs in Lincoln are about the same as what his monthly housing costs 
> > were in San Francisco.  ?When I moved to Kansas,? Roberts said, ?I was 
> > like, ?holy shit, they?re giving stuff away.??
>
> Form a long article on life in the heart of the mid-west. The list of
> land available free of cost is in a graphic and I don?t have time to
> type it over but 27 towns are giving land away because their
> populations have declined over the last 20 years, some by close to
> 30%.
>
> The problem is jobs ? you need to be entrepreneurial. Bradley Roberts
> (above) became a handyman.
>
> > Priscilla Frankenstein loved the views in Whitehall, Montana, pop. 1k. 
> > On clear days, she could see peaks and snow in almost every direction. 
> >  But after moving in 2019 from California and opening a restaurant, 
> > Frankie?s, with her husband, Charles, prices got too high as the rapid 
> > growth in nearby Bozeman spread to smaller towns. Their landlord hiked 
> > their rent, and they were asked to pay $320k to buy the building where 
> > Frankie?s was located.
> >
> > Seeking an affordable alternative, they moved to Lincoln in January 
> > and found a much cheaper building for a restaurant. They also bought a 
> > house that?s big enough for their family of 5 for $70k.
>
> Think homesteading. The west was settled with free land ? and there
> are still homesteading programs in some places. One program requires
> that you reclaim a certain amount of land from the desert every year.
> It?s one way of stopping fires ? deserts are not just sand, they are
> sagebrush that in the wind become rolling fire balls.
>
> > Eric and Emily Wolgamot had all but given up on homeownership before 
> > they found Lincoln. In the last few years, they moved out of 
> > California, where Emily Wolgamot struggled to pay $1.2k in monthly 
> > rent on a telemarketer?s salary in San Diego, to Seligman, a tourist 
> > town outside Flagstaff. The cost was manageable ? $400 a month for a 
> > plot in a trailer park ? but they needed a larger space for them and 
> > their 3 kids, and yet taking the next step seemed impossible. They saw 
> > off-grid 3-bedroom houses listed at $150k. Houses with basic 
> > necessities, like plumbing, were going as high as $500k ?And I kind of 
> > wanted to turn on a faucet,? Wolgamot said.
> >
> > She and Eric started searching online for houses across the country. 
> > Lincoln had the best deal: 2 vacant houses for a combined $5.5k. They 
> > paid cash and now only owe taxes, which run ~$150 a month. Since 
> > moving in spring 2020, Eric has rehabbed their homes while starting 
> > his own tree trimming and junk removal business. The work is far 
> > different from the service-industry jobs they had in California and 
> > Arizona, but they say it has been enough to provide for their family, 
> > given the low cost of housing.
>
> Think wagon train. Recruit people. You can also just move houses to
> clusters on free land.
>
> > During my visit, Gourley showed me the ultimate real estate bargain: 
> > an olive-green Dutch Colonial house with, an ad states, ?enough 
> > woodwork to cause anyone to swoon.? It?s a fixer-upper but not beyond 
> > repair. The price tag: $0.00.
> >
> > The only catch is the house must be moved. But the free lots are just 
> > down the street. A buyer could put the free house on a free lot. 
> > There?s more: One of the grants Gourley secured can be used on the 
> > house, meaning income-eligible buyers could get $30k to spend on 
> > renovations.
>
>
> For those who know Lynda.com. It was started by a couple who both lost
> their jobs as artists in one of the big recessions in California. They
> moved to a place they could afford to live, still in California, and
> started a website from scratch doing online instruction for graphic
> designers. It was the best site for learning software in all fields
> expanding to business, photography, programming, etc. It was just
> purchased by Linked In in 2015  for  $1.5 billion. Is now free through
> the library systems as well as by subscription.
>
> https://www.linkedin.com/learning/
>
> I takes a long time to put something like this together but look at
> how long many cohousing communities take to put together. The driver
> is finding people who need to make it work.
>
> Sharon
> ?????
> Sharon Villines
>
> ?The greenest energy is the energy you don?t use.? ? Peter DeSantis

-- Dan Treadway  treadway [at] netins.net