I live in a very, very rural part of the country. Land is CHEAP; you can buy 100+ acres of forest for under $2000/acre. There are a lot of vacant houses. Why? Because no one wants to live here. (Obviously not no one, since I chose to move here, but still.) There aren’t jobs locally; part of the price I pay for living where I want to live is spending 3+ hours in a car commuting each day. The vacant houses are vacant because the people that lived there either died, or moved because they couldn’t get work. They’re not vacant because some venture capital real estate company is buying up rural homes just to hold on to them as they rot away.
The issue isn’t vacant housing; the issue is where the housing is, and whether it’s actually habitable or not.
Can you live on that land without having to pay taxes or anything?
Because in my country, any cheap land in a place with no employment isn’t viable due to needing employment to maintain ‘ownership’ of the land through fees to the state.
Also even if the issue is location, there is huge amounts of abandoned empty housing in cities with jobs. Squatters are constantly trying to live in such places and getting chased out by cops.
You have found the rub, there is always taxes. The issue is you need internet or local jobs and guess what outside of starmlink there was nothing in the places you can afford. The extra fun part is there are people who move to low COL areas after selling their property when retiring just to make it work. This is a reason that these locations sometimes have a lot of elderly people. Now the real fucked up part is that even this strange retirement tactic does not work if you never are able to buy a place.
I live in a very, very rural part of the country. Land is CHEAP; you can buy 100+ acres of forest for under $2000/acre. There are a lot of vacant houses. Why? Because no one wants to live here. (Obviously not no one, since I chose to move here, but still.) There aren’t jobs locally; part of the price I pay for living where I want to live is spending 3+ hours in a car commuting each day. The vacant houses are vacant because the people that lived there either died, or moved because they couldn’t get work. They’re not vacant because some venture capital real estate company is buying up rural homes just to hold on to them as they rot away.
The issue isn’t vacant housing; the issue is where the housing is, and whether it’s actually habitable or not.
Can you live on that land without having to pay taxes or anything?
Because in my country, any cheap land in a place with no employment isn’t viable due to needing employment to maintain ‘ownership’ of the land through fees to the state.
Also even if the issue is location, there is huge amounts of abandoned empty housing in cities with jobs. Squatters are constantly trying to live in such places and getting chased out by cops.
You have found the rub, there is always taxes. The issue is you need internet or local jobs and guess what outside of starmlink there was nothing in the places you can afford. The extra fun part is there are people who move to low COL areas after selling their property when retiring just to make it work. This is a reason that these locations sometimes have a lot of elderly people. Now the real fucked up part is that even this strange retirement tactic does not work if you never are able to buy a place.