going to get my soul free

[haptalaon]

I know that land is only cheap in America as part of ongoing colonialisation,&that all these communes sucked for one reason or another (a big theme I'm getting from this book is the biggest barrier to dropping out is not The Man, but the actual men in your commune dumping all the important work on women)

but sigh, sigh, sigh, sigh, can you imagine waking up on 100 acres of seeming wilderness with all your buddies under the stars, or being part of a wider youth culture where people can do that.

The US is a tiny baby country so the situation around land there now is where England was in like, 1066AD, we are so far past the land grab stage and onto the land hoarding. & maybe US will never get there, it's just big enough that there's enough useless land to always be available for some dumb hippy to think they'll be able to farm there.

the dream is to wake up pretending the rest of the world no longer exists

Comments

well, crud

[kraken_galactico]

I thought we were already in the land hoarding stage here in the US. Are you saying it gets worse?!? o.O;

Re: well, crud

[haptalaon]

Afraid so XD

I'm reading We Are As Gods, a history of the back-to-the-land movment in the 1970s in the USA, and these hippy collectives - yes, white and middle class, but still they're all 20 - are buying 100 acres of gorgeous wilderness in Vermont like it's nothing.

In contrast, the average amount of land you get if you look at sale listings for homesteads in britain is ~4 acres.

(Looking it up right now, those 4acre smallholdings here are £600,000ish. I can find 100 acres in the USA for $37,000, and ok perhaps that land isn't great quality, but no one ever said back-to-the-landers were known for smart agricultural decisionmaking XD You can't live your off grid fantasy on 4 acres, that's basically two fields.)

In the UK, most large landholders are descended from friends of William the Conqueror - a French king, who successfully invaded England in 1066AD. Turning common land into parcels of land owned by his close buddies was a key strategy for keeping their loyalty, and subduing the locals. If you're a certain kind of English socialist, the enclosure of the commons is a pivotal turning point in describing modern inequality here.

Even if you buy a house, you can't always buy the land it's on at the same time, so you're stuck paying rent, and if your rental contract for the house runs out you have to buy another one.

So yeah, I think it's that tightning grip of capitalism thing, where you're still in that 1066 stage of subduing the indigenous people and smashing older ways of collectively handling land, ensuring it's all Owned by the Right Sort of person; and then it'll move on to stage two where suddenly, it's owned by fewer and fewer people and becomes more and more valuable.

[goatgodschild]

The worst part is that Wales is less expensive in this regard than the US.

[haptalaon]

Do you think? It's a lot more restrictive here in terms of what you can choose to to with land, how much you can get as a parcel, how far away from other things it is, and there are definitely places in the US with an affordable price-per-acre which I'm not sure is true anywhere in the UK

In great part, I think, because it's so much smaller here that all land is at a premium

The Man Who Knew Too Much

[goatgodschild]

Reading back through this thread, I think I was mistaken in what you meant.

I look for places with some arable (or potentially growing) land, but under 8 acres is about where it should limit. The thing with land for sale in the USA is, I want to see if there's a structure on the property. If there's a structure, that usually says that a sewer line and water is possible, as well as electricity. Those massive land parcels are all fine and good if you're either part of a multi-departmental project with outside involvement (rewilding prairie, creating a housing development, etc.), or a Big Ag project.

There's a lot of things you can run the numbers on, and I can expand on this more in a standalone post.