Hacker News Reader

Comment by stegosaurus | Hacker News Reader

The same is happening in London, UK at the moment; though it's something that cuts further than just art.

The capital and the surrounding regions are now practically unaffordable for anyone other than well-remunerated professional workers and those who got in early.

One thing I find odd about the article is the focus on 'being urban', though.

In the US, is it cheaper to live rurally? In the UK that is not true at all in my experience, country living here is aspirational and generally a sign of wealth.

What we have is not really an 'inversion' of white flight; rather, the city _and_ the suburbs are becoming wealthier whilst the poor move away from the capital to surrounding cities (or try desperately to cling on).

Then again, what constitutes a 'suburb' is radically different here!

View on HN

> In the US, is it cheaper to live rurally?

Yes, sort of.

You can find housing much cheaper outside the cities. Some services are cheaper, though not if you are "too rural," so the rest of what I write here will apply more to suburbia and semi-rural areas and not the truly "out there" rural places (where few people live anyway).

There are problems with living outside major cities, though. Work is often harder to come by, and pays less too. Companies justify this by saying the cost of living is lower, but this only makes sense for the fraction of your income you actually spend while living there. If you move out later to a more expensive area, you're in trouble because you were being paid at the "low cost of living" rate all along. On the other hand if you spend everything you earn (or more), having a low cost of living is good.

A second problem is much more acute in the UK than the US: cost of transportation. Gas, cars, and regional trains are somewhat affordable in the US, whereas in the UK they are quite a bit more expensive. National Rail fares have increased faster than inflation in many recent years, resulting in protests just two weeks ago [1]. For example, an annual pass from Tring to London, which takes 1'15", now costs about 6000 USD. That's a significant reason why living way outside London is not that cheap despite the inconvenience.

>In the US, is it cheaper to live rurally?

Absolutely. You're probably not going to land a high-paying professional job, but there's always manual labor to be done, the cost of living is generally very low, and the lifestyle is typically healthier than in cities.

I've lived in many cities ranging from 1,400 people to 20,000,000 people, and the trend is the same everywhere I've lived. There is much less destitute poverty in small American towns, and there is much greater class mobility.

I'm sure the UK is different because it has almost 7.5 times the population density of the US. The US is huge. Most Europeans can't properly appreciate how large it is. If you go out in the countryside, even very poor people are likely to have a few acres of land that they own outright. Countryside land may be valuable in the UK, but here in the US it's dirt cheap. That's not to say wealthy people don't own rural land. I'm currently living in Texas, and it's common for the wealthy to possess a smaller urban residence and a larger rural residence, often with tens or hundreds of acres of private land. It's possible to get hundreds of acres for a few million USD.

much less destitute poverty in small American towns, and there is much greater class mobility.

Eh, this really varies by region. I've driven through a number of small American towns with housing that doesn't look particularly first-world, people living in stuff like shacks with corrugated-tin roofs and half the windows filled with plywood. Rural Louisiana and Mississippi are particularly sad looking, as well as some of the more remote areas of Appalachia, and parts of coastal and south Texas. The class mobility in these areas consists mostly of younger people looking for a way to get out.

This illustrates to me the complexity of talking about poverty.

In the UK such housing just doesn't really exist as far as I know. (If it does, I probably want to move there). Our planning system and the cost of land basically means that your home will necessarily meet some basic standard or you'll be harassed and end up having to tear it down.

I'd love to, for example, get a large static caravan, buy a few acres of land, site it and see how that goes for a few years. Maybe I'd hate it. But it just isn't really possible here.

Perhaps there are European countries where such a thing would be viable that I could emigrate to.

Yes, living in the rural United States is far cheaper than living in any major city. Realize that the continental US is over 33 times the size of the UK, but only has about 5 times the population. There just isn't any competition for property out in the "middle of nowhere".

Well, the main reason rural housing in the UK is expensive is due to planning restrictions rather than a simple matter of landmass.

Agricultural / 'amenity' land can cost a few thousand pounds for an acre.

The historical reasons for such sit on my reading list...

In the US, is it cheaper to live rurally?

Tremendously so, if you are prepared to live that way. Rural houses are generally very cheap.

You've got to live a bit dirtier, perhaps with an outhouse and a well and some chickens, and you have to figure out what you are doing for a living. But in the US, if you are too poor for wherever you are living, I'm pretty sure you can just move further away from the city.

A huge chunk of the US looks like this:

http://www.culinaryanthropologist.org/photos/Smtanya0001.JPG

http://nebula.wsimg.com/98a9d952e9d4c36a0af32e562e73701e?Acc...

http://gallery.usgs.gov/images/12_01_2011/bfv2YmkXXS_12_01_2...

I don't know all the zoning rules, but when you are 200 miles from the nearest sheriff, I don't think people get too picky.

This is so wrong in many ways. Some of your costs go down, but your means of earning money go down also. Also, there is a cost to having poor infrastructure in health as well as money (septic tanks ain't cheap, burning your trash out back will give you cancer), forget about public transit, you have to have a car. Better to be poor in a city, where there could at least be some services to help out, and at least the infrastructure is there and relatively cheap. And finding a job is a possibility.

While this might be true, for clarification on my original question I'm not actually that interested in the 'whole picture' analysis of (income - expenditure).

In the UK rural property is generally more expensive in addition to being remote. But then, our urban/semi-urban housing doesn't really resemble suburbia in the same way. Streets with detached homes, large drive, etcetera are relatively rare - more common would be semi-detached.

(This post has me wanting to visit the US now... all of my knowledge is gleaned from photos and hanging around American folk online, heh)

I mean; it sounds to me that a few years salary could enable you to live out in the sticks and 'retire' for a long time, if not indefinitely. That sort of thing would be impossible in the UK; ex-social housing in a run down town is probably your best bet.

It might be that I'm framing things wrongly simply because housing (and property tax) is so expensive here. All other expenses are practically negligible in comparison. $3-4000 a year could buy you basic food, utilities, and a computer to hack away on.

The scale is a bit different, that's for sure. If you really want the full effect, drive the trans-canada highway from coast to coast, budget a week. Most canadians would shortcut through the US and save ~10 hours of driving (a lot of that with one lane per direction through the northern ontario wilderness.)

Better to be poor in a city

I could definitely be wrong, and I agree there is a point where you are just too far, but I live more than an hour from the city and meet people from towns even further away; life still happens as normal out here and it doesn't cost so damn much. So maybe don't live in a corn field, but don't insist on New York, New York either.

I spent time living in a small city (Vicksburg MS), the people living in the boonies were much worse off then those in the city or adjacent neighborhoods. Even getting to a grocery is hard, and no trash pickup or anything nice like a sewer.

Trailer parks have a bad reputation for a reason.

Outhouse? The last home outhouse around here went out in the 60's. Rural Iowa is where I live. We have had plumbing, the REC, mail deliver etc for half a century.

As for where I work? Well, in San Jose right now - I work remotely for a Silicon Valley startup. Have for 20 years, one after another.

Is it cheap? Pretty much so. 80 acres and built a house for a couple hundred thousand. Worth a lot more now since I live near a college town, but just move south 20 miles and still land is around $1000/acre.

My view is colored by the fact that most rural property I think about is in the mountains, where septic systems and satellite internet are livin' high on the hog.

Most inhabited rural property in the US is of the trailer park/boonie variety.

Living in the mountains..like say Montana, is even more expensive.

When I was buying my last house (in boring suburbia), for fun, my wife and I looked around the U.S. at what our money would buy in other places.

In L.A. it bought an empty lot with a rusting fence around it, perhaps 10m x 20m in size.

In NYC, a similar story, but the lot was smaller and had lots of rubbish you had to remove.

and so on...

So for fun we looked "out in the country". One listing has stuck in both our minds, it was an aerial photograph of a some dense forest and a few houses on it. We didn't get it, which house was this for? We reread the listing several times to eventually parse the description and realized that it was for all of it. 140acres (56.6hectares) with 4 homes and 2 other structures.

The only way the listing agent could get a picture of the property was to get in an aircraft and take it from above.

We almost toyed with the idea of moving there, but an extreme lack of jobs in our field (and low pay) kept us away. But it's tucked in our hats as a retirement option down the road.

> In the US, is it cheaper to live rurally? Yes, sort of.

It can be significantly cheaper yes.

A friend of mine works for a pharma company in SE Michigan. The job pays him ~$200K with bonus for good years. Michigan has a flat 4% state income tax.

A new, 2000 sq. ft. house in the nice part of town is $150K ($800 mortgage with 20% down). The schools are great due to the solid tax base and plenty of highly educated parents. You can buy a nice 1960's bungalow for $100K. A big house (4000 sq. ft.) on a couple acres would run you $350K.

It's not a bad setup if you can find it.

> In the US, is it cheaper to live rurally?

Very much so, but it is hard to find professional work in truly rural places (less than 20,000 with no big job source like a university or a capital).

However, I think the sweet spot in the US are either small towns with a county population of about 300k population with a research university or the (even better) small to midsize cities like Austin, Portland (both), Milwaukee, Cedar Rapids, etc.

Just riffing, FWIW

Of course, you don't necessarily have to find "professional" work. I know a few small-time ranchers who raise sheep and alpaca on modest plots of land, for example.

> In the US, is it cheaper to live rurally? In the UK that is not true at all in my experience, country living here is aspirational and generally a sign of wealth.

Is it really more expensive, or is it just difficult to afford to live there because of the lack of employment opportunities?

It's really more expensive unless we're using a different definition of rural.

Or rather, it's either impossible or expensive. Land with planning permission for dwellings is expensive. If there are fields as far as the eye can see, land will be cheap but you won't get permission to build on it.

I am unsure if the same applies to very remote areas (e.g. Scottish Highlands) but I've not seen evidence to the contrary.

Ignoring work entirely and assuming you can keep place with inflation via investments, 250K GBP would likely be enough to buy a home in a poor urban neighbourhood and exist there in perpetuity, reading or coding or doing whatever non-profitable activity you desire. Home would cost 50-75K, 3% on the rest would keep your utilities and food going.

This might be doable in a remote village (not within commuting distance of a major city) but not rural proper like some of the pictures that have been posted of farmhouses out in the middle of nowhere here. The land and property alone would be hundreds of thousands.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com