Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be better to buy some cheap land and throw up a yurt (or maybe a Quonset hut if you're more fancy), rather than take on a 30-year mortgage.
They also lack various things highly correlated with presence of building codes, such us road access, electricity, running water, clean water, water, food variety, healthcare, ER/ambulance, fire protection/prevention, crime protection/prevention, schooling, after-school activities, nightlife, pool for potential mates, (edit: was supposed to be "pool of potential mates", but in this context both work), and in general, people.
Thank you for the valuable reminder that not everyone sees the world identically! To me, an avowed city lover, all of those things are essential to a high(or even medium!)-quality life - well, except "schooling, after-school activities", as I'm not a parent and never will be. Your evaluation's no less valid, though! I hope you get to find and enjoy your ideal rural retreat soon :)
Internet is MUCH easier than clean running water or access to healthcare. Just need a Starlink rather than needing a helicopter and a water treatment plant (or 50 miles of piping with pumps every mile).
The "provide" is easy these days, apparently, thanks to Starlink.
The "yourself" bit is a tricky bit, as where it comes to utilities, you can sort of DIY your own supply of everything else, but Internet is as much a social construct as it is technical.
Seems to hugely matter on which cell you're in. Haven't seen a proper public geo-driven approach to data collection to figure out what's really going on.
Should be able to do a lot with an HF link anywhere running at like 1200bps or 2400bps, which should be reliable on the same continent. (Not supposed to do that in USA, and won't work if everyone does it, but HF is kinda dying and different places have different rules, sooo...).
terminal, HN would be fine, a console reddit and the carbonyl chromium browser for everything else you need 'live'.
Where can I find this cheap land? When I check online zillow, or via Alaskan state land auctions, the price of building lots even without road access in the deep interior is more than that of a suburb in Texas!
$4,200 per acre seems absurdly expensive to me for land out that deep in the boonies without electricity or roads. For $4,200 an acre I can buy rural land around me with road access, guaranteed electrical access, and within the last 2 and upcoming 5 years, fiber connections (just got mine 2 weeks ago).
San Marcos is one of the most overpriced and fastest growing markets in Texas, right next to Austin, priced to the stratosphere since the Californians moved in. Austin is my home town, but I couldn't afford to live in San Marcos.
For typical Texas land priced around the same per acre as Alaskan land:
$19,708 - 3.79 acres
On a public road, with electricity (water you'd need a well). Remote East Texas, and by remote I mean you're 20 min drive from the nearest city (Kirbyville with some gas, food, small department stores) and 40 min drive from the nearest Walmart SuperCenter (the real sign of civilization in rural America).
Or if you prefer something closer to a city, the desert just outside Del Rio, you can see:
$15,997 - 2.05 acres
On a public road, I see electricity nearby but you'd have to run it to your land ($15k+ probably), or just do solar since there's plenty of sun there. Well water and septic. Bordering the Rough Canyon national recreation area and Lake Amistad, if you like boating and hiking (watch out for rattlesnakes). I'd say a "suburb" of Del Rio, an apartment building and single family homes 7 min drive away as well as a cafe. The nearest Walmart Supercenter is 30 min drive away in Del Rio, as well as the city of Del Rio and the general aviation airport is by the Walmart, if you wanted to fly to San Antonio or Monterrey.
Now you might be saying, I want true suburban land, like surrounded by other single family homes, with water hookups and neighbors, and commuting distance to a major city. That's going to cost you more - but not much more, especially given it's already got all utilities:
$33,000 - 1 acres
About 15 minutes drive from the nearest Walmart Supercenter in Angleton, as well as an HEB (gotta have that HEB), and 40 min commute to Pearland where you could actually find city jobs, or 60 min if you want to go all the way to downtown Houston (I used to have a manager who did just this drive every day for 10+ years, so she could live on a working horse farm).
That's where my disconnect is for Alaskan land prices. I can only surmise it's because the federal and state government own like 99%+ of the land in Alaska and only sell a very small amount at any time to rigidly control the prices and development. Like an Uber-California in that way.
I think the killer app is finding a place that lets you do graywater and an incinerating toilet. I just hope they drop in price. $4k for the nice ones, but can still be cheaper than running septic for light-use.
It's not building codes, it's zoning/permitting. You can't just toss up an structure and live in it without going through some approval process with your county/city.
Sometimes the only requirement is to meet code, but even that creates issues when you want to build something for yourself.
We have some really far out places that are still "unorganized" in Ontario Canada and therefore no permitting req'd, but you're still supposed to follow the building code for anything over 108sqft.
That said, many might face some challenges in doing so in a place they want to live. It's non-trivial to find a cheap piece of livable land in a city. In a more rural areas, you can expect some possible complications in things like water, electricity, and internet access.
Even easier than that... just don't treat it as "sewage". In Japan all the way up into the 20th century landlords often claimed a right to their residents "night soil". In pretty much everywhere except (parts of) Europe, human manure was seen as a very valuable resource.
Start a compost pile and get the correct Carbon:Nitrogen ratio (~24:1). Using the Berkeley method it can reach heats of up to 200°F (93°C) within a week. You'd be surprised how quickly something like human feces can neutralized in conditions like these. The recommended wait time before direct handling is usually about 2 months but this is mostly because it's hard to be sure you've got the right ratios, temperatures, etc.
Regardless, anyone trying an "offgrid" life would be wise to stop pouring effort into throwing away one of the most valuable resources humans produce
I've done experiments (with items from the catbox, not my own) with vermi-composting night soil. A healthy colony of E. foetidia with vanish a turd in less than an hour or so.
Hmm I'm not quite sure this would actually neutralize parasites however. In composting, the actions of the microbes themselves allow the pile to reach temperatures high enough to burn your hand. These temperatures can actually be sustained for quite a while too. Even the very microbes that cause temperatures to reach that high themselves die and the only lifeforms left are some specialist thermophilic species.
Vermicompost setups never reach those temperatures so I don't see how it could possibly be safe to vermicompost human feces in them...
It's a good point. The "Humanure Handbook" guy hasn't developed a prion disease, so there's that...
A quick search turned up this...
> As for pathogens, while there has been considerable research demonstrating the effectiveness of vermicomposting as a means of destroying pathogens, I still recommend taking a cautious approach with any material removed from the system. You may want to further process it via hot composting before using it – and you may want to avoid using it as fertilizer for food crops (even with additional measures being taken).
> The "Humanure Handbook" guy hasn't developed a prion disease
As much as HN loves obsessing over prions they're still an extremely rare phenomenon and there's few real solutions to resolving them regardless of how you deal with organic matter. Your poop is also not the only way it spreads. Saliva, urine, blood, etc all spread it. Ultimately a prion is just a protein malformed in a very specific configuration. If anything, exposing organic matter to high heat might actually reduce the risk of prions spreading than collecting all sewage together and washing it many miles away in underground tunnels
But yes, there are definitely other pathogens worth thinking about that can be spread from human organic products and I would really caution against relying on any composting strategy that doesn't get hot for treating it.
That being said, vermicomposting is a wonderful way to quickly turn food waste and other less dangerous organic waste products into usable soil
The prion thing was a joke. (Not prion disease, that's objectively terrifying.)
> I would really caution against relying on any composting strategy that doesn't get hot for treating it.
Oh yeah. If I were to use this system for human poop I'd probably go a step further and use the resulting compost only on plants that were themselves destined to be (hot) composted.
FYI, prions aren't damaged by a mere 200F compost pile. It's a problem in hospitals too, where their ordinary autoclave temperatures only kill bacterial spores and other less hardy things.
I'm not sure but I think he's putting humanure directly on crops that he then eats. It's a pretty tight cycle, and it seems to me (with ZERO expertise) that if human prions are a thing that's a good way to find them.
You're not necessarily throwing away the output from a septic tank. Composted liquid flows down output pipes and into a buried drainage field. Anecdotally, in my parents house this drainage field was located directly under a paddock full of cattle, and the grass above the drainage field was always green and lush.
