The escape is to go to parts of the country where home ownership is insanely cheap due to low demand, but people don’t want to do it. Instead they bury their head in the sand and hope their hip urban centers suddenly become affordable.
Can they find a good paying job there in their chosen profession? Are there social opportunities for finding mates with matching interests? What are the art and music scenes like? There are a lot more things people think about than cheap housing.
There is a reason for the low demand, usually lack of economic activity and infrastructure. It may work if you're a senior IT freelancer, for other trades... less so.
> where home ownership is insanely cheap due to low demand, but people don’t want to do it.
No one does it because there are no jobs in those places. We're failing as a society to build sufficient housing in areas of economic opportunity. In some areas we're moving backwards, Manhattan housed 300K more people in 1950 than it does today.
Not every job can be remote and most types of work benefit from agglomeration effects. Pretending that we can will people to live middle Pennsylvania by creating jobs somehow is foolish when we could simply build housing where the jobs already are.
