I'm feeling a bit stifled in my city and want to move. My priorities are $1500-2000/mo rent and a path to an affordable house (see: picture), a unionised city workforce, good greenspace with an extensive parks system, good biking infrastructure, a good public university, and a good political scene. That leaves Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago, and maybe an East Coast city I haven't researched yet. Of those, Portland is at the top of my list because I'm getting an ocean for Great Lakes prices.
What's bad about the city that makes people move away? Is there a better option in Oregon, especially one that would let me commute into Portland without whatever problems it has?
Wait 300k for an abandoned 2 bedroom 1 bath home is now considered an affordable home?
As far as Portland itself, the city is fairly nice. However, anywhere the homes are somewhat affordable even near the outskirts of the metro is filled with turbo racist. The cops are also really aggressive for the west coast if you aren't white. I've visited friends there and I have been pulled over less than when I've visited the rural south.
That house in the photo was just absurd to me but not so much so that I could think of a separate post for it. $300-400k is about what I'd spend on a home and you can't find much better than that for the same price in 3rd-tier Colorado cities. I'm hoping that it can get me a small 1-5 acre homestead outside of a major city.
If you are saying "me" and not "us (at least 3 adults)", this just becomes equivalent to the exurban dream.
Even in the cheapest cities (cutoff being 500k county pop), you are not going to get even 1 acre in easy cycling distance of anything, for a remotely affordable price, unless you have at least 6 people on that acre and build the home yourself. This is a mathematical reality: without extensive urbanist ordinances, radial density of a city will obey a smooth logistic decay function, and land value is proportionate to the output of that function. Suburbs and exurbs have residential subdivisions that stretch to the horizon with the assumption that everyone's just going to commute 30 minutes in a car every time they need something.
However, in those smaller cities I mentioned in the other reply, where the edge of the city's incorporation line often drops off into farmland or woods, you could probably get some okay land for $15k-20k an acre, excluding buildings.
I have two friends who had the same idea about the homesteading thing and they moved to Tillamook, which is about an hour from Portland towards the coast. It's politically purple, and you can occasionally find affordable houses a bit outside of downtown on bigger plots like they did. They're not actually homesteaders, though. They both work remote, they just have chickens and some vegetable plots.
You might also be able to find something similar, space-wise, in Oregon's wine country mostly centered around McMinnville. Lots of those homes just seem like bubble-era mcmansions though, I've never looked too hard.
Yeah..... Colorado prices have gotten pretty ridiculous in the last couple decades. I remember when you could have bought a mansion there for that much if you weren't looking at Denver or Colorado springs.
That's a hard ask anymore in any state that isn't filled to the brim with assholes. Tbh even like places like Minneapolis or Portland the areas surrounding the cities where you can still buy acreage are mostly filled with a bunch of reactionaries that are sometimes more ferocious than in places in the south they don't feel like they're being cornered.
You might try to widen your search to include some more conservative states that have progressive cities in them. For example Madison or Milwaukee are pretty nice if you don't mind the cold.
My perspective is skewed because i live in property hell but that place would be over a million dollars here
Tbf so is mine, but in the opposite direction. My current home is a 2 bedroom 1 bath a bit larger than the house op posted. When I got it it was probably in a bit worse condition, but I bought it from the bank for a little less than 40k.
The downside of course is that I live in one of the poorer states in the US.
Trying to do the math on how much less I would get paid there compared to buying a house for a dollar.
I would live in one of those premade starter shacks that you get in a survival crafting game if I owned it and didnt have a landlord
Yeah..... I'm a transplant here and it definitely makes it hard to move back out of the state. I've gotten offers for jobs that pay quite a bit more in nicer places, but it'd be hard to have a mortgage again.
I usually just use the offers to wrangle a pay increase and now make a bit more than my nation wide average. Depending on your field the starting pay here is usually pretty bad, but most companies are willing to do large increases in salaries because they know everyone with an education is looking to move away.
I'm Canadian so I'd rather not be 'accidentally' sent to CECOT either way but I'm a journeyperson trades-doer
Yeah...... unless you are a connoisseur of small batch methamphetamine, it's probably best for you to steer clear of this shit hole. The trades here are all contract work with no benefits, shit pay, and literally no work place safety.
But to be fair, that's quickly becoming all of America unless you actually own your own business that contracts out all their work.