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?
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.