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This is awesome and I'm so stoked to read about what you've been up to. I'd love to be able to do something like Thais some day , though maybe not starting quite as much from scratch as you are!
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Nov 22, 2012 18:02
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Leperflesh- there are plenty of rural areas just outside major cities. I live in Chester county, PA about an hour from Philadelphia, and 2 hours from both DC and NYC. The township I live in is almost all protected land that can never be built on and it's farms as far as the eye can see, but we are 20 minutes from a whole foods and good restaurants and malls, and an hour from some of the best museums in the country. The Amish live 15 minutes in the other direction. I live on a plot of half an acre in a village of 18 houses so I do have a couple neighbors but there are also plenty of very isolated and reasonably priced homes with more land. And it's impossible for any new housing developments to be built here in the future so it will always be rural. I used to think I really wanted to homestead on multiple acres but it is so much work and having good neighbors is really nice. Our pipes froze the other day and our neighbor loaned us his blowtorch. I think we found a good compromise of rural and town living where we are. Our immediate neighbors have sheep and chickens and we have a barn and a large backyard so we can do a bit of gardening or get chickens or bees ourselves if we want. But we also don't have to maintain a ton of land no matter what, so we can take it slow.
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Jan 9, 2014 14:13
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apatite posted:
There are a lot of hard-core conservationists around here (mega-rich people who want open land for fox hunting and nice views, environmentalists, farmers) and so even though they have different reasons for wanting to prevent strip malls and new housing developments, the end goal is the same and they've managed to work together to put most of the land under easement or pledged to land conservation non profits. There are also township ordinances that state that the minimum land for division/ building is 20 acres, so even if the land isn't under easement or conservation (and about 90% of it is), you can only have 1 house per 20 acres. Of course there are a few little villages like mine that are grandfathered in, but it means that this village will always be only 18 houses and there will always be open farmland across the street. Anyway, around here it's all rolling hills and open fields, hardly any forest, so if you're not mowing your field and maintaining your fences you'll start to get sideways glances. You can't really get away with hiding a DIY shack from view, because everything is in view. However, there are several thousand-acre+ preserves within a 10 minute drive which are public parks, and because of all the horse farms around here, all the roads need to have fences at least 20' from the street for a bridle path, so there is public right-of-way to walk on the side of any little side road along the farms for miles and miles and miles. It's great to be able to go out for walks right from my front door and not have to drive first to do it.
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Jan 9, 2014 17:21
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