I’d get a dozen aggressive rottweilers and let them lose in there.
Ask HN: How to find a small town to relocate for remote work?
261–270 of 582 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to find a small town to relocate for remote work?
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m sure you didn’t intend it this way, but this comment comes across as incredibly arrogant and unfeeling.
Was going to say something similar. Having grown up in a small idyllic town, there was beauty in the slow struggle to live there. OP would do well to try and learn the culture before seeking to change it. There’s value beyond “cheaper houses” and “craft beer” in these places.
By “the culture” are you referring to the high murder rate?
Re: Ask HN: How to find a small town to relocate for remote work?
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Promote yourself and your town. I'm looking for a new home in the same way as the OP, and my best hope is that a few dozen like-minded nerds will gentrify a small town, because they have been so undercut by cities of late.
I’m sure you didn’t intend it this way, but this comment comes across as incredibly arrogant and unfeeling.
To you (and others), but not to everyone.
Re: Ask HN: How to find a small town to relocate for remote work?
#264> I don’t need more than a good diner, a supermarket, and a friendly bar. You'd better be sure about that. Having a favorite diner, grocer and bar and only patronizing those businesses is a world apart from having exactly one option. What do you do when the bartender/regulars decide they don't like you. Or your neighbor, for that matter. The one whose family's been there for generations and is buds with the sherrif.…
I was just telling someone that fallacy of extrapolating known experiences out into the unknown. We caught a bit of this moving out to the town we now reside in. The previous city we came from had a dedicated child urgent care. We assumed every decent sized county had the same such thing. Not so.
Re: Ask HN: How to find a small town to relocate for remote work?
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Gentrifying a place pretty inherently means removing at least some of the people who live there. Not necessarily. You could buy a house that's empty.
And when the rent for the neighbour gets raised double because you started attracting people willing to pay double to move there...?
> attracting people willing to pay double to move there
What active behavior are we actually talking about? Making the place nicer? I feel like there's got to be actual some breathing room between "savior of the murder capital Pine Bluff" and "big bad real estate investor gentrifying people out of their homes."
Re: Ask HN: How to find a small town to relocate for remote work?
#266My method sure hasn't worked very well... or has it? I was looking for cheap warehouse space to start a business in, and did a nation-wide search for the largest, cheapest building in the entire continental US. I found one that seemed too good to be true. a 220,000 sqft metal warehouse and office complex on 17 acres. I thought the price was a typo at $375k.The agent assured me that the price was correct, and I flew o…
Maybe the cheapest place you can find is that way for a reason? "You get what you pay for" isn't an ironclad law, but it's still a decent hint.
Re: Ask HN: How to find a small town to relocate for remote work?
#267Travel. Just book yourself for two month long stays at a bunch of places and see what you like. I tried that but sucked at it and eneded up staying in the first place I did a stint at... but to be fair there are worse places than Colorado's west slope, especially if you bike and climb and ski. You say that you just need a bar and a supermarket, but you've probably never lived in, like, Brady, TX or Cuba, NM. Stuff ge…
If you’re pretty good with QGIS and willing to spend a couple hundred USD for some data sources I bet it wouldn’t be too tough to go and find a bunch of data (a lot of which is already mostly publicly available) to find a suitable location that meets your criteria.
What you would do is load all of the data as layers in QGIS, then, probably starting with house listings that met your criteria, select all homes that were within X miles/meters to stuff like
- grocery store
- hospital
- lake
- bar
- climbing spot/bike trails/hiking
- etc etc etc what ever you want for criteria
Hardest part would be hunting down all the data and some geocoding would probably be involved (there would probably be several data sources that you would have to convert from list of addresses to lat/long points) but there are enough free geocoding services out there that this wouldn’t be tough at all.
All in all could probably be done in an afternoon or two for someone familiar with tech but a newbie to QGIS
Re: Ask HN: How to find a small town to relocate for remote work?
#268My method sure hasn't worked very well... or has it? I was looking for cheap warehouse space to start a business in, and did a nation-wide search for the largest, cheapest building in the entire continental US. I found one that seemed too good to be true. a 220,000 sqft metal warehouse and office complex on 17 acres. I thought the price was a typo at $375k.The agent assured me that the price was correct, and I flew o…
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Re: Ask HN: How to find a small town to relocate for remote work?
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It depends." My town actually has an E.R. and urgent care. We have a CVS in town too (my town has a lot of stuff!!). There are also medical taxis (there are no regular taxis here) and private hire ambulances that'll take you if you need a different hospital. Typically you get the number of the closest general doc to you, and make good friends with your neighbors, so somebody can drive you to a hospital right away if…
Why did you struggle to get car parts shipped?
Stripped a bolt. Luckily our town also has an auto parts store (we have a lot of stuff!!) and they had those giant stripped bolt extracting sockets, but no replacement bolt.
Have you ever tried to find the rear brake caliper housing assembly bolt for a 2nd gen Scion xB? Not the slide pins or bracket bolts, the housing assembly that holds the whole caliper onto the wheel. Nobody sells it, you have to get it from a dealership, who's 2 hours away and ships via USPS (there is no way to get there without a car). They then screw up which part it is because nobody ever orders this bolt and the parts diagrams don't label it well. So you wait for a different part to be shipped again. All after getting the normal brake parts shipped and trying to install them which took a week on its own. So about 3+ weeks.
(If you have a second car you could maybe go around hardware stores looking for an identical bolt, but even then the steel and threads may be different, as different bolts have different torque specs due to whether that bolt's threads are supposed to stretch or not in order to bind. These bolts are very low torque even though they are for a caliper assembly)
Re: Ask HN: How to find a small town to relocate for remote work?
#270>We’d likely both be happier in a town, living just off some Main Street with 20 or so shops. The city is great but honestly I don’t need more than a good diner, a supermarket, and a friendly bar. Nice to haves are a pleasant climate (not too cold), an airport within an hour or so, and decent public schools.
Study. You can type "Las Cruces NM climate" into Google and get a free graph. You know your interests better than any of us, and you can look at local event listings, restaurants, venues etc to see what's a good fit. Zillow will tell you about schools and crime, and airports are on the map.
When people go by word-of-mouth based on where other people went, you get a situation where everyone moves to Denver^W Austin^W Nashville, and then it isn't fun anymore. Nobody goes there, it's too crowded. Especially when the discussion is on the Internet.