Rural Living
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If you are able to obtain permission or not be noticed, almost any type of shelter could be used. Many rural communities are very insular and everyone knows everyone else. Strangers are viewed with suspicion and often due to boredom snooping and gossip are the only entertainment.
There is another side to rural survival though if you are willing to research and reach out following leads and not being dissuaded by dead ends and rejections. Find some old hippy or soft heart with a patch of unused land, ask to set down a shack in the back 40 and maybe some bee hives or a garden, we knew a drifter who did this once he got to Hawaii and he is still living there by selling honey every few months and eating from his garden.
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Adverse Possession
In Free Land we describe acquiring abandoned property legally by squatting for a defined period of time. This is an excellent way to gain a good shelter and useful private land, you can even sell it later, this doesn't work for public land.
Recycled Sea Shipping Container
Super strong and designed to be waterproof, the standard 24 and 40 foot shipping container can be made into a house by cutting holes for and installing a door and windows. It is cheaper for a company to sell a well-used container than to scrap and recycle it. If you plan to use it as a home or barn you will have to address ventilation and insulation issues, otherwise you will face condensation problems. Strength is mostly in the stacking direction, twisting or loads against the walls like from burial may cause structural failure.
Straw Bale
Straw bale is one of the easiest, simplest, cheapest ways to build either a full size house or hut. Far a small structure all you really do is create walls out of hay bales, staggering them like giant bricks, and add a waterproof cover, sometimes coating the outsides with concrete, mud, leaves, or wood to keep the walls dry. This is not necessary. With properly placed support beams, the house will stay safe through wet times and rain. Straw also acts as an insulator. If you will be living in a very cold or windy area with an abundance of hay, we would suggest doubling up walls. A small sleeping hut consisting of straw bales, freight pallets to support the roof bales, one or more large tarps for wind and weather protection, and rope or fiber tape to secure the tarp could be made for a very low price, don't forget to save a few bales for a raised bed or floor so you won't loose body heat to the cold ground. Ask at the feed or hardware store if they offer cheap or free delivery out to your building site.
Yurt
For a few grand a decent sized yurt can be purchased. The mountain peoples of China, Mongolia, and even part of Afghanistan use yurts for mobile housing. A canvas roof, round wood walls, and a smoke hole or plastic skylight are normal features. A quality yurt will last up to ten years in a damp climate and longer in a dry one.
Ferro-cement
Ferro-cement is an extremely strong, easy-to-deal-with material. Not to mention cheap, and ferro houses can take just about any shape, making them easy to hide in places the pigs would never think. Below is a free e-book about ferro. Very informative.
http://ferrocement.com/casa-contents/contents.en-ferroHouse-web.html
Greenhouse
PVC tubing arches and UV resistant plastic make for an acceptable shelter and an excellent source of food for under $100. These are most effective in low wind areas which have mild winters but become unbearable to live in in summer. Black plastic sheeting over the soil and a perforated garden hose under the sheeting allow irrigation and conservation of water slits in the plastic allow plants to grow. Twine hanging from the arches can be used to hang overloaded cucumber and tomato plants.
See Farm It
Mobile Homes
The mobile home often elicits snickers and jokes with heavy racist and classist overtones when mentioned. Of course this is part of the CorpGov marketing machine scaring the sheeple into overpriced oversized houses financed with adjustable rate balloon mortgages. There is no shame in a manufactured home, the quality is comparable to the contractor built houses found in most Amerikan subdivisions.
Not intended to be regularly moved mobile homes can with the proper truck and equipment be moved to a new site if required. Purchased used single wide mobiles are sometimes as cheap as three to six months of minimum wage earnings plus transportation costs. Beyond the trailer park style single wide homes there are also double, triple, and even larger designs that many would think were built on site. Be careful and get an inspection before buying as the mover is not responsible for a house that falls apart during moving due to rot or abuse.
Slab City
You could always park in Slab City (4 miles outside of Niland, Callifornia) and call that home. Not many resources of any kind. You need to buy water and solar is about the only way to get cheap electricity. Mild winters but flaming hot summers.
School Bus
Even if it will never run again a school bus is still a possibility for shelter; tow it to your site put it on blocks and remove the seats. The upsides are a reasonably large living area and potential for relocation. A bus cabin is real cleanup problem when you vacate, it will also invite police attention so place this option towards the bottom of your list.
Immigrant Labor Camp
If you happen to appear somewhat browner skinned, most rural WASP's will look right through you if you play to their expectations, taking on Latino laborer dress and keeping your mouth shut can work as great camouflage. Migrant labor camps are usually provided for workers as part of their pay. Conditions are often sparse to tragic as CorpGov and independent farmers just want to make a buck, these are usually not the place to look for shelter unless you look and speak like a native of the lands south of the Rio Grande and are in a very tight situation.
Black Mesa Navajo
The Native peoples of Black Mesa, AZ run a program for outsiders to come and live and work with a family or an elder. You will be expected to perform physical labor, and drugs and alcohol are strictly forbidden. They ask for a commitment of at least a few weeks, but shorter or longer stays can be arranged. Visit http://www.blackmesais.org/cultural_sen.html or email blackmesais@riseup.net
Wilderness
Guides
Remote Areas Development manual
Search http://eric.ed.gov/ for the "Remote Areas Development Manual" it is the pocket size book that gives you almost every DIY technique to build a well run farming village.
Peace Corps Building Manual
Visit the website http://home.comcast.net/~kellyjmorris/build_docs.html which has a free download of the Peace Corps Construction Manual which teaches how to make block and brick construction with minimal concrete or local soils, it also covers digging wells. Like military manuals the Peace Corps publications are written under government contract with your taxes and are in the public domain, feel free to print, bind, and even sell these books. also mirrored at the Hacker Labs B.B.S. http://hlbbs.hackerlabs.net/downloads/stw/PDFs/Construction_Handbook.pdf.tar.bz2 unzip with sevenzip or similar program.
Magazines
Back in the 1970's the big back-to-the-land magazine was The Mother Earth News (TMEN). Many back issues are sought-after for their still relevant information and DIY projects (They also sell CD-ROM archives of many of their projects and articles from the 1970's, considered to be TMEN's heyday). In the 1990's, they were bought out by Ogden Publications and changed much of the magazine's demographics to suburban types. Many of the editorial staff left and founded BackHome, which maintains the rural emphasis of the original TMEN.
There is another publication; Backwoods Home Magazine. While it does have some good information on homesteading, some of the editorials often have a conservative libertarian bias and sometimes veer into conspiracy theory-land.
Another magazine, again with a similar name, is The Backwoodsman, which has heavy emphasis on primitive living and wilderness survival. It fittingly uses "The Magazine for the Twenty-First Century Frontiersman" as it's motto.
All four of these publications maintain websites and sell collections of their past articles and projects, either in book or CD-ROM format.
- BackHome: http://www.backhomemagazine.com/
- Backwoods Home Magazine: http://www.backwoodshome.com/
- The Backwoodsman: http://www.backwoodsmanmag.com/
- The Mother Earth News: http://www.motherearthnews.com/
Original Rural Living
If you are considering moving to the country, especially as a group, you are talking about farms and farmland. There are some farms for rent, and occasionally a family that has to be away for a year or two will let you live on their farm if you keep the place in repair. These can be found advertised in the back of various farming magazines and in the classified sections of newspapers, especially the Sunday editions. Generally speaking, however, if you're interested in a farm, you should be considering an outright purchase.
First, you have to determine in what part of the country you want to live in terms of the climate you prefer and how far away from the major cities you wish to locate. The least populated states, such as Utah, Idaho, the Dakotas, Montana and the like, have the cheapest prices and the lowest tax rates. The more populated a state, and in turn, the closer to a city, the higher the commercial value of the land.
There are hundreds of different types of farms, so the next set of questions you'll have to raise concerns the type of farm activity you'll want to engage in. Cattle farms are different than vegetable farms or orchards. Farms come in sizes: from half an acre to ranches larger than the state of Connecticut. They will run in price from $30 to $3000 an acre, with the most expensive being prime farmland in fertile river valleys located close to an urban area. The further away from the city and the further up a hill, the cheaper the land gets. It also gets woodier, rockier and steeper, which means less tillable land.
If you are talking of living in a farm house and maybe having a small garden and some livestock for your own use, with perhaps a pond on the property, you are looking for what is called a recreational farm. When you buy a recreational farm, naturally you are interested in the house, barn, well, fences, chicken-coop, corrals, woodsheds and other physical structures on the property. Unless these are in unusually good condition or unique, they do not enter into the sale price as major factors. It is the land itself that is bought and sold.
Farmland is measured in acreage; an acre being slightly more than 43,560 square feet. The total area is measured in 40-acre plots. Thus, if a farmer or a real estate agent says he has a plot of land down the road, he means a 40-acre farm. Farms are generally measured this way, with an average recreational farm being 160 acres in size or an area covering about 1/2 square mile. A reasonable rate for recreational farmland 100 miles from a major city with good water and a livable house would be about $50 per acre. For a 160-acre farm, it would be $8,000, which is not an awful lot considering what you are getting. For an overall view, get the free catalogs and brochures provided by the United Farm Agency, 612 W. 47th St., Kansas City, Mo. 64112.
Now that you have a rough idea of where and what type of farm you want, you can begin to get more specific. Check out the classified section in the Sunday newspaper of the largest city near your desired location. Get the phone book and call or write to real estate agencies in the vicinity. Unlike the city, where there is a sellers' market, rural estate agents collect their fee from the seller of the property, so you won't have to worry about the agent's fee.
When you have narrowed down the choices, the next thing you'll want to look at is the plot book for the county. The plot book has all the farms in each township mapped out. lt also shows terrain variations, type of housing on the land, location of rivers, roads and a host of other pertinent information. Road accessibility, especially in the winter, is an important factor. If the farms bordering the one you have selected are abandoned or not in full use, then for all intents and purposes, you have more land than you are buying.
After doing all this, you are prepared to go look at the farm itself. Notice the condition of the auxiliary roads leading to the house. You'll want an idea of what sections of the land are tillable. Make note of how many boulders you'll have to clear to do some planting. Also note how many trees there are and to what extent the brush has to be cut down. Be sure and have a good idea of the insect problems you can expect. Mosquitoes or flies can bug the shit out of you. Feel the soil where you plan to have a garden and see how rich it is. If there are fruit trees, check their condition. Taste the water. Find out if hunters or tourists come through the land. Examine the house. The most important things are the basement and the roof. In the basement examine the beams for dry rot and termites. See how long it will be before the roof must be replaced. Next check the heating system, the electrical wiring and the plumbing. Then you'll want to know about services such as schools, snow plowing, telephones, fire department and finally about your neighbors. If the house is beyond repair, you might still want the farm, especially if you are good at carpentry. Cabins, A-Frames, domes and tepees are all cheaply constructed with little experience. Get the materials from your nearest military installation.
Finally, check out the secondary structures on the land to see how usable they are. If there is a pond, you'll want to see how deep it is for swimming. If there are streams, you'll want to know about the fishing possibilities; and if large wooded areas, the hunting.
In negotiating the final sales agreement, you should employ a lawyer. You'll also want to check out the possibility of negotiating a bank loan for the farm. Don't forget that you have to pay taxes on the land, so inquire from the previous owner or agent as to the tax bill. Usually, you can count on paying about $50 annually per 40-acre plot.
Finally, check out the federal programs available in the area. If you can learn the ins and outs of the government programs, you can rip off plenty. The Feed-Grain Program of the Department of Agriculture pays you not to grow grain. The Cotton Subsidy Program pays you not to grow cotton. Also look into the Soil Bank Program of the United States Development Association and various Department of Forestry programs which pay you to plant trees. Between not planting cotton and planting trees, you should be able to manage.
