Early Retirement Extreme Forums

A whole ghost town is for sale in Connecticut for $800K. Potential site for an ERE community?

http://business.financialpost.com/2014/ ... -us800000/

$800k is the starting bid. BTW, there are a number of these ghost towns around.

There's some beautiful buildings there. Would be nice if it was restored as a proper village again rather than a theme park.

Sounds like a poor business proposition - renting out to a bunch of misers

For those interested in more rural/self sufficient lifestyle maybe they could club together and buy a chunk of land and subdivide it between themselves...maybe cheaper than buying individually ?

I think ERE'ers are too individualistic to make a planned community work.

I've been thinking along similar lines as chenda whenever the ere city thread comes up. The problem has always been with coming up with some sort of cyberspace consensus of where to go and who goes first.

We could form a nonprofit corporation to buy someplace. The advantages are that we could pool our resources and moreover the buying decision could be made by a majority vote by the board of directors. Therefore an actual decision could be made.

Then again sometimes I have trouble knowing when people are just daydreaming or serious.

I think this thread should be linked to the "What are your pet peeves?" one.
Just so we could get to know a little about each other first...

Who would want to sit on the board?... a lot of INTJ's on this site...trying to manage people....Yuck...or worse still be managed...

I'm not sure as well as if an ERE town could offer anything which can't already be found elsewhere. People will naturally gravitate to areas which offer low living costs, amenities in walking distance, public transport etc Lots of sub-cultures exist with similar ideas which have naturally congregated in certain areas.

Probably best to work towards improving existing towns rather than build from scratch, and identifying places where ERE'ers might be interested in moving to. Ghost towns do seem to offer interesting possibilities, though I would imagine the challenges and costs of restoring infrastructure would be substantial.

Uhm, yes ... this is why ERE city, at least in my mind, was never to be a city of 100% ERE people. Rather it would be a/several designated spots where the concentration of ERE people is maybe 1% instead of the usual 0.01% or whatever. A city where meetups and other interactions would a hundred times larger.

I think the most likely path to ERE city would be as a subset of MMM city. So the real question is how to catalyze MMM city.

Indeed. Actually, the most likely path is just identifying a city that already has a lot of this behavior/sentiment already.

Portland, OR ;-P

For some of us, just over the WA border from Portland, for tax reasons…

Hehe. I love the sound of Portland, OR. It's my favourite city in the world.

I think there are cheaper ghost towns in Nevada. Of course, then you have to live in Nevada.

Oooh, oooh -I want to be on the Council of the Omegas!

Proposition 1: Inspired by the most logical race in the galaxy, the Vulcans, breeding will be permitted once every seven years. For many of you, this will be much less breeding. For me, much, much more.

chenda wrote:I think ERE'ers are too individualistic to make a planned community work.

I agree that an “ERE community” sounds like a non-starter, but I’m not sure that it is our “individuality” that comes in the way. EREers are extremely unlikely to be the sort that go running off to communes or some such airy-fairy nonsense, I’m sure : but beyond that are we really more individualistic than the average?

What we are is so many things. We are an amalgamation of our economic choices, our taste in music, our taste in reading, our politics, our religion, our family lives, our professional interests and/or obligations, our non-professional interests/hobbies and obligations, our level of physical fitness and health, our age, our monetary situation (in absolute terms), and so many other things. Not all of these aspects are equally important to all of us at all times, but we are very many things, not just one thing.

To protractedly focus on just one of these many aspects of who we are, to the extent of actually going to found a fully-fledged physical community around it, sounds too much like some kind of cult. I don’t see too many takers for that kind of thing, given what I’ve seen of folks here.

Besides : I would imagine that ERE is something that will command our overwhelming attention only when we are still wrestling with it, fighting to achieve it. Once you’ve crossed that threshold, and once it ceases to be a struggle and a challenge : then you’ll probably find your interest flagging off : you may still stay nominally engaged, but you may no longer find it of overriding interest. This is probably the one biggest reason why an ERE community may not work : we don't really need to obsess too much or focus overly much about this aspect of our life once we're there already.



Wait, now : Taken as a whole, isn’t all of that the same as saying we're too individualistic?

Yeah. But I knew you'd get there.

I think I like having a "virtual ERE community" just the way it is here.

Now somebody else can create the "ERE SIMS" sort of game to complete the virtual reality.

Dragline wrote:Yeah. But I knew you'd get there.

jacob wrote:Indeed. Actually, the most likely path is just identifying a city that already has a lot of this behavior/sentiment already.

Portland, OR ;-P

I typed Portland in your search box in the site and I read everything here about starting a ERE city and I noticed that you liked Portland Oregon, that its so cool. I live in the Portland Oregon area. 15 min. from downtown Portland. I thought wow, out of all the places in the country and you pick my town. You should start an ERE community here. That would be a blast !