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Choosing A Town

Section 1 - Chapter 2

What Kind Of Town?

A poor local economy is the reason you can buy cheap houses in many parts of the country. These are towns that have seen troubled times, but are often recovering, sometimes with good reasons. Anaconda, for example, now has, in addition to it's beautiful mountain scenery, a ski resort and a Jack Nicklaus golf course. Houses cost four times as much an hour in any direction, and those prices are bound to reach Anaconda eventually.

There are towns like the one in South Dakota where we stopped for lunch one day. A bulletin board had ads for houses for sale by desperate people trying not to be the last to leave town. For example, there was a photo of a beautiful old five-bedroom farmhouse for $11,000.

The restaurant had only a few customers at lunchtime. As we ate, we looked up the deserted street and noticed that most of the buildings were boarded-up. This was a dying town, with nothing to help revive it. A free house wouldn't be a good enough reason to move here.

A town has to have enough of what you need. This is going to be entirely different for each of us, of course. Below you will see the minimal criteria my wife and I decided on when we were searching for an inexpensive town to live in. If you are considering moving to a less expensive town, you should make a list of your basic criteria. It will save you a lot of time screening possibilities.

Both while driving around the country on various trips, and while scouring the internet, we found many wonderful towns, from Florida to Oregon, where there are cheap houses for sale. What does a town need in order to make our list? The criteria are certainly subjective, but include at least the following:

1. Population of at least 4,000. Usually the population has to be 7,000 or more before a town really meets the other criteria, but sometimes a small town has more than you might think. We had a limit of 80,000 on the upper end, but only because cheap houses in larger cities are usually in bad or dangerous areas of town. Small towns don't have dangerous areas.

2. Decent library. Yes, we like libraries, but this is also one of those "indicator" criteria. A town that won't spring for a decent library usually has other problems.

3. Good grocery store. Once you get below 15,000 or so on the population, towns may not have a real grocery store. It can be frustrating and expensive trying to find the food you want in little shops and convenience stores. We don't like the idea of having to drive to another town to do basic shopping.

4. Movie theater. We like movies. This is also an indicator. If the town can't support a movie theater, it is probably too small, either in it's population or its thinking.

5. At least six real houses for sale under $50,000. "Real house" in his context, means homes that are essentially livable - not just extreme fixer-uppers or mobile homes. We have nothing against fixer-uppers or mobile homes, having owned both, but they should be cheap wherever they are.

6. The town has a good "feel" to it. This is a hard one to define, and is a personal taste issue. We know pretty quickly if a town "feels" good for us when we drive into it. We also have come to use the internet heavily for research, and find that we develop good or bad feelings from the businesses and activities that we read about. Our intuition has been pretty reliable so far.

After much research, we have found a number of towns that meet our criteria, including some with homes regularly showing up for under $30,000. There really are nice towns out there where you can find cheap houses for sale, but you'll have to establish your own criteria for choosing a town. Where are these most affordable towns? We'll see some in the next chapter.

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