> Anywhere that is outside an MSA, has very poor soil, no exploitable oil and/or mineral (and most mineral and oil rights are separate from the land anyways), not by a body of water, and has no electric/water/sewage service is going to be very cheap, like $100-500 per acre cheap.

This is so very very wrong. MSAs are purely based on population density. I grew up in one of these white counties on the map you linked. It's small towns, scattered among farmland and coal mines, and the local MSAs are nothing but a larger (but still quite small) town with an interstate.

As a heuristic, after looking myself for a couple decades for a residence that didn't participate in the global real estate mania we're still in the grips of, the MSA boundary works "good enough" as a starting point for median households setting up a search for a place to live that still follows a conventional 30% DTI ratio (or a safer 15-20% DTI to account for the greater income precarity for median US households today).

We're mostly in a cognitive elite echo chamber here on HN due entirely to a historical anomaly that prices most of our labor high relative to more conventional labor pools (though IMHO not commensurate with yielded productivity benefits), and our sense of what is fiscally "reasonable" is highly distorted and privileged. The MSA boundary is not a hard and fast binary switch, where inside the boundary land is crazy expensive relative to prevailing local incomes, but outside the boundary it suddenly is crazy cheap. But it serves as a useful starting point to look for the pricing gradients in your local area for a median household.

A heck of a lot of Millenials got debt-trapped by the higher education scam, and I applaud those who are "once burned twice shy" about taking on another unsustainable debt load in real estate. For those in the US looking for a chunk of land to inexpensively park their possessions (and if you are the kind of Maker-type that enjoys HN, tools alone can take up a lot of space), without becoming an investor in the real estate business itself, then the choices for the past few decades of cheap credit that I've experienced have been get extraordinarily lucky finding a good deal, wait for a bust, or locate outside of where there is lots of land banking activity.

Land does get much cheaper on the outer rings of an MSA, but IMHO still not nearly cheap enough for median households. They're still stretching, and compromising their quality of life a hell of a lot at the same time. We're pushing tons of stress onto them as an unseen externality, and calling it all good and patting ourselves on our backs that we have so many "homeowners", when we should be holding a frank discussion on why our real estate land markets are so dysfunctional.

YMMV of course.

I'm seeing a lot of words here, but not the three that matter: "I was wrong."

If you wanted to say "real estate is cheaper in the rural area, but you'd have to drive everywhere", then you'd be right. But that's not what you said. What you said was, "Anywhere that is outside an MSA, has very poor soil, no exploitable oil and/or mineral (and most mineral and oil rights are separate from the land anyways), not by a body of water, and has no electric/water/sewage service", and that is demonstrably false, and doesn't even pass even a cursory logical test, because for this to be true, then all the arable land and extractive natural resources would have be in cities, and if that was true, then where would the buildings be?

If you fail to understand what is going on in your basic assumptions, why should the rest of your argument even be considered?

I did notice, your phrase, "the higher education scam". That's interesting, since educational attainment has been shown time, and time, and time again, to be the biggest predictor of economic success. The long term viability and effects of shifting the cost of education in the past 25 years from state budgets to individuals, is certainly a concern and worthy of debate, but to refer to education as a "scam", makes me wonder about how well thought out your ideas on the educational debt crisis is as well.

I think you're bitter, and not nearly as smart as you think you are.

Thanks, and something a little bit better? Have heard about Dayton OH

In addition to the sibling comment, you can also find relatively cheap housing in some of the Sunbelt although I understand that the real housing crash in Las Vegas has largely recovered.

If you're serious about it, you really need to think about your non-negotiables, your strong preferences, and how high you're willing to go for "cheap" housing. For some people the answer might be a condo in a smaller city that isn't in demand. For others, it might be a house that's out in the sticks someplace. There's also a huge difference between cheap as in $100K and cheap as in $300K.

Contra another post, you probably don't want land that isn't already engineered. Of course, also consider Internet. I know tech people who manage with satellite but there are a lot of compromises.

I'm a big fan of western/piedmont of NC for remote workers. It's not the absolute cheapest compared to the midwest, but the weather is better if you don't love snow, and it's still extremely cheap if you're in some non-hip parts (Greensboro, High Point, Winston Salem are very affordable small cities that have universities, and other less-connected mountain towns like Morganton/Wilkesboro/Marion/Hickory are even cheaper, but less vibrant), and there are plenty of roads connecting you to airports and bigger cities with more robust economies (Atlanta, Nashville, Charlotte). Asheville is probably the nicest remote work city in NC, and would definitely beat Dayton culturally, but it's nowhere near as cheap.

Awesome! A million thanks