Day: November 12, 2025

Prior to summer vacation, I had Zillow on my phone and every day or so they would have  not very helpful suggestions on the latest home to buy – 90% of them being just your typical white vinyl siding with asphalt roof in a suburban setting with virtually no acreage. Houses that are well, a place to live, a roof but hardly something I would want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on.

I get it, you have to live somewhere. Houses are seen as investments, superior to just renting, an expense with no return beyond that’s month of shelter. Beats living on the street, you need a place to shit and shower and get cleaned up so you can go to work and make money. Still, I can envision a long commute in an car, to an essentially suburban house next to a corn field that smells like cow shit. Zillow’s solution? How about a city house in the ghetto?

I just got frustrated. It’s not to say that aren’t some unique and even some interesting homesteads and off-grid cabins that pop up on Zillow from time to time, interesting options but all too far away from work. Everything around Albany seems to either be a property in the city, usually a bad neighborhood, or a fairly typically suburban house be it in a village, a suburban subdivision or next to a cow shit cornfield. Ready for your big screen television and sign-up for weekly garbage service and paying big utility bills to the power company.

I just don’t want any part of it. My apartment is diapolated and leaky, in bad shape but it’s cheap. Money forever gone, but I am also saving and investing a lot. Truth is much too soon, my parents will be gone, and I can probably buy their 5-acre homestead, even if it also isn’t exactly what I want but it will provide a place to live until my early retirement in around 15 years, when I am free to buy whatever, get that real off-grid cabin in a state that respects values and right to own whatever guns I want without guberment permission and have fires and burn my own shit.

But in the mean time, if I’m careful what I burn, and I do end up with their old homestead, I will be able to have goats and other livestock like they once did, and if I want to add solar, I can probably build rack mounts, add batteries, and by following code and working with an electrician have a largely independent, if grid tied system. And I can continue to compost, burn paper and maybe even some wrappers, take my own trash to the transfer station and avoid as much waste as possible.