Flathead Pass Acreage

CR,
I like that first one out by Townsend and this last one.  Obvi­ous dif­fer­ences of qual­i­ty vs quan­ti­ty, and we both know the answer to that ques­tion.  So with 40 acres and $885k how many folks will you need to make it do-able, and what do you get for your cash?

What fol­lows goes against a lot of my think­ing over the last few years, but it also makes a lot of sense to me, so I’m putting it out there.

$22,125/acre, and I don’t think you want to make it so every­one gets their own acre par­cel.  Prob­a­bly bet­ter off with 1 or 2 areas sec­tioned for devel­op­ment (on my lit­tle 3k sq ft here in SD we’ve got enough for a gar­den and a work­able yard/garage etc) and the rest left for sin­gle track or wilder­ness or whatever.

I mean fuck, how much space do you real­ly need?  You can build a 2,000 sq ft house on 1,000 sq ft, and any­one who wants more than a 2k sq ft house ain’t my kind of people.

An acre is 43,500 sq feet.  At 5,000 sq ft/lot (which is small, but you’ve got the rest of the fuck­ing prop­er­ty plus com­mu­ni­ty facil­i­ties like a work­shop & gym) then you can get about 8 homes on 1 acre.  High den­si­ty devel­op­ment is where it’s at for effi­cien­cies to start real­ly work­ing (like com­mu­ni­ty lev­el grey­wa­ter and solar and wind and all the rest of the cool green stuff) and for com­mu­ni­ty itself.  I don’t want to live in the mid­dle of nowhere with no one around, I want to live close to nowhere with a good tribe of folks.

So, devel­op 2–5 acres for 16–40 homes and leave the oth­er 35 or so acres open for wilder­ness stuff.  2 acres and 16 homes sounds way bet­ter to me; I don’t know 40 kick ass peo­ple who I’d be into liv­ing in that kind of arrange­ment with.  That brings it to $55k per for the raw cost, then you’ve got to fac­tor in build­ing and what­ev­er com­mu­ni­ty bull­shit on top of that.  $55k is do-able.  It’s plan the fuck ahead mon­ey, but it’s do-able.

Set aside anoth­er acre for “town-cen­ter” stuff like a gym and a restau­rant-grade kitchen and a ful­ly oper­a­tional wood/metal work­shop with plen­ty of park­ing space and a range you’re start­ing to get what I’m look­ing for.

Also, fig­ure out how many peo­ple will live there full time (not me) and how many peo­ple want a place to go to and build a kick ass house and hang out with rad peo­ple at dif­fer­ent times of the year (most def­i­nite­ly me) and make that info avail­able to buy­ers-in.  I don’t think that many peo­ple need to live there full-time for it to be awe­some, and it’d be kind of cool to always have fresh blood rotat­ing through with a cou­ple of big ol’ potluck moth­er­fuck­ing din­ners once or twice a year when every­one shows up.

Either way it’s the same price to get in.  First right of refusal to the group when sell­ing, and some kind of group fund that gets a lit­tle inflow every month to take care of buy­ing back prop­er­ty and main­te­nance on the com­mu­ni­ty back­hoe etc.  Maybe that’s only for the first 5 years, I don’t know.  Wan­der­ing back and forth across that socialist/individualist line, lean­ing heav­i­ly to indi­vid­u­al­ist when I come to my sens­es and heav­i­ly to social­ist when I want to max­i­mize effi­cien­cy of buy­ing power.

How to gath­er that mon­ey togeth­er is the next ques­tion.  Prob put out a list with a 2 month time require­ment and the whole way it’ll go, at the end of which you say “I’m in” or “No thanks.”  If you’ve got 16 folks, set up a bank account and give every­one a year (or two, what­ev­er) to con­tribute their por­tion.  At the end of which if you’ve got the mon­ey togeth­er we pull the trig­ger on a nice piece of prop­er­ty, and if we don’t every­one gets their mon­ey back and we drift away.

That’s my six cents.

NFH