In the midst of a national housing shortage, towns on the Kansas plains are giving away free land and ultra-cheap houses. Is the offer worth it?
Sitting in the basement of a historic courthouse in Lincoln — a wind-swept town in north central Kansas — Bradley Roberts laughs while comparing his current situation to his previous life in San Francisco.
Roberts was like many people in the Bay Area: Savvy, successful, and drowning in housing expenses. When he bought a house ~15 years ago, he and his partner went $300k over their budget. Rent at his last place in San Francisco was nearly $4k a month.
“It was awful,” Roberts, 50, told The Hustle .
Roberts, whose grandparents were from Lincoln, bought a converted barn home in the middle of town last year for $22k. His annual housing costs in Lincoln are about the same as what his monthly housing costs were in San Francisco.
“When I moved to Kansas,” Roberts said, “I was like, ‘holy shit, they’re giving stuff away.’” Bradley Roberts started a handyman business and says he “fell in love with Lincoln, again.” (The Hustle) Roberts is exaggerating, but only slightly.
In Kansas small towns, the houses are cheap, with quality homes going for $100k and fixer-uppers costing far less. Land, a commodity over which NIMBY battles rage throughout the country, can actually be obtained for free in several counties.
The downside to living in rural Kansas, of course, has always been economic opportunity. High-paying jobs don’t grow as easily as the milo.
But price-conscious urban dwellers have been drawn to places they never thought they could live. After a year of soaring real estate prices in every city and suburb, long-depressed and depopulated Kansas is going through a lower-key real estate boom of its own. Enjoying this article?
Get the Hustle’s 5-minute weekday roundup that keeps you hip to happenings in tech, business, and internet… things.
Delivered weekdays plus a bonus Sunday feature. Unsubscribe whenever.
“It always used to be the case that we said there’s a big difference between what’s going on in the larger cities and the rural areas,” said Stanley Longhofer , a professor and founding director of the Wichita State University Center for Real Estate. “And the answer now is not as much. It really is kind of across the board.”
Are the Great Plains the greatest option left for an affordable lifestyle? And can small towns reverse the market forces that have long made them financially risky and undesirable? The boom and bust of the Great Plains
In the mid-1800s, the United States had thousands of miles of open land in the middle of the country and almost nobody who wanted to live there.
Then, in 1862, Abraham Lincoln pulled the ultimate Manifest Destiny power move with the Homestead Act.
The government granted individuals 160 acres of free land as long as they lived on and farmed the land for 5 years, enticing Americans to claim 270m acres in states like Kansas, Nebraska, and North Dakota. Free territory was also distributed to railroad companies, which sold their surplus land to new residents at dirt-cheap rates.
Buoyed by the free and inexpensive land, small towns sprung up overnight, often just a few miles from each other. These hyperlocal economies thrived with farming at the center of life.
But in the 1920s, the mechanization of agriculture reduced the need for farm work, and population loss followed. The outflow accelerated in the coming decades as commercial farming operations consolidated family farms and interstate highways took away visitors.
Once-bustling Main Streets are now pockmarked with shuttered buildings, and elder care facilities are often small towns’ top employers. Vacant storefronts in Lincoln (The Hustle) Kansas embodies the ups and downs of the Homestead Act as much as anywhere. The state boomed from ~100k residents in 1860 to 1.4m in 1890, making it larger than New Jersey. But the vast majority of Kansas counties experienced peak population before 1950. Farms in the state have declined from 167k in 1920 to 58.3k today, while growing in size from an average of 272 acres to 784 acres. My own family deserted the Great Plains. My great-grandmother’s parents farmed in Osborne in the early 20th century, but her daughter moved to larger, less-agrarian McPherson, and her daughter, my mother, moved to the Kansas City area.With dwindling populations, the large number of small towns has turned into a logistical and financial headache. Many of Kansas’s sparsely populated 104 counties and 627 incorporated municipalities (compare that to 58 counties and 482 municipalities […]
Protected by Patchstack