Criteria for selecting a new home

I’ve been asked to skip ahead and dive into the lists of potentially promising destination towns in specific states, and will start doing so. That will mean skipping over a lot of explanatory text about which parts of the country are most sustainable and able to accept more people, what I think their politics will be if the Union falls apart, why secular democrats shouldn’t let themselves get crowded into blue bantustans, what internet resources are available to do your own searching for personally attractive destinations, and so forth. I’ll go back and prepare those sections piecemeal later.

For now, though, I think I do need to comment a bit on my criteria. You may find online lists of “the best places to live in Ohio” or wherever, many or most of which will have been omitted by my search strategy, and you’ll wonder why I didn’t draw from those lists. Much of the reason is because my criteria are different: those lists are aimed at the upper-middle-class who can live wherever they like, whereas my target audience includes the lower-middle-class and downwardly mobile, who first and foremost need a community where they can keep a roof over their heads in a worsening future. For my purposes, a cheap town with several active factories is better than a picturesque and marvelously crime-free town. But if cost isn’t a consideration for you (you lucky person), you may wish to look elsewhere for guidance.

 

 

( Read more... )

 

 

Ohio

Ohio is a traditionally industrial Rust Belt state that includes four major cities (Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Toledo), two cities in the 100,000 to 200,000 range (Akron and Dayton), and quite a few smaller cities. Most of the largest cities are situated within much larger, politically fragmented metropolitan areas. The metropolitan areas of Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati each hold over two million people, and those of Toledo, Youngstown, Akron (south of Cleveland), and Dayton (north of Cincinnati) hold several hundred thousand apiece.

The foodshed analyses of Julie Kurtz et al. (2020) estimate that most of Ohio’s urban areas could be provisioned within a reasonably sized foodshed if (as usual) a lower-meat diet were to be adopted. Cost of living in Ohio is generally moderate even in the big cities, thanks to the state’s blue-collar character. Still, all of these metro areas are larger than will be desirable in a resource-limited future, and new migrants should avoid the biggest ones unless they have special reason to move there. Redistribution of some of the existing populations of those metros to smaller cities and towns might also be beneficial to the people involved. There are many other communities that would provide better quality of life, as well as better governance, as we will see.

 

( Read more... )

 

The book is available! Well, sort of.

Readers who would like to get 104,000 words (counting references) of my highly opinionated opinions all at once can now obtain an eBook version of Planning the Next Great Migration for 99 cents from the Amazon Kindle store here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B8T9F8BX/ref=sr_1_1

I recognize that this solution has many imperfections. Most importantly, you must have a Kindle to read it, and I don’t have a Kindle, because I loathe those revolting little gadgets. But a lot of people do have them, and I felt a sense of urgency to start trying to get my message out the fastest way I could, because even though I’m something of a doomer, these days, bad things always seem to happen faster than I think they will.

It could not be made available free through Amazon (Bezos ain’t running a charity here, he’s got a lot of alimony to pay), but it is labeled as Creative Commons-licensed for free noncommercial distribution. The next hoop for me to jump through is creating the files for a paperback print-on-demand version, which may have to wait until I can take a few vacation days, because I believe that anything worth writing is worth printing out on paper. (Whether this was worth writing will ultimately be up to people other than myself; for the moment, leave me my illusions, thanks!) The Kindle version cover could easily be attached to the paperback text PDF to make a freely distributable PDF version, but I do not know of a good free website where I could put that file and provide a permanent link to it. Any suggestions would be welcome.