New Hampshire Has Some Sweet Spots For Homesteading

@destroyerofgear says:

In the past few years we’ve been getting lots of tourist activity in the summer too. Northern NH can be tricky because there’s a lot of activity surrounding the white mountains so just because an area looks remote doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of people there. Another seasonal consideration is sled traffic since our trail system is very expansive but lots of them are closed to motorized use during the summer. That means that trails that are slow and quiet may get busy and loud once there’s a bit of snow on the ground. There’s Appalachian trail traffic to consider too.

@destroyerofgear says:

@@goblins2k5 there’s good and bad aspects. On the one hand they bring a lot of money to the state and plenty of local industries rely on that to survive. So if they go away so do many jobs, which has plenty of bad downstream effects on all of us. On the other hand outsiders often don’t fit the local culture and inadvertently violate the unwritten rules of northern New England. A great example is driving, Vermont (which has a great reliance on tourism) used to have a very slow and relaxed driving culture where basically everyone drove the speed limit and gave pedestrians and other cars a wide berth, but that culture has been slowly changing due to the large number of aggressive, out of state drivers on Vermont roads. I’m on the road a lot in Vermont and the average Vermont driver now drives very differently than 5 years ago. Out of state, seasonal property owners also tend to not adopt our common law right to roam practices especially for their hunting camps. Where in the past it was common for public use trails to cross many private property parcels, there’s now tons of great wooded land being occupied by flatlanders who immediately plaster no trespassing signs everywhere and string the whole place up with more cameras than a Hollywood red carpet event. And on the flip side more locally owned properties have been posting their land due to flatlander recreators not being courteous when passing through. Half the time you’re in someone’s backyard on the trails and people often don’t think about how their noise pollution, littering, or trail destruction affects those people.

I’m not here to contribute to blanket flatlander hate, but let’s be honest about the situation. In a way you get both negatives as a transplant homesteader because you have to deal with the consequences of outsiders in your area while also being perceived as one of them by your neighbors, at least for awhile.

@FrCharlesButler says:

Also, great job on Nate’s show! One of his best.

@paulnandico2370 says:

New Hampshire is more free, but both are indeed beautiful states.

@paulnandico2370 says:

Sadly, I have found it is just a motto. I have lived here 4 years, and had more freedom in Oklahoma, also MUCH lower property taxes.

@paulnandico2370 says:

​@CPcomments maybe on paper. I can only tell you (in real life) I never paid out as much in taxes (sales and property) in Oklahoma as I do here. My property taxes here are 20x as high as they were in Oklahoma… on a fraction of the land (<2 acres vs 40 in OK).

@john3_14-17 says:

The effect of taxes on you is going to depend a lot on your lifestyle and where your wealth and physical well-being is derived. For homesteaders where a disproportionate amount of wealth comes from property, a high property tax raises the bar to keep the property. Likewise, for an entrepreneur whose wealth disproportionately comes from business income, high property taxes aren’t as big of an obstacle as high income taxes.

The Texas government, for example, markets itself to group 2. They want businesses and entrepreneurs to move to the cities and build things. They don’t have much interest in group 1, and so let the localities charge high property taxes while banning them from charging income taxes I think. So when someone says that Texas is ‘more free’ or is a low tax state, the question following should be ‘for whom?’.