There’s a house for sale on the northern plain, in a place you’d never go. It sits by a field just a mile from the river, where a million bass and perch are jumping just now as I write this. By modern standards, it’s a tiny little house — just 600 square feet. But if you adhere to the standard of our great-grandfathers, it’s a fine-sized place, where any young, industrious couple could easily raise a whack of kids.

Now, there might seem to be a certain cruelty in talking about housing. I say this because, by all I can tell online, it’s a sore subject among the younger crowd. A long and mostly endless stream of “blackpills” about the cost of housing can be readily found on any social media platform — and often enough, the “boomers” are the scapegoat; the ones who lived their American Dreams and, as the allegations go, pulled up the ladder behind them as they tasted their successes.

Then again, for the right young person — there are many opportunities to stop pointing the finger at the boomer and to become the boomer, if they so choose.

They’d merely need to content themselves with a manner of living that would be more in line with that of their own great-grandfathers than the life so often depicted on reality television, TikTok, Instagram, and whatever else. They’d need to disabuse themselves of the idea that they ought to abscond to some kind of a tropical Shangri-La; and moreover, they’d need to leave behind the idea that snow, overcast, wind, rain, and long winters are all that bad to contend with, because in all truth, they’re actually great. Yes, startling as it could be to many “Zoomers” and “Milennials,” it just so happens that if you really want to become a member of the landed gentry, it’s really not so far out of reach just the moment you decide that you like the snow, don’t need access to the hottest clubs and the biggest cities, and can be more than happy with getting cozy in a smaller house.

Moreover, the vision that I am going to postulate here would not even require very much in the way of work. I say this because by all I have seen, many young people today find the idea of indefinite wage labor to be a dismal one. They seem to prefer a “low-work lifestyle,” but very often, the manner of living that such a lifestyle would require is completely foreign to them. Because of this, right alongside the many social media posts on the topic of the awful expense of buying a home — there are just as many posts, it seems, complaining about “life in the 4HL,” or pining for remote work, or (rightfully) bemoaning the scam-infested, difficult-to-navigate, often cynical and fake job market that they’ve encountered.

Some go so far as to say that young Americans ought to move to foreign countries, where life is cheaper, the weather is “better,” and prospects all around seem more favorable. Yet I’m not so sure. It seems to me that there are a great many opportunities right here in our own country that would amply address the various grievances of so many of our nation’s young people. In fact, were it to be that any of those who seek a simpler, more straightforward, more affordable way of life matched themselves up with the various regions in which that kind of a life is on offer in spades — it just might make our country better. For, the places with inexpensive housing are often in great need of new blood; such places could often use the vigor, enthusiasm, and life that only young newcomers seem to bring.

To get there, we only need to take a little trip up north — to my neck of the woods.

Massena, New York is a place that I have written about before. In fact, it’s a place that I’ve been obsessed with since I was a little boy.

American Siberia

A.M. Hickman

·

January 16, 2024

“Bro this looks depressing as hell,” one poster said in a comment on a video I recently posted of downtown Massena, NY. In the video, I am driving my minivan through the desolate streets, eyeing dilapidated buildings beneath the eternal grey overcast as a brooding Quebecois acoustic song plays on the radio.

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All one needs to do is to look at a map of the Empire State and find its northernmost point, and there it is: The Town of Massena, standing proud at the confluence of the Saint Lawrence, Grass, and Raquette Rivers. Anyone who stands along the mighty Saint Lawrence River there stands at the first stretch of American soil between open ocean and 20% of the earth’s fresh water — in the Great Lakes. More than this, the Seaway is there; a navigable channel that allows ships passage into this vast, incredible system of lakes. And alongside that first lock lies the Moses-Saunders International Power Dam — a giant dam straddling the international border with Canada that produces the cheapest municipal electricity in the United States.

This whole area is surprisingly flat; Massena’s south side is flanked with sprawling farm fields, rich wetlands, and a seemingly endless realm of high-quality timber. Water is plentiful here — with ample rainfall, substantial snowfall, and intricate networks of subsurface water, lakes, creeks, streams, and rivers, one need not worry about droughts and water rights. And the soil in the fields is some of the best in the American Northeast. Indeed, vast quantities of milk, grain, beef, apples, and other valuable foodstuffs is produced here, and the natural scenery, as well as the hunting, trapping, and fishing is all world-class.

And so if I should tell you that for the low, low price of just $29,000, you could find yourself enjoying the full gamut of Northern luxuries that is on display here, you’d think that people would be lining up for a chance at such good fortune.

Instead — no one is. For reasons I have been unable to discern, Massena is one of the poorest, least-desirable places not only in New York State, but in the United States at large. True enough; it’s very far to any large American city here — yet on the flip-side, it’s within very close distance of two major Canadian cities, and so you’d wonder if that’d make up for it. Apparently, it doesn’t. For though I personally find the area to be among my favorite in the United States, and in spite of having some of the lowest housing costs in America — the combination of distance from the rest of the US, a sub-optimal job market, a conservative culture (too conservative for the liberals), a liberal state government (too liberal for the conservatives), and perhaps above all, the endlessly “dreary” weather (which has far more upsides that it is presently popular to admit) has altogether conspired to make this place a totally forgotten hinterland.

Now, if people decided to come here and fix it up, do business, and make it “great again,” as certain politicians have ever said they’d do across this country at large — why, you’d have a generation of people coming in who’d be privileged with a very low buy-in in what is effectively a sleeping empire. No doubt, in raw geographical terms, and by any reasonable historical standard, this is a highly desirable place. It is only the whims and fashions of our very peculiar time that have temporarily arrested Massena’s inevitable emergence as a major regional power.

For those with a mind to see it, and a willingness to break rank with the pack — the opportunities to be a part of this ‘sleeping empire’ are now totally staggering. As an example, up on Route 37, which runs along the Saint Lawrence River, there’s a 600-square-foot house for sale for $29,000. It sits on a quarter-acre lot just a mile from a 3,000-acre nature preserve on the river, where bow-hunting is allowed and there are many dozens of excellent fishing holes. The house is also situated on a significant east-west route so far as public transit is concerned. And so, unlike so much of rural America — this is a place where one could conceivably live quite well without bearing the egregious expense of an automobile. Though I and my wife do not presently live in Massena, we live nearby, and we’re doing exactly this — we do not have an automobile, nor do we want one. We use the rural county transit bus, which we have found to be extremely cheap and quite reliable; and it has certainly saved us thousands and thousands of dollars by liberating us from the onerous expense of keeping a car.

The house is also situated within the Massena Electric district — meaning the resident would have access to the cheapest municipal electric in the United States, which presently sells for just $0.04/kwh. The taxes are reasonable as well, coming in at about $500 per year after the STAR rebate, or $41 per month. And, with such a strong Amish presence in the area, there are ways to purchase bulk food at cost through their channels that can lower one’s food bill to laughably low levels — my wife and I presently spend perhaps $300 per month on food for the two of us. Considering that the property has a well on-site, water is free, and as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a little extra in electric for that — or they could have the Amish deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in a wood stove, very cheaply.

With a flip phone for communication — at $8/mo from US Mobile — and a willingness to entertain oneself by reading books from the library and fishing, one’s total monthly expenses could look something like this:

Taxes: $41 
Electric: ~$30 
Water: $0
Heat:
Transit: $53 for a 30-ride pass for each person living there, assuming you go to town 3x per week at $2/trip. Multiple options to take the bus to town each day from this location. 
Food: ~$300/mo. 
Telephone: $8/mo 
Entertainment: Fishing and library, free 
Internet: Use library

This altogether totals up to about $432/mo, or $5,184/yr for a single person. And for those who might be quick to point out that there could be a dearth of jobs there, note that when people say “there are no jobs” in a given area, they generally mean that there are no jobs that could produce a normal, upper-middle-class lifestyle there. Which, even in Massena and Ogdensburg isn’t entirely true. But even if it were, the Stewart’s gas stations in both towns are actively hiring part-time cashiers at $17/hr. These places will let you work just one day a week if you like, and seem to be pretty good about flexible hours. In this case, you could work just one ten-hour shift per week, and in so doing, earn more than 30% of what you need to live well at this particular house with just four days of work per month.

Working at Stewart’s is just one example, of course — there are plenty of ways to earn ~$5k-$6k per year in America, ranging from local wage work to traveling for seasonal work to running some kind of a mail order business from one’s home. I’ve known men who grow rare Chinese medicinal herbs in greenhouses on a tenth of an acre to sell via the mail; or my uncle, who takes lumber from old barns and crafts it into shelves to sell online. Others go out to North Dakota once a year to work the sugar beet harvest, head up to Alaska to work in the fisheries once a year, or work from the Department of Labor’s seasonal job list.

By the standards of our great-grandfathers — that is, with a little work here and there, a big garden, a fishing pole, and some venison in the freezer — there’s never been a better time to try to “make it” in America and live the older version of the American Dream. If we can’t see that now, it doesn’t necessarily mean that things have gotten bad — it might mean that our perception has become grossly skewed by an era of hyperabundance, marketing, reality TV, and social media comparison syndrome.

None of what I am writing is some kind of a thought experiment. My wife and I really live a life very similar to the one I’ve described here, and are living on practically nothing. And I’ve actually been inside of this house, because I nearly bought it myself back in 2021. It needs work, but not that much; you could realistically move right in. For the low, low price of $29,000 — or really, they’d probably take $20,000 — you, too could live this kind of a life. Heck, if you don’t have $20k, I know of a bank up here that would give you a mortgage on this place, with NO inspection or appraisal required, with 20% down. With a credit score over 700, and a couple thousand bucks, any American could live an earlier iteration of the American Dream — and could be living so cheaply, they’ve got their expatriate buddies down in Mexico beat.

This is only one example. I fully believe that there are ways to live a fairly normal life (by mid-20th century standards) in rural America for even less than $432/mo. There are ways to feed a family while working even less than forty hours per month — without welfare, or begging, or dishonesty. And as long as these possibilities exist, it seems to me that those who are anguished about horrible job and housing markets are functionally choosing to be anguished. After all, there’s nothing saying we can’t go and live like our great-grandfathers did. It’s all there for the taking; I see analagous homes for sale all over the country, whether it’s in PA, IL, ME, ND, IA, AL, MS, WV, or a handful of other states.

They are all simply waiting for young, enthusiastic Americans to come and say “yes” to these far-flung regions. Those who do will find not only that they have less debt, more free time for family, prayer, and creative pursuits — but that they’re actively making this country better. That they’re actively taking the great wealth of our history, land, and infrastructure and hanging onto it, preserving it, standing up for it — in a way that simply isn’t possible for those who choose to pack into top-10 cities with sky-high rents.

At the end of it, most people don’t want to live this way. That’s OK — I’m not here to judge them. But I am here to tell anyone who is fed up with the housing market, tired of living the “4HL,” and sick of seeing our country’s heartland regions continue to crumble that there are actionable solutions to their problems. They could do it today. They could make the change if they wished.

Heaven knows, if enough of them did, it could change American history for the better. And for a few of you — you just might wind up being our new neighbors!