See the front page of today's (2/13/2006) Oregonian for two articles covering Oregon's DHS safety net. Its already strapped and over subscribed. And things have yet to get really "bad".

Jeff

Not the words I would choose. This implies survivalist thinking about a rapid breakdown in civil order after nuke attack, UN black helicopter invasion, and such, some of it worse case real concerns, some of it paranoid imagination. A person isn't going to live long or well on a pickup load of survival/camping gear and a spot in the National Forest. "Bugging out" as I understand it is a very incomplete strategy. One that would only be attractive when all the other choices for living become worse in a short period of time. A well prepared refugee is the most positive way I can describe the result of that idea being played out.

I'd prefer to view my concept as a "transition" plan. I'm a trailing edge baby boomer, and retirement is not all that far away, probably less than 20 years based on demographic profile. My entire life I've wanted to have a place in the country where I could raise organic food, some animals, and escape being another hamster trapped spinning civilization's treadmill. So this is part of my long term strategy for life even if the s*** miraculously doesn't hit the fan post-PO.

Now if life in the city does become unacceptable, retirement may just come sooner or differently than my best case scenario. There will be already productive land, wood, water, shelter, tools and established community at the end of my transition plan.

My best view of the long term future for the generations that follow us is a return to a more agrarian type lifestyle. Only the very wealthy will not be tending at least a kitchen garden. Many more people will live close to their essential resources where they will produce and consume on location. People will have to be more spread out over the landscape and not mostly concentrated in cities like now. Cities will continue, but they will hold a smaller fraction of the population.

The really dark side of our overall predicament is that the number of humans has grossly exceeded the sustainable carrying capacity of the Earth when petroleum energy is subtracted from the life support equation. There will be a lot of suffering as we enter energy descent. I don't know how to make it fair for everyone. Those of us understanding these things in advance need to be developing our local resource and social systems so we can take care of those close to us, so our children can become sustainable and eventually take care of us. So many things need to change, and it is going to be so very painful to experience and watch.

Jeff

Here is some brainstorming that I went through a few years ago. You and anyone else reading this are welcome to use this information any way you want. First some background thoughts.

You have to have some resources to trade up and into real estate. In our times a down payment and the ability to make monthly payments has been enough to get you in and keep you going. Inflation has been the friend of people who buy real estate this way. You pay back a fixed size, fixed rate loan with dollars that are easier and easier to come by. The place goes up in value and the percentage you own grows while the part measured by the fixed loan shrinks in proportion. The one huge catch is that you must always be able to make your payments. If you can't, that is how you lose in real estate. Otherwise, enough time and the constant inflation of our money supply have made it very difficult to lose in real estate. There are good reasons to beleive we are heading into a time of aggressive inflation, which makes now a really good time to get that big, fixed real estate loan at what are still historically low interest rates.

With any real estate purchase you have the opportunity to work out co-ownership arrangements with anyone close to you that you can trust and can always work problems out with in the future. So any idea can have that component and I won't stress it further, consider it as part of the financing choices.

Transportation used to be by foot. You can walk from here to the California border in less than two weeks. In my car I can be there in less than 4 hours. If our world slows down like I think it will with less fuel, then investing more time to travel will be a new old way. Plus there are bicycles. Probably there will be passenger trains again because the tracks are still there and some railroad people will see a way to make money hauling people again. So travel will get much less instantaneous and convenient, but it will not disappear or become impossible. This is my working assumption.

Here are two ideas about ag land.

1. If you are determined to stay in the immediate PDX area you might look at some exclusive Ag only land immediately outside the UGB that is most accessible to you. Out where I'm at that would be Washington or Yamhill counties, maybe Marion to the South. In order to build a house on one of these plots you need to show $80,000 year agricultural income. So these are basically unbuildable plots that come up once in a while, and for a lot less money than if you were able to build on them. But you don't want to build, you want to grow food. Fifteen or so years ago I had the chance to visit Berlin, Germany. I was impressed with all the little houses people had in the agricultural lands surrounding the city. No bigger than a single axle camper, cute as all get out of course. So what were these? They were garden houses. People lived in the city in flats but during weekends and summer they would come out to the garden house to grow food in the attached plot of ground that they either owned or leased. These were not proper houses, they didn't have plumbed in sewer or water. They did have sleeping and cooking arrangements.

So you could do this here. However you buy it, you could set up a piece of purely ag land with a garden house for you, and if you want to be in the business, lease out sub-plots to other people to use the same. From what I know about building codes, which is probably not enough, if these are under 200 sq ft agricultural buildings without septic you don't even need to permit them. I know of no law that would restrict you from leasing out subplots of a non-dividable, non-buildable piece of agricultural land. Just make sure it doesn't fall into the category of campground or trailer park. I think its an expansion on the community garden idea. Only because the location is farther out and the transportation is not so instant any more, people need a place to stay when they go to tend the garden over the weekend, and during longer stretches during the summer. You can take money and or produce in trade for the lease. You can let people build their own garden houses on the sub-plot you lease them. You can set the rules on sustainability and what practices are acceptable or not.

2. Ag land that already has a house on it. This will cost you a lot more because of the established house. Believe it or not, there are people who want to live in the country even though they can't afford to buy there themselves. So you can rent out the house while you still live in the city. If you are lucky or persistent you can find a renter that will also be a part of your community when you arrive. If you are still close to PDX you can have the house rented out and still do the garden house plot leasing as suggested in number one above. Your plan can be to eventually move to the main house or figure out something else to let you live on the land. The farther away from PDX the less expensive this kind of property is going to be. But prices have definitely gone up. This kind of place has more than doubled in value in S. Oregon over the last 4-5 years.

Personally, if I was comitted to staying in the PDX area no matter what, I'd be putting together the garden house idea on unbuildable ag land. Food security for you, and you have the potential to build a virtual community with the people who have a share of the garden plots with you through co-ownership or leasing. I don't think you could ever get rich this way, but you never know. Food is going to become a lot more precious, and people who thought they would never stoop to touch the dirt will become willing to do anything. All the new houses going up around me have a enough open space to put patio tomatoes out and that is about it. They would use land better as commonwall structures as the scraps are barely enough to walk between the houses. There will be plenty of people who won't even be able to have a kitchen garden. The market for the sub-plots may be weak now, but it will increase over time because of PO.

Jeff

:::: Jan Steinman, a fossil-fuel free (almost) zone! ::::

Yes I agree wholeheartedly that the low interest fixed rate loan is a great gift that we should take advantage of now while we can and before hyperinflation takes over. At the same time, you have to be able tocover your expenses and jobs will get scarce. I am a therapist at a hospital for acutely mentally ill folks (adventist). I hope that job will stick around for a while during the "slow collapse". But I can't count on it forever so I get nervous about incurring more debt that I can barely manage now in order to secure farm land.

I think it would be a great idea if some of us Peak Oilers started offering ideas about buying farm land cooperatively that we could take turns cultivating and living on. I am also open to collectively buying wood lots for future sustainable harvesting. If done on a collective level, one could spend a fraction of the cost of buying land individually, share needed skills and share the labor of caretaking ag land.

If people have any ideas about this they want to share, or a willingness to discuss costs and benefits, I'd love to hear. In fact, as I'm writing this, I'll start another thread and we can go on to discuss food security for Portlanders here on this thread.