Cheap Land Fairbanks

"There's a reason the land is cheap"

First! Do you want to expand your backpacking skills with other women, trans and non-binary people in a chill environment with extremely good vibes? We’ll traipse through peaceful canyons in southern Utah, sleeping on the warm sand at night and jumping in creeks if we get too hot during the day. My spring sessions of these trips sold out, so I added some fall dates! Apply soon if you want a spot, before these fill up too! A bit of backpacking experience is helpful, but if you have other outdoors experience I can help you fill in the gaps. Deets and the application are here.

Also! My good friend Sarah Histand has an online strength-training program for summer adventures that rules, called Summer Strong- getting the miles in is key for hiking training, but strength training is helpful too, especially for injury prevention and if your trip has much elevation gain. A lot of my friends have done this program, and love it! This year Sarah has even added a somatic co-regulation component so you know the vibes are immaculate. The program starts on April 14th, and deets are here.

Loafus Borealis photosynthesizing in the sun

Cheap Land Fairbanks

This weekend I looked at some different parcels of land in the Fairbanks area in the possibly overly-optimistic quest to begin to determine if I’ll ever be able to have my own wee land. I’m honestly exhausted from a lifetime of renting in a world where the rent only ever continues to rise- some places have regulations around how much a landlord can raise rent but not in Alaska, here they can raise it whatever amount for whatever reason, and there are functionally no tenant protections- in Anchorage in 2022 my landlord Olivia lied about the utility bill (the utilities were part of the rent, and she said they’d gone up, and when I asked to see the bill I saw that not only had they not gone up but she’d been overcharging us), and when I complained to her about that she terminated our tenancy, dumping us in the middle of winter into a housing market that had literally nothing available, a housing market where it can take a year to find a place- her retaliation against us was so shocking and scary (and then learning that there was absolutely nothing I could do about it) that it lowkey traumatized me, and moved the needle in my brain from “I’ve lived in rentals since I was born but it’s chill” to “this situation has actually become dangerous and I need to figure out how to stop renting someday for my own safety”. Even talking publicly about renting scares me now- like what if my current landlord reads this newsletter and decides to retaliate? I’d never experienced a landlord that shady until my 2022 landlord in Anchorage, but now that I know what they can get away with I stress about it a lot.

Anyway, one possible way out of the Neverending Story-style Swamp of Sadness that is renting is to own land and live on that land, somehow. I know people also buy houses, but I have no credit- my credit report is literally blank, because I’ve never done anything to build my credit, and I have no cosigner because I do not have family, and I have no inheritance or other big chunk of money. I could decide today to start building my credit, but house prices are insane and interest rates are awful, and also it doesn’t make sense to live in a full-size house with real utilities in the coldest city in the US- people’s electric bills for real houses here are like $600/month, and if you have plumbing you have to worry about your pipes freezing all winter. What makes the most sense here is a cabin without traditional utilities, but you can’t get a loan for that or for raw land, so. But a cool thing about the Fairbanks area is that there actually are affordable parcels of land, cheap enough that if you save you can buy with cash, and don’t need a loan- you can get a two-acre parcel here for around $25,000. On reddit there’s a couple posts where people are like why is some land more affordable in Fairbanks and people are like because it sucks to live here and maybe that’s true, but one person’s trash (land) is another person’s treasure (land), amirite? Then again, I think often of the book Cheap Land Colorado, a book that I loved and that is, essentially, a long exploration of the phrase Land is cheap for a reason. So here are some of the reasons that the cheap parcels of land in Fairbanks are so cheap:

-You literally cannot get to the land. You have to bushwhack through the woods across other land to reach it- there’s not even a trail. If you buy this land you’ll have to build a road or driveway, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

-The land is in the bog. This means the ground will constantly shift under your cabin, and in winter the air will be polluted and it’ll be ten degrees colder than higher spots.

-The land is next a massive, active mine that dumps heavy metals into the environment.

-The land has no electricity, so if you want that you’ll have to spend a bunch of money to have it put in.

-The land is on a super steep hillside.

-Often several of these things, combined.

post-run snooze time

On Saturday, Jon and checked out a number of these small, affordable parcels around Fairbanks, just to try and get a feel for what was available, and the various drawbacks of each. We put on snowshoes and post-holed through the heavy, wet snow for hours, toggling between various maps on our phones to try and figure out where property lines were, proposed road access corridors, etc. Many of the parcels were not great. There were a couple lovely 2-acre parcels- above the bog, steep but not too steep, with beautiful birch trees and big white spruce. These parcels would, however, require a long road being built, and even thinking about the first steps of that felt overwhelming to me- logging the trees along the road corridor (I’ve never used a chainsaw), pulling out the stumps, renting heavy equipment, cutting into the hillside? Bringing in gravel?! And of course that would just be the first step of many- what if I could only afford to build an ATV trail? Then I’d have to buy an ATV (plus a snowmachine for winter) and start hauling in building materials sled-load by sled-load. Tools, lumber, a generator… and I’ve never built anything before, so I’d be learning from scratch how to build a cabin. I’d have to clear the spot for the cabin, which would require more logging and pulling out stumps, plus putting in some sort of foundation. Maybe, eventually, I’d have a little dry cabin with a woodstove, and I’d forever haul my water in on the ATV/snow machine. Could I live without electricity? Solar can be a thing, at least for part of the year. If I did want electricity that would be a whole other, expensive project…

In Cheap Land Colorado, people without much money (veterans, addicts, disabled people-those who might be houseless elsewhere) buy five acre parcels of land in the high desert of Colorado for $5k each and attempt to eek out a life there, only to discover that they cannot actually afford to stay- a septic tank is required, and this costs $30k to put in. Also, if you leave your land ever the neighbors will come and steal everything that’s not nailed down, even stripping the copper wiring from your walls- this makes it hard to leave for work, and there aren’t jobs nearby. If you don’t put in a septic tank you’ll be fined, and eventually the fines build up so much that you abandoned your land, at which point it’s sold again for $5k, to another unsuspecting soul. These same five acre parcels have been re-sold, over and over, for decades.

After post-holing through the snow for hours looking at parcels that were either terrible or included too many additional costs, I sat on the couch with my dogs, scrolling Zillow listings and feeling depressed. I clicked on the parcels that were cheap and did have road access, asking myself what I was willing to accept- the ever-shifting bog, where building any sort of structure is a dubious investment at best? Living next to a giant mine that dumps mercury into the atmosphere? Between the two, I would probably choose the bog. Even then, it would be a while before I could actually purchase the land, after which the arduous process of clearing a spot and building a cabin would begin. At best, I have a long stretch of renting still ahead of me. The idea of this deflated me. But at least I live in a place where some eventual exit from renting is a possibility at least, right?

Alternately, I could do what my friend Tara recommends, and buy the other kind of cheap Alaskan land- land that’s in the middle of nowhere. I’m not ready for this though. I like being able to easily drive to the grocery store, and having more than one, maybe two people within a fifty mile radius that I can hang out with. Perhaps someday living super remotely, with just the trees as companions, will be appealing, and I can get twenty acres for $20k, and have total nature-immersion bliss. Or maybe eventually I can have both; my wee bog cabin on the edge of Fairbanks, and my remote off-grid log cabin in the bush. A person can dream!

Anyway, I’ll keep you all updated on my progress.

Carrot