Several years ago, I read about a collection of mid-sized towns along the Pacific Coast, between Northern California and the Canadian border, that were affordable (under $300k for a decent sized home and lot). Because I'm always looking for any excuse to move, no matter where I live, I immediately checked them all out. When we made our last move, I had created a spreadsheet of things that I needed to investigate along with a scorecard for those things. I've added a few things since then, because rural southeastern Minnesota (where we moved) turned out to be quite a bit more redneck than I had anticipated. In fact, all of rural Minnesota is more backwards and uneducated, right wing, racist, and downright regressive then you might think from an outsider’s perspective of Minnesota; or from just living in the Twin Cities and only visiting the outback areas.
From that lesson I added two high-pointer qualities to my next prospective new location: #1, there needs to be a Unitarian Universalist Fellowship somewhere very nearby (within 10 miles) and #2, I don't ever want to move to a place where the majority of voters voted for Donald Trump. I don’t even want to live somewhere where nearly 50% voted for a rapist/felon/Russian asset. You probably wouldn't be surprised to know that all of those affordable places in California, Oregon and Washington were heavily slanted towards Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Likewise, you might not be surprised to know that all of those small towns are economic dead zones, with high crime rates, lots of meth and Fentanyl arrests and overdose deaths, and most of those affordable houses, and neighborhoods, look like they were lived in by someone who died from a meth or fentanyl overdose.
After reading a recent article that described the possibility that the Vermont legislature might actually start outlawing loud exhausts and applying appropriate fines for violators[1], I started looking at Vermont real estate. In particular, I was interested in real estate along the Canadian border. My first surprise was that area is incredibly affordable and most of the urban parts (A misnomer in a state where a 45,000 population “city” is the largest in the state.) of Vermont are way out of my price range. (For example, 900 square feet and 2 bedrooms in Burlington is nearly $400k.) That made me suspicious. So, I did my presidential election results search and discovered (you guessed it) most of the northern border of Vermont is filled with unemployed, drug addicted, illiterate, racist Trump voters.
The question is, are all of the negatives in the area what created the Trump voters or are the kinds of people who are inclined to be Trump voters also inclined to trash an area? Personally, I'm inclined towards the second. Either, or both, could be true, though.
Another example, Crescent City, CA, is a town almost right on the California-Oregon border and only 80 miles north of an absolutely spectacular small, very liberal, and totally unaffordable city (Arcata, CA). Crescent City is an example of one of those affordable garbage dumps. Crescent City currently has a selection of houses available for sale between $90,000 and $260,000. None of them are particularly amazing, but several are definitely livable. Arcata, on the other hand, will cost you anything from $180,000, for a lot to build on, to a bit short of a million dollars for a very similar collection of well-maintained, very livable houses. The difference is one city is filled with loser Trump voters and the other is largely intelligent human beings.
As anyone who has paid the slightest attention to US states’ economic situations knows, red states don’t foot their own bills. Blue state taxpayers not only pay their own way but they also carry the deadbeat red states. The same is true for rural areas . . . everywhere. All of that would be dramatically less irritating if there were some level of gratitude from red and rural dependents, but, like typical teenagers, rural Americans imagine they have done something to deserve their “allowance.” It’s certainly not based on the “food” they grow, since corn and soybeans accounted for 87% of total U.S. grain and oilseed production and most of that is either converted to energy-inefficient ethanol, health-destroying corn syrup, or exported, with heavy state and federal subsidies, to other countries. Even substantial percentages of the meat products American farmers grow is exported, again with federal supports, because farmers produce too much of what Americans don’t want to eat and the various chemical contaminants make those products undesirable to non-US consumers.
All that means that regressive Republican towns and cities are filled with a majority of non-productive, mostly-white, uneducated, entitled residents who don’t take good care of their property or communities. It’s hard to spot those things from outside, especially from hundreds or thousands of miles away, so the best tool I’ve found for making those kinds of judgements is stereotyping; as politically-incorrect as that may be. There might be some responsible, decent, intelligent, creative, democratic-minded (small “d”) communities, somewhere in this country, but the odds are staggeringly against that and, if they exist, they are the “exception that proves the rule.”
