The average price for a home in America is nearly $440,000, according to data from Realtor.com. The state of the housing market in the US has made many young and prospective homeowners feeling hopeless due to the rising prices and lack of availability for more affordable properties.
For buyers who are willing to have an open mind and truly start over someplace that seems untouched, there are a slew of towns in central east Kansas that are available for the cost of a car, ranging from $50,000 to $85,000.
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In towns like Coldwater, Protection, Ashland, and Englewood, the number of residents has been essentially split in half since the 1930s, according to US census data.
Kansas is not the only state that’s seen a decline. In many more rural states, major factories and industrial sites have moved on to cheaper places, and agriculturally saturated areas are becoming less profitable for the families and businesses that remain.
These towns are becoming more and more desolate, and are even at risk of abandonment, which is causing the real estate industry to make some major changes to cope with the losses.
Local real estate agent Jeff Simpson noted that a lot of the Kansas towns are “getting sleepy pretty quick,” with towns having populations lower than 2,000, and on the more extreme end towns like Englewood, which has a population of just 58 people.
Simpson mainly works with agricultural land and farmsteads, and told Realtor.com that with industry and local commerce gone, people are just leaving and never returning, which in turn lowers the value of land and property.
“You see a lot of people aging out of the farming communities, and their children have kind of left—either moved into suburban areas or out of state. So yeah, there’s certainly a little bit of a struggle going on there,” he said.
“We’re seeing homes sell for $50,000 to $85,000 – especially old farmsteads that have been broken off into larger parcels.”
“A lot of these towns didn’t have the money to tear down and build new—so these homes survived,” Elizabeth Finkelstein, from Cheap Old Homes, explains.
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“They’re like time capsules, filled with pink tile bathrooms and solid oak cabinets. They weren’t designed to impress—they were designed to last.”
“They’re the backbone of the country—agriculture, farmland, the rolling lands. They’re such a part of where this country came from, and the houses deserve to be preserved.”
Local Kansas real estate agents are now pitching low-cost homes as investment opportunities for recreational activities and farm production.
“That area doesn’t get a lot of rain, so crop production and yields aren’t as high as places like Iowa or Illinois. It makes it pretty hard to make a living farming,” Finkelstein stated.
“There’s a lot of out-of-state recreational users—pheasant and quail, the deer, the turkey. There’s a lot of hunting that happens in our area,” says Simpson.
“If you can buy a farm for recreational use and there’s no place to stay, a decent little home nearby will get chewed up pretty quick.”
Realtor.com Senior Economic Research Analyst Hannah Jones said that “‘dying’ towns face prolonged population decline, disinvestment and economic contraction. Many of these locations are former industrial hubs, or small towns left behind by shifts in economic activity. As a result, these towns face a large number of vacant homes and buildings, a shrinking tax base, fewer working-age residents, and limited investment.”
“While the future may seem grim for these towns, there are some strategies that could help manage their decline. The city or county can acquire and manage privately-held land to prevent further blight and strategically choose how/when to use vacant land.
Some towns like Youngstown, OH, or Flint, MI, have adopted strategies to ‘right-size’ their towns by concentrating services and infrastructure in viable areas.”
“Revitalization can happen, but it requires bringing job opportunities and people back to town, which can lead to investment and growth.”
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
