Should You Locate Your Retreat in a Town or the Countryside? The Pros and Cons of Each

Choosing a retreat location is the hardest thing you must do, because there are so many variables, issues, and choices to make.

Furthermore, many of your choices are far from clear-cut.  They depend on things uniquely to do with you, your circumstances, and to do with the areas you are considering, and require you to make difficult value judgments where a choice for something might then impact on your ability to also optimize some other important feature.

This all makes it difficult for you, and of course, difficult for those of us who try to write on the topic too!  But write we do; indeed this article means we now have over 90,000 words already published about choosing a retreat location (more than a full-sized book), and there’s plenty more still to write.

This article can be considered as a follow on from several other articles that directly or obliquely consider the choice between an in-town or out-in-the-country type location.  See, for example, our two-part series, Identifying Good Towns and The Robustness of a Town’s Services, plus articles such as Where to Locate Within a Town, The Importance of Good Nearby Neighbors and Will Your Nearby Town Thrive, Survive or Fail.

In this article we identify some of the respective good and bad points associated with living either in a rural area far from other people, or in a more concentrated population cluster such as a small town.  You can decide on the relative importance of these things, we simply offer them up for your consideration.

Positive Aspects of Town Living	Negative Aspects of Town Living
You become a member of a local community, and with a group of people in the town, can select your friends and fellow community members from a larger group of people to choose from If the town groups together constructively, there is better mutual security – ‘safety in numbers’ and with help closer at hand in an emergency Probably have some community services such as medical, law enforcement, fire, water, sewer Probably have businesses providing all sorts of commercial services – eg electrical and mechanical maintenance, plumbing, etc Most places you need to go to will be within walking distance A group of people in one location aids effective trading – buying, selling, exchanging, bartering	It is harder to quality control your neighbors (and their neighbors, too) and you are more impacted by them and their actions Some locals may pose present threats, others may become troublesome WTSHTF An unknown number of people will be truly prepared, and an unknown but greater number may become dependent on you WTSHTF A greater population density and more frequent interactions with other people makes it easier for epidemics to spread A town is unlikely to be self-sufficient for food, and unlikely to be able to become so in the future (too many people, too little land) You have much less privacy of any type in a town The desirability to be discreet about your resources and capabilities and the lack of privacy will pose problems, for example, with antenna arrays, making your dwelling structure bullet proof, etc Smaller sized lots make it more difficult to use them for many different purposes Land prices are higher, limiting the amount of land you can buy in a town Land taxes are probably higher than in the country too Local city bylaws are probably going to be more restrictive in many respects (some possibly unexpected).  In particular, you can forget any opportunity to use firearms for any purpose on your town lot, and may have major restrictions on the fuel you can store City laws (and laws in general) may be more aggressively enforced with a city police force and less ability to do things unobserved A town’s services may fail WTSHTF and make the town less viable without the services than the countryside would be (never having the services in the first place).  For example, most country folk have their own septic systems, what do townsfolk do when their town sewer system fails? You probably can’t hunt or fish or raise livestock on your town property; even if you could, just how much game do you expect to find in your back yard? Might not even be allowed/able to collect rainwater from your roof.  Where else/how else would you get water in a town? Less space for solar arrays, probably no chance of hydro, probably little/no chance of wind power Impractical to consider activities that generate significant noise or smells Towns are more likely to organize formal food sharing (ie confiscation) type programs in an emergency.  They have an additional level of government (city govt) and a significant concentration of people needing food.
Positive Aspects of Rural Living	Negative Aspects of Rural Living
Free of direct/immediate issues from neighbors, who are probably sufficiently distant to give you much greater privacy and to have less mutual impacts on what you and they do Lower population density and fewer interactions with other people reduce the spread of epidemics Your neighbors (and you too) are all more likely to be already self-sufficient in terms of food production You may even have a chance to start growing food surpluses to trade with others Because everyone was not relying on city services (eg water, sewer) to start with, WTSHTF you will all be less impacted Land prices are lower – you can buy more land for the same money as less land in a town would cost Land taxes are probably lower than in the city too More land gives you more space for everything, and a greater amount of land spreads your risk of unexpected events over a broader area, hopefully making such events less impactful With more space, costing less money, and more private, you can set up all sorts of things ranging from private gun ranges to antenna arrays to more extensive cultivation of many different crops to safety and privacy zones You have the space for extensive solar arrays, might possibly be able to implement a micro-hydro system, and maybe add a wind turbine too You can consider activities that are noisy or smelly or in some other way would be too attention-getting or objectionable in town (eg methane gas generation from cow dung) You’re more likely to have a solution already in place for water Fewer (or no) restrictions on hunting and fishing and livestock raising on your land Easier to build structures with non-standard construction eg for fire-proof and ballistic protection and to erect obstacles against vehicular assault Less likely to have as much county government interference as city folks do with both city and county government, and more able to live your life discreetly Larger lots allow for inefficient but beneficial land uses such as forestry and harvesting trees for both construction materials and firewood/energy	Your nearest neighbors are probably too far away to be able to provide immediate urgent assistance in an emergency Even communicating with neighbors may become difficult if cell phones and landlines fail Might not have high-speed internet and state of the art cell-phone and data service Although neighbors are far and few, you are more dependent on additional people to manage and secure a larger lot than you are in a town There is probably less of a community spirit, and a smaller potential community anyway, at least within a few hours walk/bicycle/horse ride There is a lack of convenient local services. Nothing will be a short walk away, and if liquid fueled internal combustion powered vehicles become impractical in the future, distances will become a major problem

Towns Aren’t All Bad

Wow – looking at the imbalance between the pluses and minuses of town and rural life would seem to suggest that everyone should choose a rural location for their retreat.

But not all the bullet points are of equal importance, and you need to do more than just count bullet points.  You need to decide which are the most important factors for you, and whether you can minimize the negatives that inevitably are associated with any set of positives.

We provide considerable more detail on the brief bullet points we offer above in other articles on these topics.  We linked, above, to some of our other articles about town vs country living, and you can also visit our complete collection of retreat location themed articles here.

Summary

The difficult art of choosing an ideal location for your retreat involves trading off the pluses and minuses of each issue you need to consider.

To help you understand and evaluate the consequences of your choices, we’ve listed almost 50 different factors to consider when trying to select between a town or rural retreat location.