Welcome to Brainstuff from how Stuff Works dot com where smart Happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question, how can you get free or nearly free land and houses in the United States? Today? You may recall from your history class that it was once possible to get free land in the United States pretty easily. It was called the Homestead Act, and it was enacted in eighteen sixty two. The state of Alaska has an article on the Homestead
Act and it describes it this way. In eighteen sixty two, Congress past the revolutionary Homestead Act that sent thousands of Americans West in pursuit of free land. Any man twenty one years of age or over was eligible to stake out a hundred and sixty acres of land for less than twenty dollars after filing their intentions. Homesteaders were required to live on the land, build a residence, and farm at least ten percent of it within five years before
a legal patent for the land was issued. After Alaska was purchased by the US, homesteaders began claiming land in Alaska. Homesteaders ranged from dairy and agricultural farmers to miners and wilderness pioneers living a subsistence lifestyle. Though homesteading in most of the US began to rapidly diminish in the early twentieth century, it remained a viable method of settling Alaska.
The Homestead Act was finally repealed in nineteen seventy six, though Alaska was granted an extension until nineteen eighty six. In its hundred fourteen active years, ten per cent of US land was settled under the Act, including significant portions of Alaska. If you think about it, this is a pretty powerful idea. The thought that you could drop everything, head west and get a free piece of land to
start your life over. That's pretty significant, and it brings up the obvious question is there anything like that today? Is there any way to get free land or free housing in the United States in two thousand tennish The answer is yes, although it's not a hundred and sixty acres, it's a little bit smaller than that. But there are a number of municipalities in the United States today that are giving away free land in order to try to
encourage people to move into the area. For example, there's a city called Beatrice that has the Homestead Act of two thousand, ten and on their website they say the city of Beatrice currently has three residential lots available. The lots are approximately eighty three ft wide and a hundred forty ft deep. The lots are located on the west side of Beatrice, there within the city limits. The lots all have access to a street, water, sewer, and electricity.
There are no buildings on the lots. If you fulfill all the terms and conditions of the contract, you will receive the land at no cost from the city. So there you have it. Free land is available today in the United States. But what if you're looking for something a little more spacious, if you're willing to relax the formal definition of the word free and go to something
like ten thousand or twenty thousand dollars. There's a remarkable amount of stuff available in the United States today, and most people, even if you're working minimum wage, you could live, you know, with their parents, or sleep on their friends couch for a year or two and scrape together ten or twenty thousand dollars. So where can you find a ten thousand or twenty thousand dollar house? The key is to look in America's most distressed cities. Right now, one
of which would be Detroit. If you go to a website like realtor dot com and plug in a few input parameters for your search, you can actually find lots of houses, like a thousand of them that are less than twenty thousand dollars in Detroit today, and some of them are pretty nice, surprisingly nice, and they're available because Detroit's going through some really really hard times. The thing is,
Detroit isn't alone. Almost any city because there's so much distress right now, has some real deals in real estate, and if you get on a website and look at real estate, you might be surprised at what kind of houses you can find at really really low prices in this market. And the exact same thing is true for land. You can find land if you are willing to look for it in the two hundred to five d and
acre range. Now it's not gonna be urban land, it's going to be out in the middle of absolute nowhere. But still, you know these think about the people who homesteaded in eighteen sixty two. They were going out into the middle of the middle of nowhere and settling their land. So if you're willing to take that kind of adventure and willing to spend just a little bit of money, you can find lots of land today that's very, very
reasonably priced. So if you're looking for an adventure, or if you're looking to relive the day days of the Homestead Act in eighteen sixty two, or if you just want to start over in life, get on the web and look at some of the amazing deals that are available today, either in the free realm or in the very very low price realm. You might be surprised by
what you find. For more on this and thousands of other topics, does that how stuff works dot com and don't forget to check out the brain stuff blog on the how stuff works dot com home page. You can also follow brain Stuff on Facebook or Twitter at brain stuff hs W. The house Stuff works dot Com iPhone app is coming soon. Get access to our content in a new way, articles, videos, and more all on the go. Check out the latest podcast and blog post and see
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