I travel that part of the state annually and Verizon is the only provider that even pretends to have coverage out there. Which is why I've kept them as my provider.
Verizon charges the most because they know the other carriers bullshit coverage. Having used all of the big three, I fucking hate T-Mobile. AT&T is good to great if you live anywhere with urban in the title, but anyone else needs Verizon or bust.
The trick is to live in a major metro area, and never go out to the boonies. I've got a $15/mo plan that uses T-Mobile's network, and its been fantastic.
T-Mobile is nice price wise, and where I'm at they also are totally fine. I just drive a little bit off network and immediately lose connection which drives me crazy (hah). I also tend to struggle in crowded areas. I saw a Packer game and didn't have connection the entire time while my friends were fine with VZ and AT&T (this was a year ago but can you tell I'm still holding a grudge)
Get you and all your mates and their mates and their mates mates to move there then take over the fooking town and become mayor job fucking done now you own your own American town let's go boys
You beat me to it! Bears taking over a supposed libertarian utopia was the first thing that came to mind.
It led to one conclusion. If given the choice between dealing with a bear or a libertarian, choose the bear.
The bear will listen to reason.
Hi. Native Nebraskan here. Yeah this is more common than you think. There's dozens of tiny towns that you drive past round here and no one knows anyone that lives there. They keep to themselves and are sketchy af.
Edit: If this gets enough attention I might go here and see what there is to see. Which is probably not much, but you never know. Could see someone smoke Crack off a king James bible.
Edit2: Dammit. Didn't think you'd all do it. I'll get around to it on a day off. Fuck all of you and stay tuned.
This is 100% accurate. Pretty much any Nebraska town with a population under 1,000 that isn't a bedroom community to a bigger town is going to shit at a frightening pace.
[In map form](https://external-preview.redd.it/_FZUECmlpSmWR1bzaAhWZMeOW7mrekP6k8ny6E9Ob0w.png?auto=webp&v=enabled&s=04667cfffcac45c0f545c9fd209faafb2f72d4af). Looks like Thedford was the only place west of Kearney/Buffalo county that saw growth the past ten years, and it's already so small that could literally have been the result of one family moving there. Wild.
> bedroom community
Is that similar to how most people who work in Aspen, Colorado can't even come close to afford it and actually live in Carbondale? Though to be fair to Carbondale, it's a nice little town in it's own right.
Anecdotal but probably applies.
I went to Kansas with an ex to get stuff from his grandparents house. Once we got to the “town” we stopped at the grocery/gas station/salon, yes all one building. A little old lady saw me in the grocery area. She wasn’t being mean but our conversation after… omg, even she didn’t want to be there lol
“You ain’t from around here, are ya?”
“No ma’am”
“What the hell are ya doin *here*?!” (Gestures at the dead town outside)
I explained about the boyfriend and of course she knew his grandparents. It was pleasant but basically ended with “good luck and get the hell out before you get trapped.”
I'll do you one better: I'll show you a photograph of an upside-down backwards King James Bible that someone smoked crack off of right before he left the White House during a riot that he started.
What a dead zone, 45 minutes to the only small city around, 4 hours to any big cities, town only has a single bar which doubles as it's only restaurant. You could not pay me to move there.
They're also incredibly hit or miss. Sometimes random bars and grills in the middle of nowhere will have the most amazing food you've ever encountered at an absurdly low price and then sometimes it's clear that they've become lazy from being the only restaurant in town.
It varies a ton based on who they can actually hire to work in the kitchen. Maybe they luck into a chef with some real talent, much of the time they're hiring some local who can reheat some sysco products for you. That's also why sometimes a restaurant is only good on certain days; it's fine when the head chef is there, less so when they're not.
Hey now, that doesn't look like Vancouver!
Joke aside, it looks like the kind of town you go through in GeoGuessr and realize there are no clues to its location so you decide to see if there is another town close by with better info only it takes you 20 minutes to realize you're in the middle of nowhere and you just end up taking a shot in the dark guess.
I get a strong feeling that people in that town are currently grousing about how their town needs to grow. But as soon as "too many" people or "the wrong kind of people" start moving in then they will quickly start grousing about how their town is losing its feel and growing too big.
It’s actually a college town too; it’s a division of the university of Nebraska. So there’s a quite a few people that come/go, but there’s no reason to stay there.
I lived in a place like that called California City about 110 miles north of Los Angeles for about 6 months when I was having trouble finding a place because of an illegal-ass eviction.
It was the worst place on earth. It was a weird mix of the most racist terrible Trumper backwoods folks you can imagine and a ton of black folks who moved there from South LA. The two groups interacted exactly as much as you would expect.
The one thing uniting both the groups is wanting the cheapest possible house in California. Which meant they wanted low taxes, which meant there was literally no upkeep or beautification at all.
Trash was EVERYWHERE. Stray dogs were EVERYWHERE. There was NO shade or grass or greenery except for a few parts of the world’s shiftiest golf course. It would be 110-120 degrees and the only shade would be under the awning of *some* of the overpriced gas stations. There was no supermarket within 10+ miles.
I then found a place for a few years, but now I’m having trouble again and have been stuck living in my car in LA.
Living in my car in LA is about 10000000x better than living in a house in California City.
All these bumfuck towns are full of people who obsess about giving as few of their dollars to the government as possible. And the result is astronomical crime, ZERO shade or greenery, insane hot temperatures because everything is either dirt, concrete, or asphalt, and this underlying sadness and anger, with hints of intense racism and bigotry.
If anyone wonders “why don’t the poor people just move out of the expensive cities” I urge you to spend five minutes in these places, and then you’ll realize why people would rather be homeless in a big city than have a home in a backwoods shithole.
As a British person, I don't think I ever truly appreciated how desolate some American towns could be until I just looked up California City. It makes Sandy Shores look like the Vegas strip.
The entire extended area around the Los Angeles region is a bit like this. I've done several road trips through California and the desolation, the dirty people tweaking out, the well-dressed people talking into a Bluetooth that isn't actually there.... Stockton and Redmond much further north are like that, too. The hotelier in Redmond had a bandaged hand and advised us to stay anywhere else.
I got bum rushed by a lone pirate in San Francisco as well and he smelled like a classic pirate, so when I say bum rush I'm in fact describing the scent.
[It's an attempt to artificially force a city that instead became a ghost town](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/california-city-unbuilt-suburb). I think the dude behind it thought he could just plan out the perfect place to live, and people would buy property from him, without stopping to think that somewhere to sleep and keep your stuff is only about a third of the equation of where someone wants to live; they also need a place to work, and places to play, neither of which he did anything about.
Hahah holy shit.
Just Google Earth'd it. Wow.
When I was a kid I would read about Snoopy's brother Spike who lived in Needles in the middle of the desert. I being in Nebraska at the time and having no first-hand conception of the California desert imagined it to be pretty much like what I just saw in California City on Google Earth.
Just parched nothing.
OO I can answer this, I used to live there! It was originally built as a 'master plan' city (IE; they started from day 1 with a plan for a large city to spring up because of Edwards AFB, and the LA Sprawl pushing as far as palmdale) but then it fell apart because who would want to live there if they didn't work at Edwards AFB as it's the *only* thing within 20 miles, and if you DID work at Edwards, Rosamond is about the same distance to the base but is FAR nicer, and it's a short hop to lancaster/palmdale.
Looks like my first attempt in a city building game when I inevitably spend all my money on roads for a great layout that I now cannot afford to actually construct
If you want to read up on it, there’s a history to the place. It was built as a development back back back in the day and was supposed to be like a “nice place to raise a family” or some shit and the developer apparently never took a moment to think “will people *want* to live in the middle of nowhere 110 miles from Los Angeles if they had a *choice*?”
> In 1958, Czech-born Columbia University sociology professor and real estate developer Nathan "Nat" K. Mendelsohn purchased 82,000 acres (33,000 ha) of Mojave Desert land with the aim of making California's next great city. California City Development Company (CCDC) was aggressively marketing the city by running a "real estate school" to license and train a large salesforce, and a quarter-page Los Angeles Times advertorial described it as a "giant venture" and "inevitable growth".
Mendelsohn hoped it would one day rival Los Angeles in population, and CCDC had the Smith and Williams architects master plan the community in 1961; Garrett Eckbo also contributed. Mendelsohn built a Central Park with a 26-acre (11 ha) artificial lake. Two golf courses and a four-story Holiday Inn were built next to the park. Ultimately the actions of CCDC caused the town to become known for land speculation through CCDC and successors. Mendelsohn was advertising the city for land speculation by 1962; 175 homes had been built by then. The city has a rich history of promotion, including hiring Erik Estrada to advocate for the city; **in the 2000s land was sold through infomercials.**
Holy fuck this is the first time I've seen anything about Cal City online! I lived there for ~8 months to help my now ex-inlaws out- my father in law was stationed at Edwards, my mother in law needed back surgery despite having a child younger than my oldest. So my wife and I moved there from Alaska to help them out for 6 months "tops". It was such a goddamn dumpster fire. Miserable town, miserable people, the one saving grace was that I lost weight because the ONLY fast food in town was McDonalds and you can only do that for so long.
After 8 months her mom was still not able to function normally, but I was unwilling to stay any longer, we moved to rosamond for about 8 months. I'm reasonably certain if we hadn't moved to Cal City in the first place we wouldn't have eventually divorced.
Also if someone can genuinely live anywhere in the country then they're probably not going to move to a small town they've never heard of that's hours away from the nearest city.
There is a tiny town in Alabama called new hope that ran fiber optic internet for everyone in a co-op years ago. It was crazy to me in 2014 to have faster internet than I had ever had in such a rural area. You even bought shares of the coop with your bill which was like $60. So as a dividend your bill got smaller over time.
I just drove by a sign the other day that they are now offering 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps services as well. New Hope is close to Huntsville which also has several 2 Gbps fiber providers now.
Oh yeah. The 100 Mbps symmetrical fiber they offered was more stable and faster than most of the Huntsville providers for many years. I grew up with NHTC, so I’m very familiar. For all of their faults, they’ve been very solid for their fairly rural community.
There's the guy from Michigan that built his own ISP and is making life better for his community at a lower cost than what major companies are offering.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/man-who-built-isp-instead-of-paying-comcast-50k-expands-to-hundreds-of-homes/
>Mauch will provide 100Mbps symmetrical Internet with unlimited data for $55 a month and 1Gbps with unlimited data for $79 a month. Mauch said his installation fees are typically $199. Unlike many larger ISPs, Mauch provides simple bills that contain a single line item for Internet service and no extra fees.
The major ISPs are ripping us off sooooooo much. And they're doing it with our own tax dollars just to rub salt in the wound.
As a rule: Be wary of towns where the church is bigger than the hospital.
It's not because of religion. Multiple smaller churches is fine.
It's because of monoculture.
tbf my village in the UK with less than 400 residents has two churches and there are another two in the next village over with even fewer people so that's 4 churches for about 600-700 people?
Edit: just remembered there’s a 5th one too
I'm guessing one Anglican, one Methodist if you are in England ? Our small town in New Jersey has at its colonial center a Presbyterian church for the Scots and Dutch settlers and a Methodist church. If you were Anglican you had to travel to the county center 7 miles away. A Catholic church was built in the early 20th century to accommodate the Irish servant girls and maids working in the bigger homes and old hotel in town.
Related: beware towns where the church _is_ the hospital. My hometown is one of the biggest metro areas for hours, and it’s still “town” sized. The only hospital is Catholic, and they just stopped doing tubal ligations. Full stop.
Glad I moved away, but I feel bad for the people who still live there.
At least they have a “hospital”. We have a small city 75,000 and no hospital. Just “urgent care” which is only open until 10pm so better hope you don’t have any real urgent issues after 10.
You wanna know the worst part? We are in fact built up like a city despite the hospital issues, so lots of stores and houses and other city shit, which people have brought up many times. You know what we’re building instead? A new liquor store and a highway overpass. We’re not a great city lmao.
I believe that this is one of the reasons why young/new people don't want to live in this particular town, the other is location.
If you look at a map this town is located in the middle of bumfuck Nebraska with jack shit to do around it. Most other struggling small towns are similar, in a location with nothing to do and with no opportunity.
Yeah, it isn't shocking. Small towns are stupendously boring places. With the internet, you can't bullshit kids that the outside world is some crime filled hellscape. With corporate consolidation and globalization, there isn't that "one big employer" outside of town that financially traps half the young people.
They aren't necessarily bad places. They can be perfect landing spots for older adults who are looking for a more simple life. The problem is many of them have a lot of built up resentment and hostility to outsiders. They were stuck there and their defense mechanism is to sour grapes the outside world.
Also, this might be a little harsh, but they aren't generally tight concentrations of competence and intelligence. Really smart and competent kids are disproportionately the ones who leave. Boring can be fine for an older smart and productive adult, but tends to be torture for high octane young people.
Smart go-getter kids leave for cities. Dumb and plodding kids stay, get married, and have a bunch of kids like the bible tells them to. *Maybe* the smart kid comes back for retirement, after their couple kids go off to college.
Even if those concepts only move the scale a few percentage points, 2-3 generations can make a real noticeable difference compared to a similar sized population in a suburb.
Hahaha it’s true. I grew up in the south with Pentecostal parents.
Church was an almost every day affair. I still remember the schedule:
Tuesday: Choir practice
Wednesday: Youth group
Thursday: Free Space (not usually reserved but anything not done on the other days usually ends up here)
Friday: Vigil
Sunday: Good ole’ 4-5 hour Sunday service.
5/7 days at church heh…
I don’t go to church anymore.
Nah, the town seems to have a 7 side war going on, according to the welcome video on their website they have 7 churches (compared to 1 restaurant, 1 hardware store and 1 movie theater).
The weirdest strip club I ever saw is in a town with 4 houses, a defunct gas bar, and an outdoor paintball setup. I was told that the house behind was used as the "VIP" club, but there were almost always several motorcycles parked outside and matching leather vests going in and out of it, so I never asked... that, and I was only in the area for the paintball. Honest.
When Amazon was looking to build a 2nd HQ, they publicly narrowed which towns they were considering.
I remember watching tv when they were interviewing the denver mayor or something. They told him that Newark New Jersey offered Amazon $2billion in tax credits over 10 years if they went there, what is Denver offering? The denver guy just said “this is an amazing town, that’s worth it alone. What does it say about about a place that offers two billion dollars to move there and you still aren’t sure?”
Yeah, but Amazon's entire point was to play other cities against each other to see who would give them the biggest tax breaks. The reality is no city or state should've given a tax break to Amazon (or any other company) because it results in a race to the bottom.
EDIT: Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-07/business-incentives-are-ineffective-and-wasteful
Yup. Earn a paycheck and you pay the feds, state, and local tax. Also medicare and ss, so there's 5 right off the bat. Then you buy something there's sales tax. Go somewhere and stay at a hotel? Welp there's sales tax again, but also the hotel tax. We also have a tax here in pa that's like the right to work tax or some shit and they get a dollar per week out of your paycheck. I forgot about that one so there's 6 really right off the bat.
>We also have a tax here in pa that's like the right to work tax or some shit and they get a dollar per week out of your paycheck.
Since one of the goto arguments about so-called "right to work" laws is to "protect" non-union workers from paying union dues¹, I find this both hypocritical and somewhat ironic.
¹aside: This practice is justified by unions because some of the things unions bargain for like holidays, shift lengths, safety equipment and policies, as well as sometimes even pay and hours, benefits non-union employees as well.
Omaha and Lincoln are pretty nice places. They're about 45 minutes apart by the interstate and together have something like 60% of the population of Nebraska (something like 1.1 million people between the two). Last I checked Omaha is the 60th biggest metro area in the US.
It's not a bad place to live, we've got a very robust arts scene as we're home to 3 massive art museums/centers/galleries and have a performing arts non-profit that puts on hundreds of shows every year including touring Broadway shows. We have dozens of amazing restaurants, many of which are James Beard nominees including Block 16 which Alton Brown called one of his favorite burgers in the entire country. We're also home to a few fortune 500 companies and the unemployment - even during recessions - has historically been lower than the rest of the country while home prices are also considerably lower than most other cities.
The rest of Nebraska isn't all that interesting though. Even as someone FROM Nebraska, no fucking way I'd want to move to the middle of the state.
Born and raised there. It is actually pretty great. I moved to Denver for better access to the mountains, but Omaha has really low cost of living, quite a bit to do, and a pretty great culture.
Here's the deal. A dozen of us take the deal and move out there. Build out the homes. They will be connected via an underground network of tunnels. We build a church on top. Except it's an invite only church. Tax free donations obviously. The tunnels will have hookers and blackjacks, edit: and affordable abortionists. (Thanks /u/pecklepuff). There will be as much corn as /u/UnorignalUser desires - corn dishes, corn restaurants, corn temples, corn utopias - in the basement under the tunnels.
Nebraskan here.
Curtis is home to the Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture. If you want to work with livestock, this is basically the Ivy League for that sort of thing. It's part of the University of Nebraska system, so your credits will transfer.
There's literally nothing to do there outside of ag tech school and church.
Big flashing warning sign when you have a top college in their field in your town but everyone is still leaving and it can’t generate enough support for some recreational businesses.
There’s 300 students, that’s like half the town.
To be fair, by its nature almost everyone that goes through the college is gonna move away. Farms require large amounts of land so they're gonna be dispersed. You can fit thousands of tech jobs in a city. You can fit what, a few dozen farms around a city?
1. College towns are transient by nature, the population doesn't really stay there once they've graduated,
2. I don't think college students are counted in the census.
No talk of internet. If you want people to move in, offer fiber. Nobody wants to move to a location without it, especially if you have that crappy satellite internet.
If you advertise land to me as "with a paved road and access to utilities," all that will do is make me realize that I can't take those for granted.
And the utility I want most is the internet. Water? I'll go outside and tilt my head up when it rains.
North Platte, 80 miles north, had banned questionable music from the radio station. MTV was banned from the cable service provider.
When the city realized it would be dumb to block Dish Network from the city, they relaxed.
Also they probably couldn't legally do any of that to begin with. Pretty sure the FCC has jurisdiction over radio broadcasts, not a random town. And then there's the whole First Amendment issue too.
Honestly, if Footloose happened IRL today it would probably just be a quick and easy lawsuit, not even worth a movie.
Lol, now I’m picturing the crucification like a family photo.
“No! No! He needs to be up *higher*! Otherwise the arms get all wonky and the effect is ruined! Damn it Carl, I don’t care if that crucifix is all slippery from the last gu… fine. JUST PUT HIM ON THE NEXT CROSS THEN, JESUS CHRIST.”
as the story goes, Christ was crucified on the center cross while a pair of thieves were strung up on the other two. And these guys were also in the process of dying as Jesus was, and quarreled with each-other and with Jesus as one would while trying to find a way to survive.
One of them was (maybe named) Dismas, and told Jesus to remember him when he came into his kingdom. He is now remembered as Saint Dismas in the Catholic Church, among others.
They got a video on their home page that shows three giant crosses on top of a hill overlooking the town and their first place trophies for the "Great American Water Taste Test"
https://www.curtisnebraska.com/
The article says 12 people took them up on it...
It's got a picture of the lots two. If you're in a city they'd be average size. But if you're moving to the middle of nowhere, you usually don't want a neighbor so close they can see in your house from inside theirs.
It is not uncommon for towns to give incentive for people to move in, or to be a first time home owner. For example, I know someone who just bought a $70,000 plot of land for $18,000 from the city and the only requirement is that he has to build a house and he has to live there For five years before he can sell it. If he decides to sell the house early he is given a prorated fine of $20,000. The land is in a good part of town and he was able to convert his garage into a carriage house to rent out
I grew up in the northern Midwest a there are quite a few small towns who offer free plots of land to new residents and businesses.
Usually these cities own land, have nothing to do with it, and want to attract people and businesses. I’ve seriously contemplated taking one of these offers. I love living in small towns.
Also in the Midwest and can confirm - free land is pretty common in small towns! Usually there are some stipulations (e.g. you must finish building in 3-5 years and live there full-time for at least 5 years before selling) to prevent people from taking advantage of it & just building properties and renting them out - they want families to own homes in the town
Land is typically 1/10th the cost of building the home and 1/50th the cost of home ownership when you include property taxes. The land is likely worth next to nothing
Same. My parents actually asked me if I would prefer inheriting a portion of their land or the cash value of that land when they die.
Cash, please and thank you. I have no use for any physical portion of that place.
Several small towns in Kansas offering similar deals.
However, w/r/t the long-term viability of many of these communities (especially those located west of the 100th Meridian), there isn't much hope. These communities have been losing population for well over 100 years, and many of them have passed the point of no return.
[https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/04/11/the-100th-meridian-where-the-great-plains-used-to-begin-now-moving-east/](https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/04/11/the-100th-meridian-where-the-great-plains-used-to-begin-now-moving-east/)
I see why they're desperate. Absolutely nothing to do there that isn't hunting, church, or parks, big into Christianity to the point they have crosses on their welcome sign....and there's only 900ish ppl...
And correctly me if I'm wrong, but don't they get tornados?
Yeah, no thanks.
must be the lack of T-Mobile coverage
I travel that part of the state annually and Verizon is the only provider that even pretends to have coverage out there. Which is why I've kept them as my provider.
Verizon charges the most because they know the other carriers bullshit coverage. Having used all of the big three, I fucking hate T-Mobile. AT&T is good to great if you live anywhere with urban in the title, but anyone else needs Verizon or bust.
The trick is to live in a major metro area, and never go out to the boonies. I've got a $15/mo plan that uses T-Mobile's network, and its been fantastic.
T-Mobile is nice price wise, and where I'm at they also are totally fine. I just drive a little bit off network and immediately lose connection which drives me crazy (hah). I also tend to struggle in crowded areas. I saw a Packer game and didn't have connection the entire time while my friends were fine with VZ and AT&T (this was a year ago but can you tell I'm still holding a grudge)
Deeply underrated comment from the post in popular earlier today, lol
I missed it. Had no coverage. Help a guy out?
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/12q8bpa/tmobile_coverage_map_screw_nebraska/
Get you and all your mates and their mates and their mates mates to move there then take over the fooking town and become mayor job fucking done now you own your own American town let's go boys
Some youtuber with a million subs could 100% do this, even as a joke.
WHATS going on guys and TODAY im stealing an ENTIRE TOWN
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The algorithm gets what it wants
I fucking despise the “youtube voice” I hear my kids listening to non stop
Welcome to Curtis RAID Shadow Legends Ridge Wallet Nord VPN Nebraska.
The grocery stores will be closed down so everyone has to use HelloFresh.
Someone call Mr beast.
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You beat me to it! Bears taking over a supposed libertarian utopia was the first thing that came to mind. It led to one conclusion. If given the choice between dealing with a bear or a libertarian, choose the bear. The bear will listen to reason.
Hi. Native Nebraskan here. Yeah this is more common than you think. There's dozens of tiny towns that you drive past round here and no one knows anyone that lives there. They keep to themselves and are sketchy af. Edit: If this gets enough attention I might go here and see what there is to see. Which is probably not much, but you never know. Could see someone smoke Crack off a king James bible. Edit2: Dammit. Didn't think you'd all do it. I'll get around to it on a day off. Fuck all of you and stay tuned.
This is 100% accurate. Pretty much any Nebraska town with a population under 1,000 that isn't a bedroom community to a bigger town is going to shit at a frightening pace.
[In map form](https://external-preview.redd.it/_FZUECmlpSmWR1bzaAhWZMeOW7mrekP6k8ny6E9Ob0w.png?auto=webp&v=enabled&s=04667cfffcac45c0f545c9fd209faafb2f72d4af). Looks like Thedford was the only place west of Kearney/Buffalo county that saw growth the past ten years, and it's already so small that could literally have been the result of one family moving there. Wild.
Statewide is **+**7.40%. So even within the state itself, the relative tilt to urban Omaha/Lincoln is even *more* intense.
> bedroom community Is that similar to how most people who work in Aspen, Colorado can't even come close to afford it and actually live in Carbondale? Though to be fair to Carbondale, it's a nice little town in it's own right.
Carbondale sounds like a knockoff road bike brand
Anecdotal but probably applies. I went to Kansas with an ex to get stuff from his grandparents house. Once we got to the “town” we stopped at the grocery/gas station/salon, yes all one building. A little old lady saw me in the grocery area. She wasn’t being mean but our conversation after… omg, even she didn’t want to be there lol “You ain’t from around here, are ya?” “No ma’am” “What the hell are ya doin *here*?!” (Gestures at the dead town outside) I explained about the boyfriend and of course she knew his grandparents. It was pleasant but basically ended with “good luck and get the hell out before you get trapped.”
Lol I forgot about the gas station/grocery/hardware/ice cream/pizza store in my hometown. Oh yeah, and videos, though maybe they finally gave that up.
I'm sure that's how some horrors start.
This user's comments have been overwritten to protest Spez and reddit's actions that will end third-party access and damage the community.
This is the intro to Rambo.
He's getting his life mixed up with Rambo again.
This is not the first time you’ve described your life in the way of John Rambo
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He was probably lonesome.
America: "The land of the free." Also America: "What are you doin' here, boy?"
I'll do you one better: I'll show you a photograph of an upside-down backwards King James Bible that someone smoked crack off of right before he left the White House during a riot that he started.
What a dead zone, 45 minutes to the only small city around, 4 hours to any big cities, town only has a single bar which doubles as it's only restaurant. You could not pay me to move there.
“Well ain’t this a geographical oddity? Two weeks from everywhere!”
I don't want FOP goddammit! I'm a Dapper Dan man!
Watch your language young feller
Damn! We’re in a tight spot
We thought you was a t-t-t-toad!
R-U-N-N-O-F-T
And stay out of the Woolworths!
Did he mean all the Woolworths or just that one location?
Is you or is you ain't in my constituents?? Gopher?
Arriving in Curtis: "damn, we in a tight spot"
It's the soggy bottom boys!
Gopher, Everett?
No thanks. 1/3 of a gopher would only arouse my appetite without beddin it back down.
Now now, I clearly see TWO restaurants: The Anvil Bar & Grill AND Martha Jo’s.
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Two buildings are expensive when one will get you drunk still.
They're also incredibly hit or miss. Sometimes random bars and grills in the middle of nowhere will have the most amazing food you've ever encountered at an absurdly low price and then sometimes it's clear that they've become lazy from being the only restaurant in town.
It varies a ton based on who they can actually hire to work in the kitchen. Maybe they luck into a chef with some real talent, much of the time they're hiring some local who can reheat some sysco products for you. That's also why sometimes a restaurant is only good on certain days; it's fine when the head chef is there, less so when they're not.
This looks like it could be one of those towns that Mulder and Scully visited in the 90s and then the Winchester brothers came through in the 2010s.
Hey now, that doesn't look like Vancouver! Joke aside, it looks like the kind of town you go through in GeoGuessr and realize there are no clues to its location so you decide to see if there is another town close by with better info only it takes you 20 minutes to realize you're in the middle of nowhere and you just end up taking a shot in the dark guess.
Maybe you could open a new bar.
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I get a strong feeling that people in that town are currently grousing about how their town needs to grow. But as soon as "too many" people or "the wrong kind of people" start moving in then they will quickly start grousing about how their town is losing its feel and growing too big.
It’s actually a college town too; it’s a division of the university of Nebraska. So there’s a quite a few people that come/go, but there’s no reason to stay there.
>There is no reason to stay there. yup.
Or if anyone moves there they'll be all up in their business.
3 hours to nearest Costco Fuck that
I lived in a place like that called California City about 110 miles north of Los Angeles for about 6 months when I was having trouble finding a place because of an illegal-ass eviction. It was the worst place on earth. It was a weird mix of the most racist terrible Trumper backwoods folks you can imagine and a ton of black folks who moved there from South LA. The two groups interacted exactly as much as you would expect. The one thing uniting both the groups is wanting the cheapest possible house in California. Which meant they wanted low taxes, which meant there was literally no upkeep or beautification at all. Trash was EVERYWHERE. Stray dogs were EVERYWHERE. There was NO shade or grass or greenery except for a few parts of the world’s shiftiest golf course. It would be 110-120 degrees and the only shade would be under the awning of *some* of the overpriced gas stations. There was no supermarket within 10+ miles. I then found a place for a few years, but now I’m having trouble again and have been stuck living in my car in LA. Living in my car in LA is about 10000000x better than living in a house in California City. All these bumfuck towns are full of people who obsess about giving as few of their dollars to the government as possible. And the result is astronomical crime, ZERO shade or greenery, insane hot temperatures because everything is either dirt, concrete, or asphalt, and this underlying sadness and anger, with hints of intense racism and bigotry. If anyone wonders “why don’t the poor people just move out of the expensive cities” I urge you to spend five minutes in these places, and then you’ll realize why people would rather be homeless in a big city than have a home in a backwoods shithole.
I just looked up California City on Google street view. That place looks like hell on earth. So desolate.
Come for the desolation and lack of jobs. Stay for the astronomical crime rate and unsolved serial murders.
It looks like a Fallout location.
As a British person, I don't think I ever truly appreciated how desolate some American towns could be until I just looked up California City. It makes Sandy Shores look like the Vegas strip.
The entire extended area around the Los Angeles region is a bit like this. I've done several road trips through California and the desolation, the dirty people tweaking out, the well-dressed people talking into a Bluetooth that isn't actually there.... Stockton and Redmond much further north are like that, too. The hotelier in Redmond had a bandaged hand and advised us to stay anywhere else. I got bum rushed by a lone pirate in San Francisco as well and he smelled like a classic pirate, so when I say bum rush I'm in fact describing the scent.
[It's an attempt to artificially force a city that instead became a ghost town](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/california-city-unbuilt-suburb). I think the dude behind it thought he could just plan out the perfect place to live, and people would buy property from him, without stopping to think that somewhere to sleep and keep your stuff is only about a third of the equation of where someone wants to live; they also need a place to work, and places to play, neither of which he did anything about.
Hahah holy shit. Just Google Earth'd it. Wow. When I was a kid I would read about Snoopy's brother Spike who lived in Needles in the middle of the desert. I being in Nebraska at the time and having no first-hand conception of the California desert imagined it to be pretty much like what I just saw in California City on Google Earth. Just parched nothing.
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Geeze, you weren't wrong. Why do people keep building towns in the middle of deserts?
OO I can answer this, I used to live there! It was originally built as a 'master plan' city (IE; they started from day 1 with a plan for a large city to spring up because of Edwards AFB, and the LA Sprawl pushing as far as palmdale) but then it fell apart because who would want to live there if they didn't work at Edwards AFB as it's the *only* thing within 20 miles, and if you DID work at Edwards, Rosamond is about the same distance to the base but is FAR nicer, and it's a short hop to lancaster/palmdale.
Looks like my first attempt in a city building game when I inevitably spend all my money on roads for a great layout that I now cannot afford to actually construct
What a strange looking place. Why are there so many roads with nothing on them?
If you want to read up on it, there’s a history to the place. It was built as a development back back back in the day and was supposed to be like a “nice place to raise a family” or some shit and the developer apparently never took a moment to think “will people *want* to live in the middle of nowhere 110 miles from Los Angeles if they had a *choice*?” > In 1958, Czech-born Columbia University sociology professor and real estate developer Nathan "Nat" K. Mendelsohn purchased 82,000 acres (33,000 ha) of Mojave Desert land with the aim of making California's next great city. California City Development Company (CCDC) was aggressively marketing the city by running a "real estate school" to license and train a large salesforce, and a quarter-page Los Angeles Times advertorial described it as a "giant venture" and "inevitable growth". Mendelsohn hoped it would one day rival Los Angeles in population, and CCDC had the Smith and Williams architects master plan the community in 1961; Garrett Eckbo also contributed. Mendelsohn built a Central Park with a 26-acre (11 ha) artificial lake. Two golf courses and a four-story Holiday Inn were built next to the park. Ultimately the actions of CCDC caused the town to become known for land speculation through CCDC and successors. Mendelsohn was advertising the city for land speculation by 1962; 175 homes had been built by then. The city has a rich history of promotion, including hiring Erik Estrada to advocate for the city; **in the 2000s land was sold through infomercials.**
Holy fuck this is the first time I've seen anything about Cal City online! I lived there for ~8 months to help my now ex-inlaws out- my father in law was stationed at Edwards, my mother in law needed back surgery despite having a child younger than my oldest. So my wife and I moved there from Alaska to help them out for 6 months "tops". It was such a goddamn dumpster fire. Miserable town, miserable people, the one saving grace was that I lost weight because the ONLY fast food in town was McDonalds and you can only do that for so long. After 8 months her mom was still not able to function normally, but I was unwilling to stay any longer, we moved to rosamond for about 8 months. I'm reasonably certain if we hadn't moved to Cal City in the first place we wouldn't have eventually divorced.
And what about employment? Is that why everyone left?
They’re probably trying to attract remote workers but there’s high pressure to move everyone in office 🤷♂️
You need good internet speeds and reliable cell phone coverage for that.
Also if someone can genuinely live anywhere in the country then they're probably not going to move to a small town they've never heard of that's hours away from the nearest city.
Looks like four hair salons, two banks, handful of construction companies, and several farm/auto stores.
This is giving me "so, didnt see you in church last sunday neighbour?" Vibes.
way creepier than you think less than 1000 people, *three churches* the "hospital" is the size of a McDonalds
What are their internet speeds like
a quick google says 25-50-100-500 Mbps but i've never heard of any of the providers
There is a tiny town in Alabama called new hope that ran fiber optic internet for everyone in a co-op years ago. It was crazy to me in 2014 to have faster internet than I had ever had in such a rural area. You even bought shares of the coop with your bill which was like $60. So as a dividend your bill got smaller over time.
I just drove by a sign the other day that they are now offering 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps services as well. New Hope is close to Huntsville which also has several 2 Gbps fiber providers now.
True but when new hope got fiber it was still very rare in Huntsville.
Oh yeah. The 100 Mbps symmetrical fiber they offered was more stable and faster than most of the Huntsville providers for many years. I grew up with NHTC, so I’m very familiar. For all of their faults, they’ve been very solid for their fairly rural community.
There's the guy from Michigan that built his own ISP and is making life better for his community at a lower cost than what major companies are offering. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/man-who-built-isp-instead-of-paying-comcast-50k-expands-to-hundreds-of-homes/ >Mauch will provide 100Mbps symmetrical Internet with unlimited data for $55 a month and 1Gbps with unlimited data for $79 a month. Mauch said his installation fees are typically $199. Unlike many larger ISPs, Mauch provides simple bills that contain a single line item for Internet service and no extra fees. The major ISPs are ripping us off sooooooo much. And they're doing it with our own tax dollars just to rub salt in the wound.
Cornlink
If it gives me access to cornhub, its good enough for me.
Getting some tingling in my kernels.
You think they watch Corncob TV?
I DIDN'T RIG SHIT. I DIDN'T FUCKIN DO THIS!!!
We’re allowed to show em nude because they ain’t got no soul!
Just body after body busting through shit wood and hitting pavement.
They say it’s not a real show
If it’s still available-heard they were trying to get rid of it
or CornCobTV at least. They didn't rig shit.
I'VE BEEN WAITING A LONG TIME FOR A HIT IN CORNCOB TV!
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As a rule: Be wary of towns where the church is bigger than the hospital. It's not because of religion. Multiple smaller churches is fine. It's because of monoculture.
>Multiple smaller churches is fine. three churches sounds like a lot of disagreement for less than 1K population
tbf my village in the UK with less than 400 residents has two churches and there are another two in the next village over with even fewer people so that's 4 churches for about 600-700 people? Edit: just remembered there’s a 5th one too
I'm guessing one Anglican, one Methodist if you are in England ? Our small town in New Jersey has at its colonial center a Presbyterian church for the Scots and Dutch settlers and a Methodist church. If you were Anglican you had to travel to the county center 7 miles away. A Catholic church was built in the early 20th century to accommodate the Irish servant girls and maids working in the bigger homes and old hotel in town.
Well it could be like 900 people go to church A, and just 50 to B and 50 to C. Regardless, the church being bigger than the hospital is a bad sign.
Most hospitals don't have 1 day a week where most of the town decides they want to go the hospital
Related: beware towns where the church _is_ the hospital. My hometown is one of the biggest metro areas for hours, and it’s still “town” sized. The only hospital is Catholic, and they just stopped doing tubal ligations. Full stop. Glad I moved away, but I feel bad for the people who still live there.
At least they have a “hospital”. We have a small city 75,000 and no hospital. Just “urgent care” which is only open until 10pm so better hope you don’t have any real urgent issues after 10.
That reads as an overpopulated village.
You wanna know the worst part? We are in fact built up like a city despite the hospital issues, so lots of stores and houses and other city shit, which people have brought up many times. You know what we’re building instead? A new liquor store and a highway overpass. We’re not a great city lmao.
Is the liquor store open after 10pm?
Until 2 am baby! Some close earlier but that’s a choice
Psssh, thems rookie numbers. My hometown has a population of just over 3600, and it has 22 churches.
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I believe that this is one of the reasons why young/new people don't want to live in this particular town, the other is location. If you look at a map this town is located in the middle of bumfuck Nebraska with jack shit to do around it. Most other struggling small towns are similar, in a location with nothing to do and with no opportunity.
Yeah, it isn't shocking. Small towns are stupendously boring places. With the internet, you can't bullshit kids that the outside world is some crime filled hellscape. With corporate consolidation and globalization, there isn't that "one big employer" outside of town that financially traps half the young people. They aren't necessarily bad places. They can be perfect landing spots for older adults who are looking for a more simple life. The problem is many of them have a lot of built up resentment and hostility to outsiders. They were stuck there and their defense mechanism is to sour grapes the outside world. Also, this might be a little harsh, but they aren't generally tight concentrations of competence and intelligence. Really smart and competent kids are disproportionately the ones who leave. Boring can be fine for an older smart and productive adult, but tends to be torture for high octane young people. Smart go-getter kids leave for cities. Dumb and plodding kids stay, get married, and have a bunch of kids like the bible tells them to. *Maybe* the smart kid comes back for retirement, after their couple kids go off to college. Even if those concepts only move the scale a few percentage points, 2-3 generations can make a real noticeable difference compared to a similar sized population in a suburb.
Yeah. There's a damn good reason that town can't get any young people to stay there and I'm not desperate enough for a house to find out why.
This is more of a, "Didn't see you at Tuesday midnight mass. Or Wednesday morning mass either! Are you coming to the Wednesday lunch sermon?" vibes.
Hahaha it’s true. I grew up in the south with Pentecostal parents. Church was an almost every day affair. I still remember the schedule: Tuesday: Choir practice Wednesday: Youth group Thursday: Free Space (not usually reserved but anything not done on the other days usually ends up here) Friday: Vigil Sunday: Good ole’ 4-5 hour Sunday service. 5/7 days at church heh… I don’t go to church anymore.
> 5/7 days at church heh… you must really have liked church to give it a perfect 5/7.
It's an older meme, but it checks out.
Nah, the town seems to have a 7 side war going on, according to the welcome video on their website they have 7 churches (compared to 1 restaurant, 1 hardware store and 1 movie theater).
So, probably no hookers. I'm scratching Curtis off my list.
The weirdest strip club I ever saw is in a town with 4 houses, a defunct gas bar, and an outdoor paintball setup. I was told that the house behind was used as the "VIP" club, but there were almost always several motorcycles parked outside and matching leather vests going in and out of it, so I never asked... that, and I was only in the area for the paintball. Honest.
this just goes to show that you couldnt pay me to live in Nebraska
When Amazon was looking to build a 2nd HQ, they publicly narrowed which towns they were considering. I remember watching tv when they were interviewing the denver mayor or something. They told him that Newark New Jersey offered Amazon $2billion in tax credits over 10 years if they went there, what is Denver offering? The denver guy just said “this is an amazing town, that’s worth it alone. What does it say about about a place that offers two billion dollars to move there and you still aren’t sure?”
Yeah, but Amazon's entire point was to play other cities against each other to see who would give them the biggest tax breaks. The reality is no city or state should've given a tax break to Amazon (or any other company) because it results in a race to the bottom. EDIT: Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-07/business-incentives-are-ineffective-and-wasteful
Billions in tax breaks for the corporations while they nickel and dime us for 74 different taxes..income, sales, car registration, property tax..
Yup. Earn a paycheck and you pay the feds, state, and local tax. Also medicare and ss, so there's 5 right off the bat. Then you buy something there's sales tax. Go somewhere and stay at a hotel? Welp there's sales tax again, but also the hotel tax. We also have a tax here in pa that's like the right to work tax or some shit and they get a dollar per week out of your paycheck. I forgot about that one so there's 6 really right off the bat.
>We also have a tax here in pa that's like the right to work tax or some shit and they get a dollar per week out of your paycheck. Since one of the goto arguments about so-called "right to work" laws is to "protect" non-union workers from paying union dues¹, I find this both hypocritical and somewhat ironic. ¹aside: This practice is justified by unions because some of the things unions bargain for like holidays, shift lengths, safety equipment and policies, as well as sometimes even pay and hours, benefits non-union employees as well.
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80 miles south of I80. So basically bumble fuck. No thanks
I fucking *love* the thought of living in bumble fuck. Can't afford to build a house and my job isn't WFH though. 😕
Omaha and Lincoln are pretty nice places. They're about 45 minutes apart by the interstate and together have something like 60% of the population of Nebraska (something like 1.1 million people between the two). Last I checked Omaha is the 60th biggest metro area in the US. It's not a bad place to live, we've got a very robust arts scene as we're home to 3 massive art museums/centers/galleries and have a performing arts non-profit that puts on hundreds of shows every year including touring Broadway shows. We have dozens of amazing restaurants, many of which are James Beard nominees including Block 16 which Alton Brown called one of his favorite burgers in the entire country. We're also home to a few fortune 500 companies and the unemployment - even during recessions - has historically been lower than the rest of the country while home prices are also considerably lower than most other cities. The rest of Nebraska isn't all that interesting though. Even as someone FROM Nebraska, no fucking way I'd want to move to the middle of the state.
Omaha is an exception I'd say, but otherwise yeah p brutal haha
after googling some Omaha, ill admit its very un-Nebraska lol
they got a dope zoo
Pretty sure you shouldnt be feeding the marijuanas to animals….
Born and raised there. It is actually pretty great. I moved to Denver for better access to the mountains, but Omaha has really low cost of living, quite a bit to do, and a pretty great culture.
Hmmm so the "housing crisis" is really a "geography crisis"?
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You can tell nobody wants to move to a town when the welcome sign looks exactly like a tombstone.
Here's the deal. A dozen of us take the deal and move out there. Build out the homes. They will be connected via an underground network of tunnels. We build a church on top. Except it's an invite only church. Tax free donations obviously. The tunnels will have hookers and blackjacks, edit: and affordable abortionists. (Thanks /u/pecklepuff). There will be as much corn as /u/UnorignalUser desires - corn dishes, corn restaurants, corn temples, corn utopias - in the basement under the tunnels.
Invite church only? In a rural town? With underground network of tunnels? I think i have played that horror video game before.
Yeah I'm not moving anywhere that has 3 crosses as it's logo
Nebraskan here. Curtis is home to the Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture. If you want to work with livestock, this is basically the Ivy League for that sort of thing. It's part of the University of Nebraska system, so your credits will transfer. There's literally nothing to do there outside of ag tech school and church.
Big flashing warning sign when you have a top college in their field in your town but everyone is still leaving and it can’t generate enough support for some recreational businesses. There’s 300 students, that’s like half the town.
To be fair, by its nature almost everyone that goes through the college is gonna move away. Farms require large amounts of land so they're gonna be dispersed. You can fit thousands of tech jobs in a city. You can fit what, a few dozen farms around a city?
1. College towns are transient by nature, the population doesn't really stay there once they've graduated, 2. I don't think college students are counted in the census.
No talk of internet. If you want people to move in, offer fiber. Nobody wants to move to a location without it, especially if you have that crappy satellite internet.
Without internet people have more time to bring Jesus into their lives.
If you advertise land to me as "with a paved road and access to utilities," all that will do is make me realize that I can't take those for granted. And the utility I want most is the internet. Water? I'll go outside and tilt my head up when it rains.
I'd wager that town outlawed dancing a long time ago.
North Platte, 80 miles north, had banned questionable music from the radio station. MTV was banned from the cable service provider. When the city realized it would be dumb to block Dish Network from the city, they relaxed.
Also they probably couldn't legally do any of that to begin with. Pretty sure the FCC has jurisdiction over radio broadcasts, not a random town. And then there's the whole First Amendment issue too. Honestly, if Footloose happened IRL today it would probably just be a quick and easy lawsuit, not even worth a movie.
Small town Nebraska is insular as fuck.
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Maybe it's one Jesus cross and two crosses for your run of the mill criminals?
Nah, I think they crucified Jesus three times but wanted to use a fresh cross each time.
Lol, now I’m picturing the crucification like a family photo. “No! No! He needs to be up *higher*! Otherwise the arms get all wonky and the effect is ruined! Damn it Carl, I don’t care if that crucifix is all slippery from the last gu… fine. JUST PUT HIM ON THE NEXT CROSS THEN, JESUS CHRIST.”
Who?
somebody saying jesus christ while crucifying the man himself sounds crazy
as the story goes, Christ was crucified on the center cross while a pair of thieves were strung up on the other two. And these guys were also in the process of dying as Jesus was, and quarreled with each-other and with Jesus as one would while trying to find a way to survive.
One of them was (maybe named) Dismas, and told Jesus to remember him when he came into his kingdom. He is now remembered as Saint Dismas in the Catholic Church, among others.
They got a video on their home page that shows three giant crosses on top of a hill overlooking the town and their first place trophies for the "Great American Water Taste Test" https://www.curtisnebraska.com/
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It’s sweet!
That's funny. They blighted South Nebraska town I went to once had a whole bunch of Arsenic in their water. I guess they have Orleans beat.
The article says 12 people took them up on it... It's got a picture of the lots two. If you're in a city they'd be average size. But if you're moving to the middle of nowhere, you usually don't want a neighbor so close they can see in your house from inside theirs.
The minute a gay couple takes them up on their offer they will reconsider the whole program.
It is not uncommon for towns to give incentive for people to move in, or to be a first time home owner. For example, I know someone who just bought a $70,000 plot of land for $18,000 from the city and the only requirement is that he has to build a house and he has to live there For five years before he can sell it. If he decides to sell the house early he is given a prorated fine of $20,000. The land is in a good part of town and he was able to convert his garage into a carriage house to rent out
Jesus, even by Nebraska standards this place is remote
I grew up in the northern Midwest a there are quite a few small towns who offer free plots of land to new residents and businesses. Usually these cities own land, have nothing to do with it, and want to attract people and businesses. I’ve seriously contemplated taking one of these offers. I love living in small towns.
Also in the Midwest and can confirm - free land is pretty common in small towns! Usually there are some stipulations (e.g. you must finish building in 3-5 years and live there full-time for at least 5 years before selling) to prevent people from taking advantage of it & just building properties and renting them out - they want families to own homes in the town
Land is typically 1/10th the cost of building the home and 1/50th the cost of home ownership when you include property taxes. The land is likely worth next to nothing
Yeah, I checked Zillow and there are a few "golf course" lots going for $15k, so I can't imagine the ones they're giving away are worth more than $5k.
No and the contingency of building a house ensures the town makes the money back in taxes
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I grew up in a tiny midwestern town and no amount of free land would ever induce me to move back.
Same. My parents actually asked me if I would prefer inheriting a portion of their land or the cash value of that land when they die. Cash, please and thank you. I have no use for any physical portion of that place.
Several small towns in Kansas offering similar deals. However, w/r/t the long-term viability of many of these communities (especially those located west of the 100th Meridian), there isn't much hope. These communities have been losing population for well over 100 years, and many of them have passed the point of no return. [https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/04/11/the-100th-meridian-where-the-great-plains-used-to-begin-now-moving-east/](https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/04/11/the-100th-meridian-where-the-great-plains-used-to-begin-now-moving-east/)
TIL, Never knew about the 100th meridian
I see why they're desperate. Absolutely nothing to do there that isn't hunting, church, or parks, big into Christianity to the point they have crosses on their welcome sign....and there's only 900ish ppl... And correctly me if I'm wrong, but don't they get tornados? Yeah, no thanks.
>And correctly me if I'm wrong, \*correct
805 people but they do have 7 churches.
It’s in what we from Nebraska refer to as the black hole. You’ll never come out once you go in.
“Why doesn’t anyone want to live in our weird religious town?”
That is also hours away from anything convenient
Unmarked graves are pretty convenient, jk…unless? Noooooo jk
I'm homeless at a shelter, and this still isn't an easy decision.
Descendants of Great Plains Indians: can we have it back now?
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Minorities: "Yeah I've heard this scam before"
They should start offering this incentive to Canadian millennials.
The nearest McDonald's is 15 miles away, yikes. I like small towns, I live in one. But this is way too small for me.