there is also too many places that have empty houses, whole towns that used to have thousands of people in them but now only have like 50. but people want to *move to* a nice place and a place full of empty houses is not a nice place until nice people move to it, so they pass over millions of options that would work.

in fact the people in such towns who own the property basically gave up trying to sell and you can't even find out about them without going there and asking the skeleton staff at the local courthouse (or more often, regional) to even find out who owns it and then who wants to sell, it's a lot of rigmerole.

i personally very much like the idea but i don't mind the idea of having many empty houses around me. there is some 160 villages like this in bulgaria, and a few, that people have moved into. you get the nice old house, usually, and have to spend a lot on getting it set up because, for example, it is often the case that the municipal water is not being maintained, and so on and so forth.

but yes, a lot of people want out of the big cities. it has to be a life decision so it's only gonna be smatterings of people going and getting a small acerage property and homesteading that will repopulate the areas that have emptied out because of industry moving away. once a few of these kind of people show up there can be a bigger movement, but someone has to go out to the frontier first even when it's mostly all ready to use and sitting idle.