We are looking to move. One of our possible destinations is Missouri. We are looking for a rural-ish place (lands, house, high speed internet) next to a city of 50k Ish population. We need around that for our business.

Tell me about you state!!!


How conservative it is?

Is it staying red or is it trending blue?

Are you getting flooded by liberals like some other states?

Are the big cities messing up the state?

How are house prices?

Tell me about you internet experience! (Added)

How are you gun laws?

Can I hunt with my suppressed SBR PS90?

Can I hunt with my NVG? Or kill pigs or something? Hahah

Attached File


Just like everywhere else. Stay out of the blue areas. What you see there is Jackson County, MO (Most of Kansas City), Columbia and St Louis. Stay out of Springfield, traffic is horrible.

I should hope Missouri will stay red. Biden is a complete fuck up, and our govenor did zero covid lock downs or mask crap.

House prices are low, but then again I dont know where you are coming from. Lower then a lot of places.

What on earth are you hunting with a 5.7x28? Giant squirrels?

Gun laws are good. You can use NVG for coyotes and hogs.

Thanks for the info. That was really helpful.

I was just kidding about hunting with my ps90. Would love to use my NVG for hogs or something though.

Not only stay put of the blue areas but I recommend a decent distance away from them as well. The criminals victimize the surrounding counties as well.

There are a lot of cheaper places in rural areas off the beaten path that are great to live in as long as you don't mind needing to drive a bit for shopping and other services.   Missouri isn't perfect,  but it's pretty damn good. Especially if you like the countryside.

Most people moving here seem to gravitate toward the southern half of the state especially southwest mo.  In my area rural high speed internet barely exists.  I think a lot of people are waiting on starlink, I'm waiting to see what my local electric coop is coming out with.  

It is fairly accurate lol.  I lived in the spoiled rich students part and remember seeing a lot of the orthodox jews nearby.

Really great info thanks!

Now I just need to find a piece of property with a cave on it to turn into my man cave! Haha

Just kidding. I didn’t realize how many caves where in MO

You will need a cave for brewing shine and playing banjo in colder months.

A couple towns/small cities that I think you could like is Pleasant Hill(pop. 10K?) or Warrensburg(pop. 20K?), with the 'Burg being a bit larger with more factories and a very decent college, while PH is more on the farm type large town. PH is about 15-20 miles from Lees Summit/Independance/Blue Springs which are just ajoining eastern side cities of KC. Warrensburg is about 30 miles from the same 3 cities just mentioned and about 20-25 miles from Sedalia which is home to the State Fair every August and about 10 miles from Whiteman AFB where the B2 bomber comes out of.

Lots of surrounding farming and land of each town I mentioned. Pleasant Hill is Cass County which is higher costing in taxes and permits needed for doing most anything on the property.

Warrensburg is in Johnson County and more conservative with not needing permits to build barns/sheds and other needed buildings on the land, unless you're within city limits, where there's smaller towns like Centerview and Holden. All are very gun friendly and conservative like minds. I live in Johnson County.

 My wife and I sell products at a farmers market in Holden each year and I wear my sidearm with not a batting of the eye from customers or the police dept.

Also, Missouri does have concealed carry without a permit needed, but the permit allows more than without. Firearms don't need locked up when in vehicle.

There's also Clinton(pop. 12K) which is Henry County and upper tributory of Truman Lake, Henry County Conservation land where there's about 10K acres to hunt or fish on and also cheaper home/land costs due to being about 20-25 directly south of Warrensburg. It has lots of traffic due to fishing tournaments each year and is a great city for hunting/fishing/atv/camping and other outdoors activities. I hunt there many times, except past couple years.

Harrisonville is a semi-large town of about 12K and about 12 miles south of Belton/Raymore(pop. 25K? for both and growing quickly with new homes/businesses), Grandview and a couple other towns just south of KC. Belton/Raymore is Cass County, and just up the road in Grandview is Jackson.

I've worked in Warrensburg years ago at Enersys Power where they make batteries of all types from exit signs to submarines around the allied world. They also have a Stahl's plant(worked at their factory also, but the one in Kingsville) where they do forgings and aluminum machining for companies like Catapillar. Also worked in Harrisonville at a couple businesses before retiring.

You have lots of small cities or towns to choose from. I would get with a Missouri realtor to see what they have available for the area you want to seek, then determine whether you want to commute or not for the savings in how much you want to spend for the house/land. I have lived here growing up, before going into the military and now live in my grandparents rural home, but growing up during my junior and senior summers, I traveled with my dad where we both worked in KC at a machinist shop 50 miles one way every day.

Great info thank!! Very helpful.

Think about Cape Girardeau. ~40k population. College town but still conservative. A couple of really nice hospitals if that matters.

Internet is very hit and miss in Missouri.

• Do your homework before you buy a house.  Call Spectrum and ATT to see if it has high speed internet.  This has been a shock to the rich folks moving out of St. Louis County.... the hilly, rocky nature of the Ozarks makes it difficult to string fiber cost-effectively, leaving large dead spots across the southern half of the state.


• Many homes with acreage don't have reliable LTE, much less 5G due to the terrain.


• Cities will generally have at least 200 Mbps capability.


• Starlink is available but it's Starlink.... personally I would wait before adopting it.  SpaceX is not capable of finishing the constellation without some breakthroughs in their Starship program.


• Also, if the internet is ATT you may as well not have internet.  Customer service sucks.  Spectrum actually answers the phone and will tell you how close the house is to a node.  That's important because Spectrum will work with you to connect if you're close enough.

I recently moved from Jefferson City (state capital) to a home just outside of Holt Summit, about 10 miles away. In town, I had internet through my cable company. It sucked. Barely sufficient to stream, and I experienced lots of outages, drops, etc. Now I'm on fiber. It's better than I could have imagined. My wife works from home, online all day. We get TV over the fiber, too. Great service. I mean truly outstanding internet.

The key is to buy a home that's served by a rural electric cooperative that has gotten into the fiber internet business. Not all of them have, but the ones that have made the move offer truly wonderful internet.

Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

Lots of this.

Currently my only option is hughsnet and it sucks but is better than nothing.

There's no cell service at my house either. Not even 1 little bity bar of connectivity.

Changes are coming. The infrastructure bill passed by Congress has a boatload of money for rural broadband. It's also something that even conservative Republican legislators in Missouri love to talk up. Last week, the governor made a big deal about rural internet in his state of the state speech. If nothing else, the COVID pandemic convinced rural America it was time to get connected.

Some of the the electric co-ops have been stepping up on their own for years, building a fiber backbone to service their transmission system. Others have gladly latched onto the government titty and are milking it for all its worth. Those rural areas of the state with newly built fiber systems have fantastic internet service. I mentioned mine (Callabyte Fiber through Callaway Electric Co-op) in a previous post. I can't imagine internet service being better than what I have.

That's the thing about technology . . . the LATE adopters often have the best shit. While the big cities are still struggling with hobbled together DSL and coax based cable systems, the electric co-ops are putting in brand new fiber lines with up-to-date equipment. Sucks when your co-op hasn't jumped in, but when they make the move, it's a glorious thing.

All that said, the deepest hollers of the Ozarks will probably be the last in line. It's damn expensive to run line through those hills and there's not many folks on the line to make it work. As others have said, do your research and choose wisely.

Jacob’s Cave is for sale:

https://midwestlandgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Morgan223-Property-Booklet-1.pdf

My wife and I moved to the Stockton area a couple years ago from the Chicago suburbs. We're about 45 miles N of Springfield.  We lived in Illinois all our lives, but taxes, politics and gun rights finally drove us out. We bought a newer, bigger home with a 2000sf shop building on 20 acres for far less than we sold out Illinois house for on it's 1/3 acre lot. I shoot and hunt on our property and there's good fishing right down the road. Our property taxes went from about $4500 to less than $1000. We can't even see any of the neighbors from our house, which is fine.

Moving to a rural area took a little getting used to. Everything is further away. Planning shopping trips is a must. Make lists and hit all the stops while you're in town. On the other hand, traffic is nonexistent so travel is faster and less aggravating. I go weeks at a time without seeing a traffic light.

Good internet is a drawback. We went from high speed cable to a DSL. I'm retired so it's not a big deal for me but my wife still works from home and occasionally slow internet speed is aggravating for her but it's not often and she's kinda gotten used to it. I am still hopeful for Starlink, but progress seems slow from what I've read. Supposedly, fiber will be coming from our electric co-op but I'm not holding my breath. I know people who have satellite internet, but that's more expensive and may not be much improvement from what I've been told.

All in all, I'm very happy we made the move. I spend more time outdoors and get more exercise and fresh air than I would have back in Illinois. I can go outside and shoot on my 200 yd. range any tine I want. I can hook up the boat and launch less than a mile from the house. I wouldn't go back to Illinois for anything.

Forgot about the internet thing.

I've had HughesNet, Wild Blue, Excede and dial up land-line internet, but I'm now bundled with Consolidated Communications for phone/tv and internet, which doesn't go into all parts of the State.

I did have somewhat better satellite service with Excede though as they had newer up to date equipment when I had changed to them years back, but when the weather turned bad, it too went out. Well, it does rely on satellites and if it can't see, it can't relay with heavy cover.

With Consolidated Communications(out of Texas, with office in St. Louis) they've ran hundreds/thousands of miles of fiber cable into the rural landscape of my area. Now I have great TV, fast internet, with not one interruption in service in the severest snow/ice/wind or rainstorm, going on 3-4yrs now since the company has installed the fiber cable.

Saying they ran fiber cable, but CC could of ran something totally different. Whatever cable they ran, I'm totally pleased as it also works with smart tv's, but I'm not hooked up using my tv as a internet control center for what smart tv's can do now.

Re: comments on internet

FYI:

The state of missouri has huge amounts of money (from the Fed) allocated for rural high speed internet expansion that has to be spent.

Contact your state reps, if you are so inclined, to see how they plan on burning through it

Reply: a form letter email stating how important internet access is to the rep while also saying absolutely nothing about actually making it happen.

Of course that's not just a misery problem.

I was all pumped up about starlink but the rona chip shortage has pushed it back until the middle of this year at the soonest. Fiber would be great though, probably a long way out for me though. I live on a dead end road that is the last road in this county, the end of the road is actually in another county and that has posed its own problems. Years ago I knew a guy that owned land at the end, he was having a hard time getting power to his property. He eventually sold that land before getting electric to it.

Several years ago my lady inquired about AT&T internet,  they sent back an email giving the exact price it would cost us to the cent, it was over $800,000

What's really wonky is that over a decade ago I had US cellular, I could talk, text, face time, hot spot to run my lap top, etc. It worked great. They sold out to Verizon and the service is zero, AT&T is the same.

I really doubt you can find a state with better/fewer gun laws . . . unless some state is providing free guns to their citizens.

The place north of Clinton is pretty nice even with the vinyl siding.  Can't imagine why the shop wouldn't be metal sided from being built.  Looks like an outside wood stove.  I like clinton, you can get about anything you need there and you're close to truman and the upper end of lake of the ozarks.

Thank you all verrry much for all this into!!! Incredible helpful.

We run a computer repair shop. High speed good internet is absolutely required for us - to the point of not buying a house if it does not have it.

The southeast 1/4 of the state is what I'm most familiar with. You'll face challenges getting internet outside of towns in the circled area.

It's obviously not impossible, but definitely do your research about the specific property you're looking at.

I've driven across Z hwy between 13 and 7 and that wouldn't be bad.  Quick drive to clinton and close to truman both.  Much further south and I'd rather be close to bolivar and springfield.


Last summer I visited my uncle in Alton in oregon county.  I hadn't been there in many years and it's unbelievably remote compared to most places.  If you need anything other than groceries or auto parts you're making a winding drive to west plains.  Can't believe how that place has grown!

Guy I know that lives there says " you can't even buy pants in this town anymore "

Kearney, Liberty area is nice, puts you north of the river in God's country.. Good deer hunting.

There are a lot of great places in MO.  Joplin area is not bad, about 60k pop.  St. Joseph area is around 100k but rural surrounding it.  

The Springfield area is nice, I like the town.  Columbia is a lefty town due to the university, but otherwise not bad.  South, east, or west of Jefferson City would be okay.

That's totally true.  It's true of a lot of places really.  I go to stockton to fish and you basically have woods for groceries and dollar general for whatever else.  Alton is the same way, there's a dollar general and a grocery store.  If you're fine with that great, just something to consider when moving somewhere.

That's probably why all y'all country bumpkins never wear nothing but carpenter jeans, flannel work shirts and chore coats you bought at the local Feed and Ivermectin getting place . . .

It’s OK. The earthquake will probably kill you before the lead poisoning will.

Nothing I'd worry about.

A good job will be much harder to find, if that's important to you.

Shannon county is really poor.

I would look more around Gainseville or Ava.  Closer to a larger city, so you aren't driving an hour to get to a Walmart.

Where do you live now?