I live in the city, but I also keep a pretty big focus on mobility. Like I posted earlier, there is also the issue of how a city is laid out. A lot of west coast (Portland is considered "coast" but is actually several miles inland) have wilderness areas which are even technically within city limits. This metro area has several uninhabited islands in the wide river channels which have game, airable land, and sustainable habitat. Then there is the river fish habitat which of course varies. I suspect there might be poison water issues with that though, as not a lot of people fish here.

What this and most of the cities do have is a fair number of low traffic waterways which used to be major arteries of commerce but are no longer running the volume of traffic as before. Just recently on a rafting trip I found a lot of places someone with a boat could "hole up" for quite a while, boat access only places along wide creeks and rivers where the land access was virtually nonexistant.

Then there is an individuals role in a community. There is one peninsula here with no permanent (human) inhabitants, all industrial. It is half deserted now, let alone in the future if there were major reductions in major shipping commerce. Another island between Oregon and Washington state is teeming with unused residential space in the form of houseboats, unused hotels, even a small unused military ship that is being restored by a "club" that I strongly suspect would readily serve as a naval militia for the island if SHTF. While water access to and from the island is easy, land access is only by two bridges, both of which can be easily blocked off and even normal traffic flow blocks them off frequently due to bad highway management.

I lived in "the country" through a big chunk of the 1990s and missed some strong economic times due to that, and what passed as our "survival community" were some of the worst human beings a straight up guy would ever have to tolerate. The neighbors were no better, and would loot your place if given a solid chance when we were away. The only thing that got my cabin from being looted was usually having someone home, and when I did come and go, I tried to randomize my patterns as much as possible. Never announcing long trips, never giving out a "work schedule".

In either event, I am fairly mobile. I can't afford a country property, but I have a truck, tools, and am able bodied enough to pull my own weight and make my own way in the world for the forseeable future. I recently got a camper trailer that I am making this years restoration project and in theory, I can quite likely build up one of these every few years and pre-stage them at country places belonging to people I know, but I sure don't want to be paying storage fees for them here.

The issue is with the here and now, I can get exposure to people who will pay me to get things done for them where I make enough to buy stuff, and when and where I lived in the country, people were pretty much already set, or had nothing and were only scraping by. Once the country people figure out a guy is only scraping by, they work it so that is about all he will ever get. My ambitions are a few steps above being the worn out old ranch hand living in someone's barn loft as a charity case after living a life of working below minimum wage.

I can go to the Safeway store right now and find whole fryer chickens on sale at under $5 each. That feeds me for a bit more than a day. I can eat sufficient and convenient meals at fast food joints for about the same money (frugally, eating out at $15 per day is nominal, but it is easy to jack that up to $35 per day if you go to regular sit-down restaurants). I can earn money and pay for meals faster and more efficiently than I can stalk, kill, process and cook any wild game. Given my lack of experience or efficiency in killing, plucking and gutting chickens, I cannot even make it worth the $5 each to have chickens in my back yard. Now if they went up to $20 each, then yeah, I would consider putting some bird pens in. A full on chicken raising outfit is maybe a weekend project at the most so constructing and equipping that now, stocking it with hatchlings now, would be a wasted effort and probably take my attention away from making money, which I use to buy things which quite likely would not be as available if SHTF. Chicken hatchlings though, yeah, I suspect someone will still be selling them if the grid goes down.

I could get by without a vehicle if I were on the welfare roles, but chose not to take welfare or food stamps when .gov was really trying to shove me into the gutter. Now living in the country without a vehicle, that's just plain not possible if you expect to maintain any standard of living.

I know a lot of "country people" and without exception, NONE of then own much of anything without getting money from the government one way or another on a regular basis. Usually it is a retirement check of one form or another. Then there are farm subsidies, and in some cases payouts from disability settlements. Few, very few, country places are actually self sufficient economically, not to mention being actually self sufficient to the point of being sustainable off the grid.

I have a mobile "living system" that I am engineering to be sustainable "off the grid" and right now, about $6500 into the project, I have come to the realization that it is only good for short periods of time off the grid, and accomplishes very little that could not be done better with a good size yacht. For all of the trouble I went through, I could have saved up for the two years, put money down on a 35ft motor yacht and be living in a nicely appointed local harbor at $300 per month. The mobility of the boat being even more difficult for hostiles to mess with than my camper/trailer/motorcycle system. Although vulnerable to getting hijacked or sunk, there is the issue of accessibility. Pull out onto the water and you effectively have a moat. My camper on the other hand, any prick who decides to have a problem with me can tow it, throw rocks at my windows or just burn the thing.