There is a town near where I live that used to be a regular seaport. And just like you described, there are posh apartments along the riverfront with fancy price tags. Only in this case, no one docks there anymore. All that remains of the old docks are the pilings, mostly. People dock their boats elsewhere. There is another side to this thing of going off grid. Two sides, actually. It wasn't that long ago that some people who lived back and beyond only got electricity, although it may now be more than 50 years (time flies). Those people were quite happy to have electricity in the house. Telephones came later. "City water" doesn't exist for most people in the country and some places in the US, water is a scarce resource. So lots of people who have lived in the country for generations would just laugh at the idea of going off grid. Going off the grid is old stuff now, too. There was a sort of back to the land movement in the late 1960s and 1970s. I expect that most who thought the grass was greener in the country have moved back to the city since then but it was quite a thing 40 years ago. That was the Whole Earth Catalog experience. Communes, self-reliance, back-to-nature, flower-power, tie-dyed drop-outs. There are a few diehards out there yet. Many of those people sought out places where they would be undisturbed and where the land was cheap. There are such places not so very far from here, although any place where the land is cheap is going to reflect the fact that the land is not that desireable, though opinions differ. I am familiar with places where the population is half what it was fifty years ago and they weren't such great places then, either. In fact, some communities exist now only as a name of a map. How you would go about acquiring property in such a place, I do not know. Fifty miles away, conditions can be night and day. Say, there is an accordian recording called the "Flower Power Party Polka." I kid you not!
