Many states have a common ground law in place. If you maintain a piece of land connected to your land for X number of years, it becomes your property. We webby through this in va about 10 years ago. My neighbor owned land it a fenced completely accept the front. The neighbor to the back and he never had a problem. The back neighbor sold his property. The new people had a survey done. My neighbors fence took about a quarter acre of his land and about a quarter acre of the neighbor to the souths land. We were in the process of buying my neighbors land. So we followed closely. It ended up in court. My neighbor proved he had maintained that labs for almost 30 years. And the courts awarded it to him. That's a close as we get these days.

I thought Maine and Alaska still had some homesteading opportunities?

Not all traditional rural homesteads, some have strings attached:

http://eartheasy.com/blog/2011/10/fr...-homesteading/

Urban areas suffering from the "doughnut effect" are good candidates to look at. There may be low cost land available, permits to garden on city land, grants to repair existing homes...

Thanks for the input dlskidmore and Vahomesteaders.

Apparently this doesn't work in New York, the neighbors lived in their house for 30 years when it was sold, surveyors showed we owned the corner of the house, my father gave them the corner of the house and driveway since he never knew he owned it in the first place, and the people were glad, otherwise their lawyer told them they were going to have to pay for it to get the deed cleared up to sell.

I also know Kansas is so homesteading land. Not like in old days so to speak. But they are giving away lots in anak communities and giving you x amount of years to build an appropriate house abs tie into the water and sewer. Not exactly homesteading but close.

In NYS, if you get the majority of your income from farming, you can get really big breaks on your school taxes. I'm semi-retired and bunch my cattle sales so I can get that break every other year. So if you really want to make a living on your homestead and don't get much outside income, the tax break helps a lot.

The tax break depends on your municipality. When we were farm shopping every town had different thresholds.