Sandpoint

With a low cost of living, an arts/events-oriented community, an award-winning farmer’s market, and multiple organic groceries, this home offers incredible lake-to-mountain lifestyle, minutes from downtown. What will you plant in your organic garden this fall?

Sandpoint, Idaho is a small, safe, friendly but respectful community on Idaho’s northern tip, near the Canadian border. Nestled among the Selkirk, Purcell, and Cabinet mountain ranges, Sandpoint is a real town, not a cluster of tourist traps around a ski resort.

Idaho’s largest ski resort, Schweitzer Mountain, is only minutes away. However, it’s Sandpoint’s thriving arts community, historic Panida Theater, a busy events calendar, excellent restaurants/breweries/wineries, and good neighbors that make the area a year-round home.

Throughout the Covid pandemic, local businesses are adapting to safely serve the community; the Panida, for example, is showing movies, and groceries are offering curbside pickup.

Here is a link to a beautiful aerial video of Sandpoint. I watch it and I don’t want to leave.

With spectacular scenery that can be readily appreciated from many bike paths and walking trails, It’s no surprise that Sandpoint has been named the “Most Beautiful Town in America” by Rand McNally and USA Today.

Despite Sandpoint’s relatively small population of ~8000, the town offers all the important amenities, from the serious (hospital; an array of good schools, including Waldorf; strong emergency services) to just plain fun (movie theater, bowling alley, family festivals).

The magazine Fact Company recently wrote:

First, there were boomtowns. Now, there are Zoom towns.

Places like Sandpoint, Idaho, which is located on a lake and near a popular ski resort, had already begun to see increased migration over the past 5 to 10 years. Now, it’s bracing for even more remote workers due to COVID-19, says Rumore, who is from Sandpoint and is currently looking into how the virus is affecting these gateway communities.

It’s the perfect setting to live in nature, sustainably and affordably, in your own “Northwest adobe home.”