Scouting Trips

Designing a visit as a verification exercise — what to look at, at which hours of which days, and which questions a trip can actually settle.

Scouting Trips August 22, 2026 A Four-Day Scouting Trip Built Around Open Questions County counters keep four-day weeks and records requests run on statutory clocks. Build the trip backwards from the cells screen research left empty. 11 min read

About this section

Eleven metros went on Desmond Reyes's shortlist over three years, and two survived it. What ended the guessing was watching two cost-of-living calculators disagree by 40% about the same pair of cities: after that he stopped reading rankings and started pulling the numbers himself — county assessor parcel records, Census tables, BLS price series, FEMA flood panels. He holds no real estate or financial credential and gives no advice about either. Every figure on this site is traced to the agency that publishes it, and the calculation sheet is published with the article so you can put your own candidate cities through it.

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Every guide cites the agency, statute, or document it was checked against, and carries the date it was checked. Rules change — if something here is out of date, tell us and it gets corrected.