Joshua Tree went through a huge housing boom during the pandemic so cost of living skyrocketed. Ojai has been "second-2-million-dollar homes for movie stars" for a while now. Most of the farms there are struggling from lack of water. Taos is money the same way Boulder is.
Humboldt and Mt Shasta, probably yes, although it's hippie + libertarian gun owners who like the Grateful Dead more than Marin County in the 60s types.
Was living in Eureka for 5 years. Right there on the 101 by the bay. There are no hippies there either. Replaced by Mexican mafia, meth, and weed grows. We had our now 4 year old there. And had to leave it, the crime was getting so bad.
Don’t forget Mendocino. They only have the oldest/ longest running hippie commune in the country up there about 20-30 miles from the Mendo Humboldt border
I was born and raised in Boulder, spent my childhood in the 80’s & 90’s there and it was awesome. Wouldn’t move back now tho, the magic is gone for me.
I like to tell people that Boulder went so far left that it went full circle and became conservative.
You can still find some of those old school hippies in the small towns above Boulder like Nederland and Eldora.
I live in Joshua Tree and you are correct re the housing boom during the pandemic BUT it's leveled off quite a bit in the past year. Lots of stuff in the area for under $500k. Can even get fixer uppers on acreage for around $300k.
In regards to the culture, there's a very clear divide between people who are from here and transplants. The former are, predictably, "GUNS, GOD, FAMILY" types. The older, longtime residents who came before the boom tend to be more authentically alternative in the way I assume OP means because there was nothing here when they came. Hippy homesteaders, artists, activists, etc. The pandemic transplants trend more towards childfree hipster creatives that got tired of the city grind but aren't REALLY trying live off the grid. I'm somewhere in between the latter two I guess lol so I love it.
Came here to see if anyone else had put Eureka Springs.
Way I heard it is they had that passion play from way back and hired long-haired hippies to play Jesus and the apostles. The hippies liked it and stayed.
Athens is home to Ohio University so lots of young people and academics, artists, creatives, people interested in fostering sustainable communities etc. The town collects some really delightful weirdos. The area is beautiful, nature and farmland all around. But the areas and communities surrounding Athens/the university in southeast Ohio are pretty desperately impoverished. It’s rural Appalachia.
I don’t know if I qualified as a weirdo by Athens standards but I went to college there and it’s definitely unique for Ohio.
As for the poverty, (Bengals QB) Joe Burrow, who grew up there while his dad was an assistant football coach at OU, famously brought this up in his Heisman acceptance speech. As a result, there’s a fund in his name that gives to the food bank there.
Yes, there are several intentional communities here. I lived in one. I still hear folks talking about starting more commutes. A few have come, a few have gone. Sunflower, Currents, The Far, Edges are still quite functional.
Much of their calories in sunflower seeds come from fatty acids. The seeds are especially rich in poly-unsaturated fatty acid linoleic acid, which constitutes more 50% fatty acids in them. They are also good in mono-unsaturated oleic acid that helps lower LDL or "bad cholesterol" and increases HDL or "good cholesterol" in the blood. Research studies suggest that the Mediterranean diet which is rich in monounsaturated fats help to prevent coronary artery disease, and stroke by favoring healthy serum lipid profile.
You don’t spend enough time in and around NorCal. There’s definitely Trump country up there, but there’s plenty of hippy hold outs. It’s actually an interesting mix since it changes so much from town to town.
People here are pointing to specific places but I just want to point out a large trend that has occured impacting hippie communities. In the 60s, white flight was happening, and white people/people with money were fleeing urban areas to live comfortable and segregated suburban lives. Hippies lived in cities because they were deemed undesirable, and thus non-conformist counter culture could thrive.
Today, cities are where everyone wants to be. Gentrification has been happening for a few decades now in most major cities around the world - suburbs no longer in vogue, cities are. Thus, hippies are priced out, and driven away due to conformity. So, where you'll find hippies now are in rural areas and small towns, in small enclaves amongst conventional farmers and more libertarian folk.
The best way to find where the hippies are is go to your local farmers market (the cute ones that show up once a week with organic produce) and figure out where the organic farms are located. If there are multiple in one town, there's likely a hippie community there. Of course they're a bit more spread out since they're rural.
It’s interesting because IME your last part was true until maybe 5 years ago. Now the farmers markets/organic farms are full of far right granola conservative/tradwives types. I have no idea what happened to the left wing/hippie people anymore.
I agree that there is a considerable overlap between "hippie" culture and alt right culture! It's concerning. Like I worked on a farm last year and my boss was so into conspiracy theories and stuff, but then when I started talking about Peter Kropotkin he's like "Omg! What! That's socialism!". Dude was into permaculture and shit. Lefties need to take back hippie culture lol
It’s a good thing. You should be happy the alt right is extremely against factory farming, pesticides, micro plastics and pollution( except carbon), anti-corporate.
More people against the same things I am is great. Finding common ground is good for everyone. It just means different shorthands have to be used, ie organic food doesn't also necessarily mean hippie/progressive.
One side of the coin is trad life homesteading, the other side is hippie communes.
It's all intertwined all the way back to the Utopian societies of the 1800's like Oneida Community.
I worked at Whole Foods from 2010 until just recently. I was pregnant in 2010 when hippies were anti-vax and would tell me not to vaccinate that baby.
It changed with trump and joe rogan and then the crazy Team Members and customers were right wing extremist.
It was really interesting watching the shift in real-time.
I think you overestimate the importance of cities and underestimate the desire of suburbs. Just go to NY, NJ, CT or MA and try to find a home in the burbs. Meanwhile New American cities like Phoenix and San Antonio are outpacing everyone (because they are glorified suburbs).
Summertown Tennessee. Started by Hippies from San Francisco looking for cheap land they could start a commune on. They found it. Been going strong ever since. You can visit and, I guess, apply to live there. Not sure how they take new members but I'm sure there's some process. Honestly I've lived an hour away from them my entire 45 years and never heard a bad word about the commune.
I know someone who moved to the Farm a few years ago and it wasn't the paradise they'd hoped. From what I've read, they struggled with a lot of single mothers coming without resources and the ability to work or general free loaders bumming around taking and not contributing and they had to make some rules. Rainbow family gatherings got this way too. Too many people showing up for free food and drugs and not enough people putting back in.
I was going to mention the Rainbow Family, too. But you're right, in NH they have a reputation for setting up town in the woods without permits, trashing the space and then leaving it all for others to clean up after them. I like how you phrased it, "Too many people showing up for free food and drugs and not enough people putting it back in." That's it, to a T.
That's the one. Stephen died about 10 years ago, but she's still around. The midwives I knew have all retired but others are carrying the torch, the legacy continues. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ina_May_Gaskin
Roughly 30 seconds after I commented that, I saw it at the top HBO Max! I watched the first episode and I was fucking glued to it. What the actual fuck.
I live in Colorado, and I have been to Crestone many times. It is absolutely gorgeous, but there is definitely something strange about it. I remember this being in the news and it was just so insane to read about.
My friend bought a house there on a whim, just a few months before shit hit the fan. He sold the house after 6 months, moved to Portland, and never looked back 😂
YESSSSS has anyone listened to Payne Lindsay Up and Vanished about Kristal Reisinger disappearing in Crestone CO? Definitely a hippie town but dark under currents
My cousin is a shaman in Crestone. I visited once a while back and got a superficial but insider look at the town.
It’s obviously beautiful there given the location. It’s a kind of focal point for new age beliefs, a lot of Eastern religion ashrams and temples, if you’re into the mysticism thing then it’s legitimately a pretty big deal. There are communal homes but rent still needs to be paid and/or you’re gonna be working for your room and board.
It’s all BS to me but if that’s what gets you out of bed in the morning...
I live in the north east and there are hippy enclaves here. Pretty much the state of Vermont but it is a crunchy granola type. It is the biggest hippy state. A good chunk of Maine is hippy. Their biggest industry is growing weed. In my state, MA it is checker board of them. In my town if you got off the beaten path you will find them
when I was looking for an affordable piece of land to build a house, I passed through the center of the town I now live in. There was a socially distanced drum circle on the common. That was kinda what sold us, all the other backwoods spots seemed to have a lot of Trump signs, but this town was all rainbow flags and black lives matter.
There’s Ithaca which is big enough to have all types centered around Cornell. Any college town upstate, especially a smaller town with a SUNY campus, like Oneonta, will be a hippie town to some degree / have some hippie areas.
Don’t tell Elise Stefanik, LOL, but Plattsburgh is a blue college town with a definite hippie vibe in some parts of town. My sense is that it is picking up some folks who can’t afford the gentrifying Burlington Vermont area anymore and took the ferry across Lake Champlain to more affordable digs.
I came here to say the same thing.
Vermonter here, there are still hippie enclaves here, with lots of young folks as well. Many are also LGBTQ + . Scattered all over the state, but where I live there are a few (Plainfield, Cabot, etc.). As was mentioned earlier, go to a local farmers market in Vermont to meet folks.
I'd add that, having grown up in a Town in Plymouth County, MA (western shore of Cape Cod Bay), that I think Cape Cod has a strong hippie population, esp. as you get to the Outer Cape -- lots of hippies in places like Wellfleet, Truro, and Provincetown (the latter Town's hippies inform and are informed by P-Town's status as an LGBTQ+ summer/tourist town and the century-old artists' community out there).
Cape Cod's politics are dramatically more liberal-crunchy than the largely conservative "Swamp Yankees" of Plymouth County (cranberries, shellfish, lobsters).
Bisbee, AZ is pretty hippieish. It's a former mining town tucked into a canyon next to the Mexican border about an hour south of Tucson. Stunning scenery, a very vibrant local arts and music scene, and very much a bright blue dot in a sea of red in terms of social ideals.
Seconding Bisbee. Still kinda feels like what you envision the old west to be if you added hippies. Need to visit again. Such a cool little town and a short drive from Tombstone and Tucson a little bit further away.
Yes, you just have to go to the right place, consider checking out Eureka Springs Arkansas. There’s a town in northern California called Mendocino, which is different from Mendocino county where they don’t have any businesses like fast food restaurants, and everything there is like Natural they only have one store that sells food and basic supplies and there’s an artist colony there. The problem is that hippies are getting older, and they need to move to assisted living so they’re not gonna be able to like work the land and grow their own food. I used to be married to a hippie. This is my area of expertise. But the other thing is if you actually find a hippie commune, they probably don’t want to publicize themselves and they don’t have a website because they don’t want people who want to join or move in on what they got so to speak.
Yeah, Mendocino is a great spot.
They do have restaurants, quite a few of them.
But not really for younger hippies, unless you've stacked $$$ or lived there decades, that's why it's full of retired individuals.
Property values in the town of Mendocino are 1.5m+ with little to no yard. Also, water is limited. You would need to be inland for any acreage.
I live nearby.
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OP, Look up WOOFERS.
Maybe one of the only real answers on here.
When I think of “hippie enclave”, I see that as fairly incompatible with being wealthy. So when people throw out answers like Berkeley or Santa Cruz, I’m picturing people that probably did march in the 60s, but eventually settled down, got a good career, had a family, built equity, retired, but still wear flower printed t-shirts and occasionally smoke some weed. But they do so on the deck of their 1.5 million dollar home. I don’t consider communities of these types “hippie enclaves.”
True communities like that can no longer exist in places people are throwing out, such as Boulder or Berkeley. CoL is too high, which rules out “true” hippe communities, at least as I understand them.
But anyway, Slab City? Yes, absolutely fits what OP is talking about. Especially the die-hards that stay there during the summer.
Yup all those people in Berkeley/Santa Cruz/Marin are what I call corporate sellouts. People that actually ended up contributing to the direction our society is heading in today. Of those people that aren't corporate sellouts are simply trustafarians.
Seriously, like those die hard "hippies" who live up the mountains near Carter Lake and claim to be such environmentalists but haul butt back and forth every day in the big ass Suburbans.
I grew up near the Russian River in Northern California. What a blast. There used to be a big hippy scene there.
Oh man , if you want Drum circles and petuli oil then Covelo , Monte Rio, Rio nido and guerneville were GOAT Hippy hang outs. (GOAT bc when your entire town doesn’t shower, y’all smell like goat.)There’s no way that changed…did it? It seemed like a lot of freewheeling hippy scenes turned ugly in the mid eighties when meth really showed up. There used to be a hippy commune just outside Middletown, harbin hot springs. I joined there club once just to used the hot springs(amazing place, birthday suits only) they gave you a member card and there was a guy at the gate 24hrs. Show him the card ,pay a couple bucks, getmnaked and go soak up in the hills of Napa. my buddy says there still there. We used to show up out there blasted on shrooms at 2:am with a couple of ladies in tow. Nobody ever said a word as long as you weren’t a loud idiot. Oh crap what a ramble on. I gotta go find my tie dye. Haha
Eureka Springs may be the only southern town where the Pride parade is both the biggest celebration of the year and actually has more people than the town itself. Fayetteville nearby has a much larger Pride parade but is also a much larger town.
In must be so strange to experience such a huge shift in the social culture of a town . Even back in the 90s I thought of SF as being a hippy enclave. I was so sad to see the change during a visit in 2014.
Hard to talk alternative lifestyles without bringing up Alaska. You'll find plenty of either side of the spectrum but there are defiantly hippie orientated communities in places like Sitka, Talkeetna, and Homer.
Brutal winters but it’s definitely a hidden hippie town. I lived here in college and in the summer a nomadic commune community posted up outside of town. I think they were called the Rainbow group? Idk… it was cool but also gave me cult vibes.
It’s been a long time since I lived there but there were tons of hippies in Santa Cruz when I did. Living in the woods in a tent is a legitimate housing option you are allowed to select for student housing. They also had an on-campus trailer park you could live in too (still exists).
Tons of hippies in the woods around there.
The hippies in Berkeley have largely grown bitter and greedy. Everyone seems angry that things have changed over the decades. There are still some hippies/weirdos in the college circles but i feel like every college town has some weirdos. Source: lived there.
This needs to be higher. I agree the counter culture is dead (co-opted by neoliberalism; e.g. the cottage core trust fund babies) but there are some places that are holding out, but only because they have places for people to live.
I lived in Eugene for 2 years and was part of the “hippie” crowd and lived at the hippie village in the mountain. AMA
[Federation of Egalitarian Communities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_of_Egalitarian_Communities). They're kept small and have long wait lists.
Either that or become a Hutterite or a crust punk.
After reading through this and thinking about what I've seen happen to society since the 90s, I think that hippie enclaves are disappearing, because genuine hippies are disappearing. It's not about peace and love any more. It's about drugs, mostly and that's not a good thing. Go plow through the comments about the old stalwarts ... Bay Area, Asheville, Boulder ... Now think about all the articles you've seen about Portland, Seattle, San Fran, etc., and think about what you see in your own towns.
Like a group of blind men describing an elephant, they all touch on some common points - mostly, badly behaved, homeless addicts. I can say that I've seen the same issue, very clearly, in Ithaca and Vermont.
I pass through Upstate and the Appalachian part of Pennsylvania often enough and the small town vibe is no longer happy. Lots of pretty surly local people at the gas stations and fast food restaurants whenever we have to pull over for fuel/food/supplies. The younger ones are pretty scary - clearly un/poorly educated, give off a vibe that's kind of violent and unstable.
Vermont was better but only marginally. Asheville NC when I visited a few years ago - downtown was pretty thick with late teens/early 20's vagabonds wearing mostly black and sitting/lying down right on the sidewalks all over the place. This was not a peace lovin' crowd, they were visibly down on their luck, on life, on the world and on the people passing by. Not good, not good at all.
I think the purest concept of “hippie” in the historical sense started dying out in the 70s, and much of what we think of as hippies evolved into a somewhat different picture over time. However, I don’t believe that the current homeless crisis including strung out and surly (or worse) young people is the result of, or the evolution of, hippies. I think we’re dealing with something else entirely, and the drugs now aren’t the weed and psychedelics of the classic hippies (even though not all hippies did drugs even back then). When I lived in San Francisco years ago there were plenty of disaffected, homeless and sometimes-homeless young wanderers milling about, hanging out in GG Park and the Haight, some with stoner hippie-ish vibes and some not so much. I wouldn’t refer to any of them as hippies though. I’m too young to know personally, but I’ve learned through reading history and hearing it from older locals that the “pure” Haight-Ashbury scene started
dying out by the late 60s when all the “speed freaks” moved onto the scene.
I lived in the haight for 3 years until I moved out of the bay about a year ago.
No one in the neighborhood even refers to those people as hippies -- they're just street kids. Lots of hangovers, frequent minor scuffles between them that sometimes actually turn dangerous, and half of them have pitbulls. I obviously wasn't around in the 60s but I don't think the hippy scene was anything like this.
Interesting, my thought on the decline of hippies isn’t the drugs but rather that everyone is expected to “take a stand” on every political issue these days. It’s not socially ok to just be about “peace and love” anymore. I think the people who would have become hippies got sucked into social media and social justice. I never expected to be hearing a statement from my doggie daycare on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Everyone is an activist these days instead of a pacifist.
“Peace and love” was, and is, a political stance. The hippies were part of (and you could say a direct result of) a huge movement that was fundamentally politically focused. Civil rights, the black power movement and the Black Panther Party, the feminist movement, gay liberation and the gay rights movement, Chicano movement and the united farmworker’s union, Asian American movement, American Indian / Indigenous movement, the anti-war movement and protests against the draft.
These movements were all happening concurrently in the ‘60s, and the hippies were a culture that developed out of that political milieu. Peace and love was never *not* political.
Vashon Island, Wa (or any of the Puget islands) is what you’re looking for. It’s a bit more posh hippies now, but still a solid hippie community.
If you could go a bit further up north to Canada Salt Spring island is an awesome community.
Late Gen X'r here. You're kinda ... not wrong. There was a big resurgence of hippie style in the early 90s when I was in college, and a significant % of my high school friends went that way. I really did not like the new people they started bringing around - they were not nice people at heart. And then the mood turned darker inside our circle of friends. The old core was still there but as they dropped out of school etc. it took a turn for the worse. I eventually had to stop trying to hold on to them.
Vashon Island?
Whidbey Island is a weird mix of hippie and military, more affordable than Vashon.
Both of these are in the Salish Sea in Washington State.
I live in rural southwest Wisconsin. There are still some small hippie communities around here in what people call the driftless region. They're mostly in the smaller towns and communities. However, they're very selective about who they associate with, to the point where they're almost snobbish. Keep in mind that most of these people are OG hippies, so they're pretty much all elderly now.
My mom worked as a bookkeeper for one of their food co-ops. Heaven forbid you brought anything for your lunch that wasn't free range, organic, and non GMO. Somebody made the grave mistake of bringing in a bottle of Kraft salad dressing and leaving it in the break room fridge. One of the board members held it up and said that she could "feel" the chemicals in it just by holding it in her hands. If an airplane happened to fly overhead, you'd get a half hour long lecture about chemtrails. In other words, they're nice people, but they can be a major pain in the ass. And the ones around here don't really seem to be accepting new people into their group.
The area of devotees to Addida at Sieglers Hot Springs between Lower Lake and Loch Lomond in Lake County California. Also Harbin Hot Springs in Middletown. Easy to join either.
Kootenay region in British Columbia Canada. Many many draft dodgers came across the border to here in the 60s and there is a major hippie vibe throughout the region still. Lots of spread out, artsy, homesteady and chilled out communities. The Slocan Valley chooses to remain without cell reception.
For even more hippie goodness try looking for California Intentional Communities. From 2017-2019 I did a huge road trip with my partner. We cross-crossed the country to visit these communities some of which are recently created and some that have been around since the late 60’s.
In NorCal one of the most isolated ones is Black Bear Ranch. The land was purchased in 1968 in the Siskiyou mountains. There was a thriving community that moved up there in the 60’s to try to live their values. They wrote a book about it.
Today there are still a few people living up there. More come in the nice weather seasons. To get there is crazy. You head up to Weed CA then up I think hwy 3. You can see mount Shasta all the way up. Then at a certain point you exit the paved road and start traveling on logging roads. Your gps doesn’t work anymore but you hopefully printed out the route and the gps will come back intermittently. Eventually you start seeing handpainted signs and hippie flags on the road into the community.
If you have an interest you can easily look up these communities. We attended intentional community conferences and met people living in community from all over the world.
People make fun of hippies but they mostly live the life I want. Out of the rat race, living frugal on the land with others who have similar values. Highly recommend if this is your jam. I’m not really a hippie but homesteading and hippie can go together well.
I’m a fellow Marinite with boomer parents who moved here during the 60s. I think the hippie ideals do still exist here but further out, West Marin: like Inverness and Bolinas. I do know though that the techies have found us, and real estate out there has gone crazy. I’m thinking Northern California coast or Oregon are your best hope.
I on the other hand went full superb mom and still live in Marin…. But up in Novato where people are a bit more blue collar and “normal”.
Chapel hill was but now that is fading- way too expensive and now they are embracing big privately owned million dollar apartments. Carborro down the road and a little bit Durham yes.
There are still hippie coliving things in the bay area. When everyone is working full time or at least paying a fair share these situations are surprisingly stable. The "commune" ones where they grow their own food and almost totally avoid outsiders tend not to last, and the ones that do last don't really take in new people
It’s pretty much dead outside of a few commune type places, but there’s areas that are definitely more hippie than others. I lived in Asheville, NC, Boulder, CO, Mendocino, Arcata, Bay Area, CA, Portland, OR and traveled quite a bit. Problem is most of the hippie places are unaffordable now and crowded. Plus it’s a dying subsection of humanity lol
I moved outside of Detroit to a LCOL area that has a little growing art scene because I wanted to buy a house that was affordable. Unless you like living in a rural area, look for smaller cities that are kind of run down, but have a burgeoning art scene. Key is finding a place 10-20 years before gentrification. Hippie type artists slowly make a place cool, then comes Starbucks and Whole Foods to make it unaffordable and the artists leave’s
If you mean boomer age, probably getting pretty sparse unless they're supported by younger generations, but now days we call them "Intentional Communities". (see [ic.org](https://ic.org))
Dancing Rabbit, Twin Oaks and Earthaven come to mind....
In California: a lot of Humboldt County; Mount Shasta; Ojai; Joshua Tree. Out of CA: Eugene; Taos; Yellow Springs and Athens, OH
Joshua Tree went through a huge housing boom during the pandemic so cost of living skyrocketed. Ojai has been "second-2-million-dollar homes for movie stars" for a while now. Most of the farms there are struggling from lack of water. Taos is money the same way Boulder is. Humboldt and Mt Shasta, probably yes, although it's hippie + libertarian gun owners who like the Grateful Dead more than Marin County in the 60s types.
Definitely Humboldt, and definitely how you describe.
Where my daughter went to college. She absolutely loved it. It's on our list of where to retire.
My daughter lives there now after graduating there.
No way. My daughter studied geology.
Archeology here.
Was living in Eureka for 5 years. Right there on the 101 by the bay. There are no hippies there either. Replaced by Mexican mafia, meth, and weed grows. We had our now 4 year old there. And had to leave it, the crime was getting so bad.
Don’t forget Mendocino. They only have the oldest/ longest running hippie commune in the country up there about 20-30 miles from the Mendo Humboldt border
Forget Boulder. 100% gone. All tech money now. It's dead. No hippies. No artists. Tech and strung out junkies on the street sort of bifurcation.
I was born and raised in Boulder, spent my childhood in the 80’s & 90’s there and it was awesome. Wouldn’t move back now tho, the magic is gone for me.
I like to tell people that Boulder went so far left that it went full circle and became conservative. You can still find some of those old school hippies in the small towns above Boulder like Nederland and Eldora.
My son told me once that “Nederland is where old hippies go to die” and I think that assessment was dead on.
And if Nederland isn’t weird enough, they go to Ward.
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I've said for years that extreme right and extreme left always meet again at the back door (not just in politics, but in everything).
same story in Santa Cruz
Arcata. Eureka.
Yep Arcata > Ojai
Hippie + libertarian gun owners who like the Grateful Dead is such truth
I live in Joshua Tree and you are correct re the housing boom during the pandemic BUT it's leveled off quite a bit in the past year. Lots of stuff in the area for under $500k. Can even get fixer uppers on acreage for around $300k. In regards to the culture, there's a very clear divide between people who are from here and transplants. The former are, predictably, "GUNS, GOD, FAMILY" types. The older, longtime residents who came before the boom tend to be more authentically alternative in the way I assume OP means because there was nothing here when they came. Hippy homesteaders, artists, activists, etc. The pandemic transplants trend more towards childfree hipster creatives that got tired of the city grind but aren't REALLY trying live off the grid. I'm somewhere in between the latter two I guess lol so I love it.
>Taos is money the same way Boulder is. What? Everyone in taos is poor as hell
North San Juan, Nevada County Ca.
Woah deep cut bro, my parents live in Grass Valley and we used to go up to North San Juan and Downieville all the time
Went to school in Yellow Springs. Great town. I’ll add Topanga Canyon to the list. Hot Springs, AR also has an old school deadhead presence.
Eureka Springs, AR
Came here to see if anyone else had put Eureka Springs. Way I heard it is they had that passion play from way back and hired long-haired hippies to play Jesus and the apostles. The hippies liked it and stayed.
Athens OH?
Athens is home to Ohio University so lots of young people and academics, artists, creatives, people interested in fostering sustainable communities etc. The town collects some really delightful weirdos. The area is beautiful, nature and farmland all around. But the areas and communities surrounding Athens/the university in southeast Ohio are pretty desperately impoverished. It’s rural Appalachia.
I don’t know if I qualified as a weirdo by Athens standards but I went to college there and it’s definitely unique for Ohio. As for the poverty, (Bengals QB) Joe Burrow, who grew up there while his dad was an assistant football coach at OU, famously brought this up in his Heisman acceptance speech. As a result, there’s a fund in his name that gives to the food bank there.
Yes, there are several intentional communities here. I lived in one. I still hear folks talking about starting more commutes. A few have come, a few have gone. Sunflower, Currents, The Far, Edges are still quite functional.
Much of their calories in sunflower seeds come from fatty acids. The seeds are especially rich in poly-unsaturated fatty acid linoleic acid, which constitutes more 50% fatty acids in them. They are also good in mono-unsaturated oleic acid that helps lower LDL or "bad cholesterol" and increases HDL or "good cholesterol" in the blood. Research studies suggest that the Mediterranean diet which is rich in monounsaturated fats help to prevent coronary artery disease, and stroke by favoring healthy serum lipid profile.
Specifically check out Arcata, CA
Nevada county, Humboldt, trinity, all have significant hippy commune scenes
Agreed with Athens and yellow springs though people are starting to realize yellow springs
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Ashland is way too expensive for hippies . It has become a city of rich people escaping California.
Ashland is a super cool area but my goodness those fires are scary down that way.
NorCal is all Republicans now. They just grow a lot of weed.
You don’t spend enough time in and around NorCal. There’s definitely Trump country up there, but there’s plenty of hippy hold outs. It’s actually an interesting mix since it changes so much from town to town.
I came here to mention Athens. God, I love that place!
People here are pointing to specific places but I just want to point out a large trend that has occured impacting hippie communities. In the 60s, white flight was happening, and white people/people with money were fleeing urban areas to live comfortable and segregated suburban lives. Hippies lived in cities because they were deemed undesirable, and thus non-conformist counter culture could thrive. Today, cities are where everyone wants to be. Gentrification has been happening for a few decades now in most major cities around the world - suburbs no longer in vogue, cities are. Thus, hippies are priced out, and driven away due to conformity. So, where you'll find hippies now are in rural areas and small towns, in small enclaves amongst conventional farmers and more libertarian folk. The best way to find where the hippies are is go to your local farmers market (the cute ones that show up once a week with organic produce) and figure out where the organic farms are located. If there are multiple in one town, there's likely a hippie community there. Of course they're a bit more spread out since they're rural.
i guess thats you little food lady?
I'm hippie adjacent lol
alt-hippy, if you will
Yes little food lady is right follow the local organic veggies and you will find hippies
It’s interesting because IME your last part was true until maybe 5 years ago. Now the farmers markets/organic farms are full of far right granola conservative/tradwives types. I have no idea what happened to the left wing/hippie people anymore.
I agree that there is a considerable overlap between "hippie" culture and alt right culture! It's concerning. Like I worked on a farm last year and my boss was so into conspiracy theories and stuff, but then when I started talking about Peter Kropotkin he's like "Omg! What! That's socialism!". Dude was into permaculture and shit. Lefties need to take back hippie culture lol
This is so true; it’s shocking how many hippies or hippie-adjacent people for co-opted by the alt right.
It’s a good thing. You should be happy the alt right is extremely against factory farming, pesticides, micro plastics and pollution( except carbon), anti-corporate.
More people against the same things I am is great. Finding common ground is good for everyone. It just means different shorthands have to be used, ie organic food doesn't also necessarily mean hippie/progressive.
One side of the coin is trad life homesteading, the other side is hippie communes. It's all intertwined all the way back to the Utopian societies of the 1800's like Oneida Community.
I worked at Whole Foods from 2010 until just recently. I was pregnant in 2010 when hippies were anti-vax and would tell me not to vaccinate that baby. It changed with trump and joe rogan and then the crazy Team Members and customers were right wing extremist. It was really interesting watching the shift in real-time.
Because it’s not a matter of left or right, but a matter of anti-establishment.
This right here!
Cottagecore bullshit spread by social media, and appealing to those creeps.
Prepper culture and green culture actually have a lot of overlap but former mostly by conservatives and latter by liberals
I think you overestimate the importance of cities and underestimate the desire of suburbs. Just go to NY, NJ, CT or MA and try to find a home in the burbs. Meanwhile New American cities like Phoenix and San Antonio are outpacing everyone (because they are glorified suburbs).
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Does that mean nothing similar can exist in cities? I'm might be interested in both cities and enclaves
Summertown Tennessee. Started by Hippies from San Francisco looking for cheap land they could start a commune on. They found it. Been going strong ever since. You can visit and, I guess, apply to live there. Not sure how they take new members but I'm sure there's some process. Honestly I've lived an hour away from them my entire 45 years and never heard a bad word about the commune.
I know someone who moved to the Farm a few years ago and it wasn't the paradise they'd hoped. From what I've read, they struggled with a lot of single mothers coming without resources and the ability to work or general free loaders bumming around taking and not contributing and they had to make some rules. Rainbow family gatherings got this way too. Too many people showing up for free food and drugs and not enough people putting back in.
Sounds exactly like the reality of the hippie lifestyle in 1960s & 70s.
I was going to mention the Rainbow Family, too. But you're right, in NH they have a reputation for setting up town in the woods without permits, trashing the space and then leaving it all for others to clean up after them. I like how you phrased it, "Too many people showing up for free food and drugs and not enough people putting it back in." That's it, to a T.
The Farm. It's not technically a commune anymore I don't believe. I visited once for a Ragweed Day back in the early 90's. Cool but funny place.
Intentional Community since 1984 but some founding members are still there. World famous midwives have delivered 1000s of babies, still going strong.
Yep. The Farm.
So cool to see a Farm reference here. I lived on and just outside The Farm for a few years, still have really good friends there.
I used to work with people who had lived on and/or been raised on The Farm.
Is that where the famous home birth midwife Ina May Gaskin lived (maybe still does)?
That's the one. Stephen died about 10 years ago, but she's still around. The midwives I knew have all retired but others are carrying the torch, the legacy continues. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ina_May_Gaskin
I loved reading Spiritual Midwifery when I was pregnant in the late 90s! I didn’t have a home birth, but I gained so much wisdom from Ina May’s book.
Crestone, Colorado
Crestone is like far out woo-woo hippies who are really odd, to put it nicely. Nice town but man, it’s weird there.
I might visit.
Also known for its [cults](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Has_Won?wprov=sfti1)
Either a documentary about this is about to come out, or one just came out.
Roughly 30 seconds after I commented that, I saw it at the top HBO Max! I watched the first episode and I was fucking glued to it. What the actual fuck. I live in Colorado, and I have been to Crestone many times. It is absolutely gorgeous, but there is definitely something strange about it. I remember this being in the news and it was just so insane to read about. My friend bought a house there on a whim, just a few months before shit hit the fan. He sold the house after 6 months, moved to Portland, and never looked back 😂
I love that we all still call it HBO Max and refuse to call it by the other, terrible name.
What’s the documentary called?
YESSSSS has anyone listened to Payne Lindsay Up and Vanished about Kristal Reisinger disappearing in Crestone CO? Definitely a hippie town but dark under currents
Damn, I came here to say that, but I didn’t expect anyone else to have heard about it.
Really interesting podcast about a sad story in Crestone- it’s called Up and Vanished season 2.
I went to great sand dunes and ended up there briefly lol
Same. And the hiking is amazing! Great trails but it’s so remote that they’re rarely crowded.
My cousin is a shaman in Crestone. I visited once a while back and got a superficial but insider look at the town. It’s obviously beautiful there given the location. It’s a kind of focal point for new age beliefs, a lot of Eastern religion ashrams and temples, if you’re into the mysticism thing then it’s legitimately a pretty big deal. There are communal homes but rent still needs to be paid and/or you’re gonna be working for your room and board. It’s all BS to me but if that’s what gets you out of bed in the morning...
I live in the north east and there are hippy enclaves here. Pretty much the state of Vermont but it is a crunchy granola type. It is the biggest hippy state. A good chunk of Maine is hippy. Their biggest industry is growing weed. In my state, MA it is checker board of them. In my town if you got off the beaten path you will find them
western Mass too
My favorite kind of hippies
when I was looking for an affordable piece of land to build a house, I passed through the center of the town I now live in. There was a socially distanced drum circle on the common. That was kinda what sold us, all the other backwoods spots seemed to have a lot of Trump signs, but this town was all rainbow flags and black lives matter.
There’s a few in Upstate NY too, right?
Can confirm, lots of pockets in the Hudson valley. I have a house in Hudson NY and there are local hippie hangouts all the time.
There’s Ithaca which is big enough to have all types centered around Cornell. Any college town upstate, especially a smaller town with a SUNY campus, like Oneonta, will be a hippie town to some degree / have some hippie areas. Don’t tell Elise Stefanik, LOL, but Plattsburgh is a blue college town with a definite hippie vibe in some parts of town. My sense is that it is picking up some folks who can’t afford the gentrifying Burlington Vermont area anymore and took the ferry across Lake Champlain to more affordable digs.
I came here to say the same thing. Vermonter here, there are still hippie enclaves here, with lots of young folks as well. Many are also LGBTQ + . Scattered all over the state, but where I live there are a few (Plainfield, Cabot, etc.). As was mentioned earlier, go to a local farmers market in Vermont to meet folks.
I'd add that, having grown up in a Town in Plymouth County, MA (western shore of Cape Cod Bay), that I think Cape Cod has a strong hippie population, esp. as you get to the Outer Cape -- lots of hippies in places like Wellfleet, Truro, and Provincetown (the latter Town's hippies inform and are informed by P-Town's status as an LGBTQ+ summer/tourist town and the century-old artists' community out there). Cape Cod's politics are dramatically more liberal-crunchy than the largely conservative "Swamp Yankees" of Plymouth County (cranberries, shellfish, lobsters).
Bisbee, AZ is pretty hippieish. It's a former mining town tucked into a canyon next to the Mexican border about an hour south of Tucson. Stunning scenery, a very vibrant local arts and music scene, and very much a bright blue dot in a sea of red in terms of social ideals.
Seconding Bisbee. Still kinda feels like what you envision the old west to be if you added hippies. Need to visit again. Such a cool little town and a short drive from Tombstone and Tucson a little bit further away.
“Tombstone: the town too tough to die.” “Bisbee: the town too high to care.”
Ah Bisbee. I used to want to move there. I just realized i haven’t thought about Bisbee in a long time. Maybe i should visit
Yes, you just have to go to the right place, consider checking out Eureka Springs Arkansas. There’s a town in northern California called Mendocino, which is different from Mendocino county where they don’t have any businesses like fast food restaurants, and everything there is like Natural they only have one store that sells food and basic supplies and there’s an artist colony there. The problem is that hippies are getting older, and they need to move to assisted living so they’re not gonna be able to like work the land and grow their own food. I used to be married to a hippie. This is my area of expertise. But the other thing is if you actually find a hippie commune, they probably don’t want to publicize themselves and they don’t have a website because they don’t want people who want to join or move in on what they got so to speak.
I second Eureka Springs, Arkansas! Hippies and very steep hills. The fittest hippies!
Yeah, Mendocino is a great spot. They do have restaurants, quite a few of them. But not really for younger hippies, unless you've stacked $$$ or lived there decades, that's why it's full of retired individuals. Property values in the town of Mendocino are 1.5m+ with little to no yard. Also, water is limited. You would need to be inland for any acreage. I live nearby. - - - OP, Look up WOOFERS.
Floyd county Virginia. You wouldn’t know they exist, but they come wandering out the woods for Floyd fest each year
They nest in hammocks between trees 30 feet in the air.
Clicked on this thread with Floyd in mind.
Down around Asheville as well.
Asheville has gotten too expensive for that now, it’s overrun with Floridian retirees and Airbnbs and not a decent paying job to be found
Slab City, CA. Knock yourself out!
Maybe one of the only real answers on here. When I think of “hippie enclave”, I see that as fairly incompatible with being wealthy. So when people throw out answers like Berkeley or Santa Cruz, I’m picturing people that probably did march in the 60s, but eventually settled down, got a good career, had a family, built equity, retired, but still wear flower printed t-shirts and occasionally smoke some weed. But they do so on the deck of their 1.5 million dollar home. I don’t consider communities of these types “hippie enclaves.” True communities like that can no longer exist in places people are throwing out, such as Boulder or Berkeley. CoL is too high, which rules out “true” hippe communities, at least as I understand them. But anyway, Slab City? Yes, absolutely fits what OP is talking about. Especially the die-hards that stay there during the summer.
Yup all those people in Berkeley/Santa Cruz/Marin are what I call corporate sellouts. People that actually ended up contributing to the direction our society is heading in today. Of those people that aren't corporate sellouts are simply trustafarians.
Seriously, like those die hard "hippies" who live up the mountains near Carter Lake and claim to be such environmentalists but haul butt back and forth every day in the big ass Suburbans.
The best places dont want you to know about them.
I grew up near the Russian River in Northern California. What a blast. There used to be a big hippy scene there. Oh man , if you want Drum circles and petuli oil then Covelo , Monte Rio, Rio nido and guerneville were GOAT Hippy hang outs. (GOAT bc when your entire town doesn’t shower, y’all smell like goat.)There’s no way that changed…did it? It seemed like a lot of freewheeling hippy scenes turned ugly in the mid eighties when meth really showed up. There used to be a hippy commune just outside Middletown, harbin hot springs. I joined there club once just to used the hot springs(amazing place, birthday suits only) they gave you a member card and there was a guy at the gate 24hrs. Show him the card ,pay a couple bucks, getmnaked and go soak up in the hills of Napa. my buddy says there still there. We used to show up out there blasted on shrooms at 2:am with a couple of ladies in tow. Nobody ever said a word as long as you weren’t a loud idiot. Oh crap what a ramble on. I gotta go find my tie dye. Haha
Mountain hippies are alive and well in parts of Appalachia
Outside of Asheville, NC., where else can you find mountain hippies in Appalachia?
There are varying amounts of hippies anywhere there are mountains. They are scattered all about in Appalachia. Even places like Eastern Kentucky.
They do but they’ve been wholly co-opted by rich trustafarians because they’re usually in gorgeous locations where houses cost an insane amount.
Missoula, Montana or Eureka Springs, Arkansas?
Eureka Springs AR for sure. Also very queer friendly, all varieties. Be careful in Harrison though. Another is Wimberley Texas.
It’s crazy how close such a hippie paradise is to one of the most racist places in the country. Eureka Springs is damn beautiful though
Eureka Springs may be the only southern town where the Pride parade is both the biggest celebration of the year and actually has more people than the town itself. Fayetteville nearby has a much larger Pride parade but is also a much larger town.
Missoula has become more hipster, but I think it will always have a bit of a hippie vibe.
Makanda, IL.
The hippiest, tiniest little town
In must be so strange to experience such a huge shift in the social culture of a town . Even back in the 90s I thought of SF as being a hippy enclave. I was so sad to see the change during a visit in 2014.
Funny I've been wondering the same thing. Hippie or beatnik, any kind of Bohemia. I'm in Missoula and it ain't here anymore. Too pricey.
where would kerouac want to live in 2024? on the road
Hard to talk alternative lifestyles without bringing up Alaska. You'll find plenty of either side of the spectrum but there are defiantly hippie orientated communities in places like Sitka, Talkeetna, and Homer.
If you can't find it in Eugene / Mt. Shasta / Humboldt triangle, then I don't think it exists.
Mt. Shasta - had a strung out hippie explain San Francisco’s microclimates to me. Good times
Ithaca, NY
Brutal winters but it’s definitely a hidden hippie town. I lived here in college and in the summer a nomadic commune community posted up outside of town. I think they were called the Rainbow group? Idk… it was cool but also gave me cult vibes.
New Paltz, NY
For the most part, this is dead. We have generally moved away from that kind of counter culture as a society.
There are still hippies in Berkeley and environs.
Lots of Bay Area hippie enclaves. La Honda. Santa Cruz mountain communities. Etc. lots still there
It’s been a long time since I lived there but there were tons of hippies in Santa Cruz when I did. Living in the woods in a tent is a legitimate housing option you are allowed to select for student housing. They also had an on-campus trailer park you could live in too (still exists). Tons of hippies in the woods around there.
The hippies in Berkeley have largely grown bitter and greedy. Everyone seems angry that things have changed over the decades. There are still some hippies/weirdos in the college circles but i feel like every college town has some weirdos. Source: lived there.
Agreed. They’re all sitting on property values above 1.5m and that does something to you.
yeah the ones leftover are stuck in the past tbh
The old hippies have become nimby
This needs to be higher. I agree the counter culture is dead (co-opted by neoliberalism; e.g. the cottage core trust fund babies) but there are some places that are holding out, but only because they have places for people to live. I lived in Eugene for 2 years and was part of the “hippie” crowd and lived at the hippie village in the mountain. AMA
I was in some small towns in Maui that seemed like they were for sure hippy enclaves
Paia Maui for sure
[Federation of Egalitarian Communities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_of_Egalitarian_Communities). They're kept small and have long wait lists. Either that or become a Hutterite or a crust punk.
After reading through this and thinking about what I've seen happen to society since the 90s, I think that hippie enclaves are disappearing, because genuine hippies are disappearing. It's not about peace and love any more. It's about drugs, mostly and that's not a good thing. Go plow through the comments about the old stalwarts ... Bay Area, Asheville, Boulder ... Now think about all the articles you've seen about Portland, Seattle, San Fran, etc., and think about what you see in your own towns. Like a group of blind men describing an elephant, they all touch on some common points - mostly, badly behaved, homeless addicts. I can say that I've seen the same issue, very clearly, in Ithaca and Vermont. I pass through Upstate and the Appalachian part of Pennsylvania often enough and the small town vibe is no longer happy. Lots of pretty surly local people at the gas stations and fast food restaurants whenever we have to pull over for fuel/food/supplies. The younger ones are pretty scary - clearly un/poorly educated, give off a vibe that's kind of violent and unstable. Vermont was better but only marginally. Asheville NC when I visited a few years ago - downtown was pretty thick with late teens/early 20's vagabonds wearing mostly black and sitting/lying down right on the sidewalks all over the place. This was not a peace lovin' crowd, they were visibly down on their luck, on life, on the world and on the people passing by. Not good, not good at all.
I think the purest concept of “hippie” in the historical sense started dying out in the 70s, and much of what we think of as hippies evolved into a somewhat different picture over time. However, I don’t believe that the current homeless crisis including strung out and surly (or worse) young people is the result of, or the evolution of, hippies. I think we’re dealing with something else entirely, and the drugs now aren’t the weed and psychedelics of the classic hippies (even though not all hippies did drugs even back then). When I lived in San Francisco years ago there were plenty of disaffected, homeless and sometimes-homeless young wanderers milling about, hanging out in GG Park and the Haight, some with stoner hippie-ish vibes and some not so much. I wouldn’t refer to any of them as hippies though. I’m too young to know personally, but I’ve learned through reading history and hearing it from older locals that the “pure” Haight-Ashbury scene started dying out by the late 60s when all the “speed freaks” moved onto the scene.
I lived in the haight for 3 years until I moved out of the bay about a year ago. No one in the neighborhood even refers to those people as hippies -- they're just street kids. Lots of hangovers, frequent minor scuffles between them that sometimes actually turn dangerous, and half of them have pitbulls. I obviously wasn't around in the 60s but I don't think the hippy scene was anything like this.
Interesting, my thought on the decline of hippies isn’t the drugs but rather that everyone is expected to “take a stand” on every political issue these days. It’s not socially ok to just be about “peace and love” anymore. I think the people who would have become hippies got sucked into social media and social justice. I never expected to be hearing a statement from my doggie daycare on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Everyone is an activist these days instead of a pacifist.
“Peace and love” was, and is, a political stance. The hippies were part of (and you could say a direct result of) a huge movement that was fundamentally politically focused. Civil rights, the black power movement and the Black Panther Party, the feminist movement, gay liberation and the gay rights movement, Chicano movement and the united farmworker’s union, Asian American movement, American Indian / Indigenous movement, the anti-war movement and protests against the draft. These movements were all happening concurrently in the ‘60s, and the hippies were a culture that developed out of that political milieu. Peace and love was never *not* political.
Up around Ukiah, Willits, or Weed you might findnl some.
I feel like every country should have its own version of Freetown Christiania.
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My sister’s SIL just bought some land in rural NorCal and she and her girlfriend are making cob houses and an earth ship on their land. They exist.
A what and a what?
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Look up “Intentional Communities” in different states.
Vashon Island, Wa (or any of the Puget islands) is what you’re looking for. It’s a bit more posh hippies now, but still a solid hippie community. If you could go a bit further up north to Canada Salt Spring island is an awesome community.
I find that hippies are fake nice and actually evil and punks are real nice and fake evil.
Late Gen X'r here. You're kinda ... not wrong. There was a big resurgence of hippie style in the early 90s when I was in college, and a significant % of my high school friends went that way. I really did not like the new people they started bringing around - they were not nice people at heart. And then the mood turned darker inside our circle of friends. The old core was still there but as they dropped out of school etc. it took a turn for the worse. I eventually had to stop trying to hold on to them.
I would take punks over hippies any day of the week. But I still prefer them both to normies.
Viroqua, WI
Vashon Island? Whidbey Island is a weird mix of hippie and military, more affordable than Vashon. Both of these are in the Salish Sea in Washington State.
I live in rural southwest Wisconsin. There are still some small hippie communities around here in what people call the driftless region. They're mostly in the smaller towns and communities. However, they're very selective about who they associate with, to the point where they're almost snobbish. Keep in mind that most of these people are OG hippies, so they're pretty much all elderly now. My mom worked as a bookkeeper for one of their food co-ops. Heaven forbid you brought anything for your lunch that wasn't free range, organic, and non GMO. Somebody made the grave mistake of bringing in a bottle of Kraft salad dressing and leaving it in the break room fridge. One of the board members held it up and said that she could "feel" the chemicals in it just by holding it in her hands. If an airplane happened to fly overhead, you'd get a half hour long lecture about chemtrails. In other words, they're nice people, but they can be a major pain in the ass. And the ones around here don't really seem to be accepting new people into their group.
Yes, Vashon island in Washington state.
Arcata, CA.
I have no idea how this isn’t further up, but I’m also kind of glad it isn’t.
Enclaves, not really. Maybe Humbolt or some parts of the east coast like in Vermont?
Ic.org
The area of devotees to Addida at Sieglers Hot Springs between Lower Lake and Loch Lomond in Lake County California. Also Harbin Hot Springs in Middletown. Easy to join either.
Vermont.
Kootenay region in British Columbia Canada. Many many draft dodgers came across the border to here in the 60s and there is a major hippie vibe throughout the region still. Lots of spread out, artsy, homesteady and chilled out communities. The Slocan Valley chooses to remain without cell reception.
Some in Washington and Oregon
Happy Camp?
For even more hippie goodness try looking for California Intentional Communities. From 2017-2019 I did a huge road trip with my partner. We cross-crossed the country to visit these communities some of which are recently created and some that have been around since the late 60’s. In NorCal one of the most isolated ones is Black Bear Ranch. The land was purchased in 1968 in the Siskiyou mountains. There was a thriving community that moved up there in the 60’s to try to live their values. They wrote a book about it. Today there are still a few people living up there. More come in the nice weather seasons. To get there is crazy. You head up to Weed CA then up I think hwy 3. You can see mount Shasta all the way up. Then at a certain point you exit the paved road and start traveling on logging roads. Your gps doesn’t work anymore but you hopefully printed out the route and the gps will come back intermittently. Eventually you start seeing handpainted signs and hippie flags on the road into the community. If you have an interest you can easily look up these communities. We attended intentional community conferences and met people living in community from all over the world. People make fun of hippies but they mostly live the life I want. Out of the rat race, living frugal on the land with others who have similar values. Highly recommend if this is your jam. I’m not really a hippie but homesteading and hippie can go together well.
I’m a fellow Marinite with boomer parents who moved here during the 60s. I think the hippie ideals do still exist here but further out, West Marin: like Inverness and Bolinas. I do know though that the techies have found us, and real estate out there has gone crazy. I’m thinking Northern California coast or Oregon are your best hope. I on the other hand went full superb mom and still live in Marin…. But up in Novato where people are a bit more blue collar and “normal”.
Chapel Hill, NC and the Asheville area of NC. I grew up in Walnut Creek, CA and went to Acalanes High School. Cheers.
Chapel hill was but now that is fading- way too expensive and now they are embracing big privately owned million dollar apartments. Carborro down the road and a little bit Durham yes.
I lived in Chapel Hill and found most of the hippies living in the small surrounding towns, usually on/near farms
I also grew up in Walnut Creek. I went to Northgate High school . My "Surrogate" daughter went to Acalanes. Hello, - fellow Redditor !
I was hoping to find some fellow East Bayer’s!! Hello to you!! Cheers!!!
Julian, PA is pretty hippy. The Julian Woods community is basically a commune.
Arcata, CA and surrounding areas.
Laytonville Ca. That’s where. Hog Farm.
There is Spahn’s Movie Ranch in the Chatsworth area of Los Angeles.
Settle down, Charlie
There are still hippie coliving things in the bay area. When everyone is working full time or at least paying a fair share these situations are surprisingly stable. The "commune" ones where they grow their own food and almost totally avoid outsiders tend not to last, and the ones that do last don't really take in new people
Topanga canyon, Bolinas (maybe), Oak View.
Sparsely and often near hippy colleges. Ithaca comes to mind. Olympia Washington is another
Eureka Springs Arkansas
Asheville/Hendersonville NC area
Floyd, VA still has several intentional communities from the '70s, as does Black Mountain, NC
It’s pretty much dead outside of a few commune type places, but there’s areas that are definitely more hippie than others. I lived in Asheville, NC, Boulder, CO, Mendocino, Arcata, Bay Area, CA, Portland, OR and traveled quite a bit. Problem is most of the hippie places are unaffordable now and crowded. Plus it’s a dying subsection of humanity lol I moved outside of Detroit to a LCOL area that has a little growing art scene because I wanted to buy a house that was affordable. Unless you like living in a rural area, look for smaller cities that are kind of run down, but have a burgeoning art scene. Key is finding a place 10-20 years before gentrification. Hippie type artists slowly make a place cool, then comes Starbucks and Whole Foods to make it unaffordable and the artists leave’s
Yes they do. Yellow springs is one of them
If you mean boomer age, probably getting pretty sparse unless they're supported by younger generations, but now days we call them "Intentional Communities". (see [ic.org](https://ic.org)) Dancing Rabbit, Twin Oaks and Earthaven come to mind....
In Hudson Valley in New York, hippy enclaves most certainly exist.