LS,
I can take allergy pills and they help a little bit, but we keep cats in the guest room/office at night and in the bedroom, where they are not allowed at all I have an air purifier for while I'm sleeping. It isn't terribly hard to find homes for cats, we know a lot of cat lovers with cat lover friends :P The area where I live is pretty far north and there is a lot of people living rurally and with outbuildings, arenas and barns that need cats to keep the mice out

There is also unfortunately a lot of backwards brutality that goes with rural life as well. We also have a lot of of people in remote areas living in poverty and that equals a lot of un-spayed and un-neutered pets. The North is a great place for people who love animals though, we have moose and bear and deer and foxes and chipmunks and all kinds of birds. I'm from Vancouver and while I sometimes miss the city, I really love living in "the wild". We live in a house in the city with a big yard that we own, not rent, so we are able to keep as many pets comfortably as we do. Our dream is to save up for a nice place in the rural area and have a little farm where we can adopt old dogs from the spca and they can retire with us. Also I'd like to be able to take a cow if one needed a home, or a goat or whatever. For now, it's cats and dogs in the city