Advice from an old guy that went through this after moving to a new area and loosing my phat California income eventually. If you aren't working, pickup consulting gigs. They will probably suck and be high stress low reward, but it will help you build connections locally. Look for ones that don't just need a body but that really need help so you are in a position where your work is visible. Heck once I got in most of the 'come in and clean up our mess' jobs wanted to hire me to manage their teams/projects. Not ideal but it paid well and I have a pretty limited pool of bog standard dev work (or worse, internal IT dev) where I live anyways.

where do you find "come in and clean up our mess" jobs? i'd love to take on some of those (i actually enjoy doing that)