Something in the way we move

American Demographics, Nov, 1999 by Glenn Thrush

Rural migration in the future will be a manifest destiny defined by natural beauty and human desires.

The two-hour drive on Route 87 from titanic Phoenix to tiny Payson, Arizona, is a passage from subdivided suburbia to the mythical expanses of the Old West. The road rises from a desert valley crowded with commuters and prefab townhouses into the very heart of Ponderosa pine country and John Ford westerns. On a map, Payson's Gila County is a green oasis in a desert state where almost everything else is portrayed in barren, bleached white.

Over a decade ago, Janet Crane, a harried single mother with a young son, first made the ride up into the Payson pines to clear her mind after a particularly bad week at work. "It was like nothing I ever saw before in my life," the 37-year-old New York native says. "I vowed then and there to move." It took her nine years to do it, but in 1997 Crane finally made it, although she paid a huge price for the privilege. What she found were higher housing costs and lower wages, and because Payson was out in the middle of the nowhere, everything cost about 15 percent more. In order to relocate, Crane says she had to move into what she calls a "four-plex" apartment building crammed unglamorously between two insurance agencies on Payson's commercial strip. "But when you get outside," she says, "there's the view."

In the last decade, Americans of all ages have been moving back to non-metro rural counties, reversing nearly a century of population losses in former farming and mining counties. The Census Bureau reports that non-metro counties - which represent three-fourths of the country's total - experienced a 5.9 percent population surge between 1990 and 1996. The most explosive growth, according to Loyola University demographer Kenneth Johnson, occurred in the 190 counties whose economies are based on retirement and the 285 counties that are ruled by recreation. For those reasons, many have chalked up the boom to retirees and ski-lovingyuppies.

But that only tells part of the story. The counties that did best of all, whatever their economic base, were the ones that offered an ideal climate, postcard perfect mountains, and cool blue waters, according to a new report. And virtually all of them were in western states. The report suggests that in the future, the counties that grow and the ones that falter may be determined by the simplest of human motives: people's desire to live in pretty places.

MAJESTY AND MAGNETISM

In the 1990s, aesthetics has translated into growth. David McGranahan, an economist with the Economic Research Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has found that there is a very strong correlation between rural-county population and job growth and how each county ranks in terms of its physical attractiveness - or to use the more technical term, its "natural amenities."

Surveying 2,260 non-metro counties nationwide (excluding Alaska and Hawaii), McGranahan created a rating scale to measure an area's attractiveness and migrant magnetism. With a limited travel budget - but access to mounds of raw data - he noticed that many of the fastest-growing counties had two things in common: They had temperate climates and they were easy on the eyes. So he decided to catalog the climatic factors and then threw in a pair of aesthetic measurements: the amount of water a county has, plus its "topographical variation." For the latter measurement, he defined 21 separate land formations ranging from "flat plains" to "high mountains." The more hills a county had, the higher the rating. Then he factored all of his variables together, laid them into his computer modeling system, and rated each rural county on a seven-tier scale, based on a standard deviation of +11.2 to -6.4.

What McGranahan found, he writes in his report, "Natural Amenities Drive Rural Population Change," released last month, was that from 1970 to 1996, high-scoring counties tended to double their population (although not all high-amenity counties had high growth), while more than half of the low-scoring counties lost population.

So what did it take to make his amenities top-25 list? "The ones that rate high have interesting terrain," he says. "You know, lakes, rivers, mountains." And the counties that bring up the rear? "For the most part," he says, "they are basically flat."

Eager to avoid over-generalizations - not to mention hate mail - McGranahan is quick to point out that his results don't factor in many other kinds of variables that make localities desirable - the chief ones being a small-town environment or proximity to urban centers. The other caveat he adds is that perfectly lovely counties with an abundance of one particular amenity - say, mild winters or beautiful lakes - but a lack of others, such as topographical variations, may not necessarily land in the upper reaches of the scale.

That said, the crown jewel of rural counties turns out to be Humboldt, in north central California, which scored an 11.2, including a perfect 21 on McGranahan's peaks-to-valleys topography measurement. Temperatures in January there average 47[degree]F, with 16.8 days of sunshine during that month. Although Humboldt wasn't the biggest gainer in terms of population or job growth in the '90s - 2.2. percent and 13 percent, respectively - it is joined on the list by some real winners. California's Calaveras County, for example, in the No. 5 spot, grew by 22.4 percent, and employment grew by 17 percent. Population in Summit, Colorado - No. 8 on the list - grew by 43.5 percent, while employment grew by 52.2 percent. On average, the population of the top 25 counties grew nearly 18 percent from 1990 to 1998.