Something in the way we move

American Demographics, Nov, 1999 by Glenn Thrush

To a great extent, McGranahan's data tell a tale of two regions. All of the counties in the top 25 are located in the West: In fact, you have to get to No. 40 to hit any county out of the West (Monroe County, Florida). Meanwhile, the ten lowest-amenity counties - all located in the Midwest - grew by a paltry 1 percent. You have to get to number 38 on the bottom 50 list to find one that is located outside of the upper Midwest (Simpson County, Kentucky). It's no great surprise that seven of the bottom ten list agriculture as their main industry.

The homeliest county of them all, according to McGranahan's scale, is Red Lake, Minnesota, a tiny farming county with bone-chilling winters, indifferent summers, and few large settlements. It doesn't have much water larger than the size of a livestock trough, and it scores a 1 on the topography scale. In layman's terms, it's flatter than a pool table. During the 1990s, Red Lake lost 5.3 percent of its residents. And it's got plenty of company. In all, seven of McGranahan's bottom ten are located in Minnesota. Over the border in North Dakota, not far from Red Lake, are two more bottom-ten dwellers: flat, virtually waterless Traill and Pembina Counties.

The irony, of course, is that the West and Midwest were the two areas of the country that were hit hardest by the sharp drop in agricultural, mining, and timber industries that all bottomed out in the 1980s. The difference, demographers say, is that the West has something with which to lure people back.

"The old patterns of boom and bust in population growth is pretty much ending in the non-metro West," says John Cromartie, an ERS researcher who tracks national migration patterns. And, he adds, "It's going to continue to grow steadily because it's such a pleasant place to live." As for the strapped agricultural Midwest, suffice it to say that America's prairie breadbasket will continue to go stale. "I have nothing against Minnesota or Iowa or Indiana - and I went to school in Wisconsin," McGranahan says, "but agriculture does well in flat, uninteresting country. Interesting-looking country makes for crummy farms, but [it's] where people want to go to live."

That Americans want to live in pretty places isn't news. What is surprising is the extent to which scenic beauty is becoming a major factor in their life decisions, among all class and income levels. Demographers have traditionally held to two basic rules for domestic migration patterns: older, well-off people move to warm places when they retire, and young, middle-means wage earners go where the money is. But times are changing, subtly and surely.

THINNER AIR, LOWER PAY

Last year, Dean Judson, then a demographer for the state of Nevada and now in the planning and research division of the U.S. Census Bureau, studied this phenomenon by conducting a detailed analysis of a survey of 1,400 people who moved to Oregon at the height of the state's in-migration boom in the early '90s. The respondents were among the 440,000 people who relocated to the state in the early 1990s - many of them fleeing the crippling California recession that pushed 2.1 million people out of the Golden State.