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Going Rural
Child magazine, November 2004
A few pictures hanging in a conference room helped convince Ken Parker to change his life. Parker was a vice president at J.P. Morgan, in the middle of a meeting at the firm’s Wall Street offices, when he suddenly took a good look at three photos on the wall. "They showed this beautiful farm, with gardens in full bloom," recalls Ken, whose grandparents were farmers. "And I just thought, ‘What am I doing in this concrete jungle? I should be in a place like that with my family.’”
A year later, Ken, his wife, Carole, and three kids moved from their home in Westfield, NJ, to a 600-acre ranch in Noble, OK. After a few months of consulting, Ken helped found a J.P. Morgan spinoff, RiskMetrics, and began heading up its software division. Today, instead of enduring a three-hour subway and train commute each day to and from his New York job, Parker takes a three-minute walk down a dirt road to his office.
While the Parkers’ move may sound extreme, increasingly, American families are relocating from metropolitan areas to country towns--without making the financial sacrifices traditionally associated with rural life. Even quintessential New Yorker Ron Galotti, former publisher of GQ magazine and the inspiration for Sex and the City’s Mr. Big, recently sold his Hamptons house and Central Park West apartment and moved with his wife and their 5-year-old child to a farm in Vermont. Equipped with faxes, broadband Internet connections, and cell phones, more parents are continuing their careers or starting new home-based businesses--and sometimes enjoying a better standard of living than they had before.
“Technological advances have made it possible, for the first time, to live in rural areas and maintain your lifestyle and your connection to the broader world," says Brian Hoey, a research fellow at the University of Michigan’s Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life. "So more middle-class families are making the move."
Today’s troubled economy has accelerated the trend, says Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes magazine and author of the new book Life 2.0: How People Are Transforming Their Lives by Finding the Where of Their Happiness. Karlgaard found many families across the country opting to leave urban coastal areas because of the high cost of living and fears of terrorism. “The single-minded ambition that dominated in the 1980s and 1990s was replaced by an ambition to achieve life success,” says Karlgaard. And people have found “genuine happiness” in small towns, he says, thanks to economic relief as well as more time for themselves and for their families.
Census data shows most rural areas in the U.S. growing at the fastest rate in decades, with roughly one in four Americans living in rural towns, according to demographer Kenneth Johnson, Ph.D., of Loyola University in Chicago. After losing roughly 1.4 million residents during the 1980s, rural counties grew by 3.5 million people in the nineties, Dr. Johnson says.
Although about one in five Americans lives in a rural town, until recently most people who lived in the country were, by necessity, willing to live cheaply or off the land as jobs were scarce.Today’s new rural settlers may appreciate the outdoors, but most aren’t giving up their Volvos to be there. In fact, many, like Parker, are high-powered professionals who work such long hours that they hire help to mow the lawn. As older suburbs have become more congested, expensive, and plagued with urban-like problems, many parents are opting for "exurbia"--rural communities on the outer fringes of metro areas--and will commute long distances to city jobs. "A lot of people would like to live in Mayberry," says Joel Kotkin, author of The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution is Reshaping the American Landscape. "But they’re finding they have to move farther and farther out to find it."
RELIVING THEIR CHILDHOODS
When Geetanjali Akerkar, M.D., a gastroenterologist, and her husband, Russell Ruthen, a Cisco Systems product manager, moved to West Newbury, MA,, they weren’t seeking an authentic rural experience. Like many who move to exurbia, the couple, who have a son, Neil, 7, and twin boys Avi and Amar, 2, had spent their adult years working in major cities, including New York, San Francisco and Boston. They were looking for a quiet, affordable neighborhood like the one in Rockland County, NY, where they both grew up. They quickly discovered how different rural New England could be from most suburbs today.
West Newbury, a sleepy country town with 4,100 residents, has good schools, affordable housing, and little crime or shops. “Driving on a main road, you see farms and apple orchards,” says Dr, Geetanjali. “Most of suburbia isn’t like that now. It’s just malls, traffic, development.”
Still, Geetanjali, whose parents emigrated from India, worries about the town’s lack of diversity: Less than 2% of its residents are non-white. According to researcher Hoey, many city dwellers move to small towns because they want a sense of belonging--only to discover they feel out of place because of the homogeneity. "We’re both going to have to try harder to expose our kids to their heritage," says Russell, who is Jewish.
Still, dining on their porch at night under the stars, Dr. Geetanjali and Russell never wish they lived in the suburbs. In fact, as West Newbury threatens to become more developed and popular with exurbanites like themselves, Dr. Geetanjali is thinking about moving even farther into the country. "Soon we’re going to see other houses from our porch," she says. "I’d like to be somewhere where we don’t see anything but woods, and where there are no lights except the stars."
GOING HOME AGAIN
Though the urge to return to one’s roots is age old, these days people don’t have to wait to retire to do it. "With today’s technology, you have the ability to move almost anywhere and continue doing what you’re doing,” says Kotkin.
But as the Parkers would discover, going home after years away involves some big adjustments. After 13 years of living in metro areas, Ken and Carole, a stay-at-home mom, yearned to be closer to their extended families in rural Oklahoma. They were also tired of the New York rat race. "I felt like my kids were growing up without me,” says Ken of daughters Matina, 17, and Whitney, 15, and son Leo, 13. “I wasn’t home until after they were in bed, and I left early in the morning.”
But it wasn’t until the Internet boom that Ken felt he could afford to move his family back. While he earns less now than he did at J.P. Morgan, he says costs are so low that the family has more cash. They bought their sprawling ranch for half the selling price of their New Jersey home. Their real estate taxes are about one fifth what they paid before.
But, like so many driven professionals who move to the country, Ken hasn’t been able to leave the fast race behind. "Quite often I’m working so hard, I might as well be back in that concrete jungle," Ken says, admitting he often works weekends. Although he dines with his family several times during the week and has made it to a few parent-teacher conferences, he says, "my attendance is not perfect. But before it was a perfect zero."
And while Ken, who comes from several generations of farmers, felt strongly that he wanted his kids to know what it was like to work the land, he admits he rarely does chores with them. "We live on 600 acres with two ponds, and we don’t often enjoy that," says Carole.
The biggest adjustment for the Parkers, however, involved their kids’ education. Back in Westfield, their kids had enjoyed one of the best school systems in the state. "On the East Coast, parents are more ambitious and push the schools to be better," says Carole, a former teacher. By comparison, the Noble schools "don’t have much to offer," she says.
Worried that her children were bored and with no good private schools nearby, Carole homeschooled all three of her children for 18 months, until she was convinced that they had acquired a love of learning and would be self-motivated enough to succeed. Now back in school, the kids are thriving.
LIVING IN TWO WORLDS
Some couples leave the city reluctantly. Take Marc and Susan Parent, who lived in New York Cityís Greenwich Village for 12 years before moving to rural Pennsylvania in 1997. "We loved the city, the restaurants, the museums, and our friends," says Marc, author of Believing it All: What my Children Taught Me About Trout Fishing, Jelly Toast, and Life.
But when they had their first son, Casey, now 10, their one-bedroom apartment started to feel cramped. Now living in a modest three bedroom, turn-of-the-century farmhouse and barn on 12 acres in Cherry Valley, PA, Casey and his brothers, Owen, 8, and Willem, 2, have ample room to roam free, says Susan, a teacher. "If we could have gotten a bigger apartment and a weekend country house, though, we would have done that," says Marc. "But that was a dream we couldn’t afford."
They do what they can to stay connected to their old life, making the 90-minute drive into New York once a month, Like so many who have left the city for the country, they find they don’t feel quite welcome in either world. With city friends, Marc has sensed a subtle superiority "Once people hear you have chickens, they write you off as if you have nothing to say," says Marc. Meanwhile, the locals of Cherry Valley have their own prejudices. One neighbor greeted Susan with an angry tirade “about how New Yorkers were infesting the place and how they had to lock their doors now and there was graffiti.”
In many rural towns, longtime residents resent the influx of outsiders, says researcher Hoey. "Part of it is that when all these outsiders come in, the property values go up and force the people who have lived there for generations to move farther and farther out into these rural ghettos. Also, small-town residents tend to cherish their traditional values and worry about those the exurbanites will bring into the community.
Despite living in Cherry Valley for more than eight years, Susan and Marc still haven’t formed close friendships there. "I have play dates with other moms for the kids, not for me," says Susan. Instead, the Parents say they enjoy simple pleasures at home, like cooking fresh eggs from their chickens or watching the boys catch fireflies and then driving them to the Dairy Queen in their pajamas. "When you have kids, you go back to whatever you were as kids," says Marc. "That’s what we’re doing.”
MAKING THE RESORT TOWN HOME
On his 40th birthday, Mike Busley quit his job as a business manager for defense contractor Lockheed Martin in San Diego. A few months later, he and his wife Denise, a full-time mom, moved with Kellee, then 10, and Bobby, then 6, to Traverse City, MI, a popular vacation spot known for its breathtaking 180 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline. There, they opened the Grand Traverse Pie Company.
Mike had never made a pie before. Denise had no particular interest in baking. But Mike knew he wanted a change in lifestyle and figured it was “now or never.” Michigan natives, Mike and Denise had wanted to move back to the state to be closer to their families, and the couple had been visiting Traverse City since they were kids. Mike hit on the idea of a pie shop after visiting a popular family-run bakery in San Diego. He thought it would be a good business, as Traverse City considers itself one of the cherry capitals of the U.S. but had no pie shops.
After training for a few months and securing a bank loan, the family moved to Traverse City and set up shop. They burned more than a few pies, but the store overflowed with customers.
Then winter came and the tourists went home. "One day that winter, there was a blizzard, we were freezing, and we sold maybe 15 pies the whole day," Mike recalls. "My wife was saying, ‘How is this ever going to work?’ I tried to keep her spirits up because opening the shop was originally my idea, but I was worried."
Studies show that people who relocate from metro areas tend to gravitate to seasonal vacation spots like Traverse City, which are rich with lakes, mountains, and other natural amenities, but these towns tend to be tougher places to earn a living. Prices are often inflated and thus aren’t as low as newcomers might expect them to be. "It’s very easy to come to a town like this with a romantic idea and fail," says Mike.
Bucking the odds, Mike grew sales by delivering pies to a store in Detroit. Then he and a partner opened two more shops in nearby towns and began supplying grocery store chains and selling pies through a Web site.
With business booming, Denise is now a full-time mom. Mike puts in longer days than when he worked for Lockheed, but with both kids working part-time in the pie shop, he says he says he’s closer to his family. "It feels good that my kids can see the values ofwork and responsibility," he says. "I teach them by showing them.
Child magazine, November 2004
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