Rustic Disharmony

From the earliest days of the republic, the American countryside has been seen as a bastion of egalitarianism. But today, large swaths of rural America, from the rocky coast of Maine to the Rocky Mountains, are marked by class warfare caused by the increasing migration of well-heeled full- and part-time residents from metropolitan society.

This new migration is a reversal of historic U.S. migrant flows. For much of this century, Americans, especially the ambitious, left rural America for the great cities. But during the 1990s, this trend began to shift. Nonmetropolitan areas of the country gained 1.8 million people, compared with a loss of 1.4 million during the 1980s. Much of this growth, about 43%, represents outsiders moving to rural America.

The influx of city types is not equally distributed. The greatest growth has occurred in scenic places: coastal New England; the Appalachian foothills of North Carolina; and the foothills and valleys adjacent to the great western mountain ranges--the Sierras, Tetons, Wasatch, Rockies, Cascades and Sawtooths. “The upper-class dynamic is to move to very nice places where they lead the rural renaissance,” says University of Michigan demographer Bill Frey. “The lower classes get to move to less appealing places.”

The rush of the rich to rural havens has unsettled the local economic and social ecology. Attracted more by scenery and amenities than by good grazing land or mineral deposits, the newcomers are transforming the traditional resource-grounded economy into what Mary Chapman, senior fellow at the Denver-based Center for the New West, calls “an ephemeral economy” based largely on wealth transfers from urban areas.

“They don’t want to come here to live the way we live,” says Chapman, who lives in Delta, Colo., population 5,000. “They are the ones with the big houses on the ridge line. They see themselves as environmentalists, but all they are doing is creating a real estate economy.”

The trend has been facilitated and sustained by the continuing decline of the indigenous resource economy--fishing, timber, coal and other mining--because of weak energy, export and commodity prices. For example, cattle ranching in the West has dropped precipitously, from about 10 million head three decades ago to barely 1 million today. Unable to live off the land, many longtime residents have had little choice but to sell their homesteads to affluent outsiders.

The most immediate impact of the newcomers can be found in housing affordability. In many places, the prices of houses have soared far beyond the means of local residents. In some of the more favored exurban retreats--Jackson Hole, Wy., and Aspen, Colo., for example--prices have more than doubled this decade. The median home price in Park City, Utah, is near that of Beverly Hills, while the average home in Aspen fetches in excess of $1 million.

Considering who is buying these properties--actor Harrison Ford, director Oliver Stone, United Surgical founder Leon Hirsch, World Bank President James Wolfensohn and former Pespico President Don Kendall, to name a few--the steep rise in prices should not be too surprising. But local young families cannot begin to compete. As a result, they move farther and farther away from their birthplaces, according to Steve Seninger, an economist at the University of Montana. “There’s an imbalance that’s developing,” he says.

Wealthy people, to be sure, have maintained second homes in selected resort towns for generations. But because their homes are closed most of the year, the cultural and social impact of these part-timers on the locals is relatively slight. The recent growth of the super-affluent, owing largely to the bull market of the late ‘90s, and their migration to rural America has had far more dramatic effects. The development of the Internet, advanced telecommunications and regular air service have enabled these affluent urbanites to live year-round in the rural havens, which has accelerated the transition from a resource-based economy to one devoted to leisure-time activities and such mobile industries as software development, investment banking and telecommunications.

Their corresponding impact on the local culture often becomes more than economic. For example, many outsiders object, on environmental grounds, to hunting, ranching and mining practices. In turn, they are regarded by many locals as people who want only cappuccino parlors, good restaurants and fashionable boutiques and have little appreciation for the unspoken understandings that underpin authentic rural life. Particularly galling, says Seninger, is the newcomers’ penchant for fencing off their properties, thereby denying access to local residents who had fished or hunted on the “private” ranches under previous owners.

Some local observers call this foreign lifestyle “urbalism,” a blending of city amenities and a country setting. “City folks come to the country to have the peace and quiet but then want urban amenities,” says Dr. Florine Raitano, former mayor of Dillon, Colo., a popular second-home destination in the Rockies. “They come to live on a country road that they now want paved. And they hate it when the cows eat their daisies.”

They also frequently oppose economic projects--expanded mining operations, fertilizer plants, retail outlets--that promote jobs and convenience for local residents. “The sons and daughters of the pioneers remember when we had to drive down to Denver to get a fresh loaf of bread during a blizzard,” Raitano recalls. “So we see a Thrifty or a Wal-Mart and say ‘glory hallelujah,’ but the people with the second homes here are against this kind of development.”

Nowhere is this trend more evident than in Park City. Once listed as a ghost town in some guide books, the city was reborn as a ski town, then as a second-home site for the wealthy because of its scenic setting and proximity to the Salt Lake City airport. In the 1990s, Park City became something else: a hotbed of small investment banks, software firms and consultants. The influx of “remote entrepreneurs” has driven the permanently dwelling outsider population to more than 12,000, three times what it was in the ‘80s.

The effects of these economic and demographic shifts--Park City and surrounding Summit County are projected to have the nation’s highest rate of job growth over the next decade--epitomize the new class dynamics in the hinterlands. In the mid-1980s, says local realtor Anne McQuoid, houses and condos sold for $250,000. Today, these same properties command $700,000 to $1 million. In the first three months of 1998, 13 houses sold at prices exceeding $2.5 million.

The other half of the class equation has not disappeared entirely. In many Western communities, natives and poorer new migrants eke out livelihoods. The unpropertied live in trailer parks, now home to as many as one in six people in the rural intermountain West. Some find relatively high-paid seasonal work in construction; others take jobs in leisure colonies, which pay half as much as more traditional occupations. Still others have joined a steady exodus of ranchers to Kansas, Canada or Nebraska.

Another urban phenomenon has sprung up in the hinterlands: the emergence of a service industry largely made up of immigrant Latinos. Like their counterparts in Los Angeles or Denver, these Latinos perform many of the jobs that the Anglo locals refuse to do, but that the affluent migrants require, as maids, gardeners, workers in restaurants, bars and smart shops.

For some residents, the growing Latino presence can be unnerving. In Park City, one resident, encountering a group of Latinos drinking beer in a public park, wrote to the local newspaper complaining that the town should be renamed “Little Los Angeles.” Yet, the newly arrived affluent class’ dependency on Latino labor is indisputable: About one-seventh of the 7,000 people residing in Jackson Hole, according to the High Country News, are Latino. One valley below Aspen is home to about 10,000 Latinos, most of them Mexican immigrants.

Longtime residents fear that the new migration will fuel class and racial tensions even where Latinos have been prominent for centuries, such as in Colorado. Unlike native-born Latinos, the newcomers do not identify with the local area and, to a great extent, do not speak English. More to the point, they are in danger of becoming a rural version of the urban poor and a cause of social tension. These anxieties represent a powerful reversal of the egalitarian ethos once strong in these parts.

“We used to have a real diversity in our economy and our people, even though the media suggests we were a lot of rednecks”, Chapman says. “But we had working populations, Hispanics and Anglos, blue-collar people who worked all sorts of jobs. Now we have an economy dominated by these affluent whites whose values are changing everything.”