Fishing to Catch People Part 2: Landing the Fish
There’s now a cottage industry of these kinds of bumper stickers. And here I thought it was just my hometown.
There’s always been a tension in small town America between long-time residents and newcomers. When I was growing up on Wrightsville Beach in North Carolina, I remember a bumper sticker that pretty much summed it up: “Welcome to Wrightsville Beach. Now go home.”
We like the outside money visitors bring in; we just don’t want them to stick around and mess things up.
The share of people in the US living in rural areas is declining steadily (from 26% in 1970 to 14% in 2020), and those remaining are more likely to be older (51 on average, vs. 45 in urban areas), poorer (14.7% poverty rate vs. 11.3% urban) and sicker (rural folks are 19.6% more likely to be obese than urban residents; 27.3% more likely to have diabetes; and 13.5% more likely to smoke, with about 1/3 as many doctors nearby to treat them).
Those pressures are encouraging some rural communities to begin intentionally recruiting outsiders to not just visit, but move there. And there is real opportunity to find new residents: surveys consistently show more people wanting to move to rural areas than actually live there.
In Part 1 I laid out some of the reasons rural communities might want to focus more on recruiting people rather than companies, and in the next part I’ll look at the growing effort to recruit strangers to live in rural communities using monetary incentives, but today I want to focus more on what elements need to be in place on the ground when potential residents are considering moving to town. Here are three things that appear to be important:
Be friendly: A lot of small town folks are still like the bumper-sticker-baring folks from Wrightsville Beach – they’re skeptical about “come here’s.” A recent Wall Street Journal article profiled the tensions new residents have ignited in Dawson County, Georgia – bringing in new money and energy and higher levels of education, but also driving up housing prices and demanding new services.
Phelps Mill in Otter Tail County, Minnesota is lovely to visit, but Erik Osberg wants more than visitors (Photo Otter Tail County.
If you are trying to recruit new residents to your community, you need to get them to take a look. Erik Osberg, the “Rural Rebound Initiative Coordinator” in Otter Tail County, Minnesota has used a combination of county money, CARES Act Funding and local in-kind contributions to produce a documentary series and ongoing social media posts on the joys of living in the area. existing residents need to buy the strategy and maybe even get some training on how to sell merits of living there. Then you need to get the new folks to actually take a look. When someone visits the area to see the beauty, residents need to kick into gear and do their part to make the visitor feel welcome: “You don’t just walk up to somebody you think is cute and ask them to marry you,” Osberg told The Daily Yonder, (a terrific source of articles and data on rural revitalization). “You ask them for a date – and so we treat tourism as that date.” Once a new family comes to live there, Osberg makes sure they get connected to others through the “Grab-a-Bite” program.
Make Room: As rural places have gotten older, more residents are choosing to “age in place.” That’s good for them, but a challenge for folks looking to move there.
It’s going to be difficult to meet the current shortage of available housing in the US if we think only of the homes that are currently occupied, argues Donovan Rypkema of Place Economics. But while he US has a current housing shortage of 6.5 million units, there are more than 4.8 million homes built before 1970 that are standing vacant. With small investments of public dollars in repairs and renovations, many of these homes could be put back into use at an affordable cost.
Brent Lane and Hannah Schewtschenko of Ohio University made a similar argument in an unpublished paper last year, using a project in rural North Carolina as an example of how a housing rehab program could work in a rural place.
In 1996, the town of Edenton, NC (current population 4,539) was reeling as a manufacturing company closed, leaving 57 mill houses vacant. The homes could have been torn down, but instead the company agreed to donate the vacant homes to the town of Edenton and a nonprofit called Preservation NC. New owners then bought the homes for $20,000-$30,000 and used tax credits to help pay for the repairs. It was win-win for the community and the homebuyers: the new homeowners got affordable homes; local builders did much of the renovation; and the tax value of the land increased dramatically (valued at $610,000 in 1996, today it has a tax value of $40 million). Lane argues other small towns could take a similar approach with their unoccupied housing units as part of the package of services they offer to retain or recruit cash-strapped millennials.
Edenton NC’s “Mill Village” homes were modest, vacant and affordable. With a little renovation, they became attractive. (Photo Preservation NC)
Be open to change:
As rural communities get “older,” it becomes more important for them to be open to welcoming new people – and new ideas and leadership. That can be hard for long-term residents, who have been doing the heavy lifting of serving on town boards or county commissions, have headed the civic clubs and nonprofits, coached the teams, volunteered at EMS or the fire department.
New residents may have to tread carefully as they find their place in the community, but they also can breathe new energy into a town, says Ben Winchester, a researcher at the University of Minnesota. And they need to have an opportunity to help shape that vision sooner rather than later: “Over the next 25 years, we’re going to have the largest turnover of residents in our rural communities that we’ve almost ever seen,” he told The Daily Yonder in an interview last week. “Are we ready for those succession plans for leadership?”
The tension between tradition and change is always tricky. And finding that balance is going to require “been here’s” and “come here’s” to come together to learn from each other as they try to build a sustainable future: “There are people choosing to move to your town for what you are today and what you will be,” says Winchester. “Not what you were.”
Notes:
Declining share of US population rural: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBHxxIPzt_M
Older, poorer, sicker: https://www.nihcm.org/publications/rural-health-in-america-how-shifting-populations-leave-people-behind
Rural living preferences: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245249/americans-big-idea-living-country.aspx#:~:text=Americans%20under%20age%2030%20are,a%20small%20city%20(16%25)
Pressures brought by retirees to small communities: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/boomers-retirees-appalachia-georgia-retirement-9bf8e61f?st=csjvw0x04atws81&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Places offering moving incentives to new residents: https://www.newsweek.com/map-cities-states-pay-move-there-1877385#:~:text=Ascend%20West%20Virginia%2C%20a%20public,Elkins%20and%20the%20eastern%20panhandle
Does paying people to move work?: https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/should-cities-pay-people-to-move-in
Rural communities doing intentional recruitment: https://dailyyonder.com/marketing-otter-tail-county-to-the-world/2020/07/23/
“Rural by Choice” video series: https://dailyyonder.com/in-rural-minnesota-otter-tail-county-documentary-series-tells-local-stories-and-invites-new-residents/2022/03/09/
Grab-a-bite program: https://www.perhamfocus.com/community/otter-tail-county-launches-new-welcome-program
Rypkema presentation to Preservation NC: https://vimeo.com/873473916
Preservation NC Edenton mill village restoration: https://www.presnc.org/edenton-mill/
Rural “brain gain” in Minnesota: https://extension.umn.edu/economic-development/rural-brain-gain-migration
Daily Yonder on who’s choosing rural: https://dailyyonder.com/brain-gain-in-rural-america-and-who-is-behind-it/2024/03/13/
Winchester on leadership: https://dailyyonder.com/brain-gain-in-rural-america-and-who-is-behind-it/2024/03/13/
National Library of Medicine study summary of national research on who moves from, returns to rural areas: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9122343/