Fall/Winter 2006: On Principle

'Round the Next Bend

Economic opportunity in rurbia

by Donald Snow

If bumper stickers are literal signs of the times, then the times are troubled in Walla Walla, Washington, where I live. The latest local bumper sticker reads "Don't Bend Walla Walla." To people outside the Northwest, this message might make no sense, but residents of our region would instantly know what it means. It's a message warning against growth--the kind of explosive population growth that Bend, Oregon, has seen in the last two decades. With the recent, dramatic florescence of the Walla Walla wine industry, coupled with the announcement of plans to build the town's first residential golf resort, many residents here fear that their town is poised to become "the next Bend." Their fears are hardly unfounded. People in many rural counties across the nation feel that they, too, are facing a most uncertain future, for much of rural America is in trouble.

At one end of the spectrum stand the poorest communities in the United States--rural communities mired in persistent poverty--whose numbers are growing as the American agricultural and natural resource economies continue to decline. In these places, opportunities are few; younger residents are fleeing for jobs far away; local schools are closing, and the sense of optimism has become fugitive. At the other end of the spectrum are communities undergoing a wrenching and rapid transformation propelled by heavy influxes of new residents and new wealth. In the most extreme examples, communities that were "rural" by every measure just a generation ago have mutated into a fascinating kind of hybrid: they have become "rurban," a strange fusion of rural, urban, and suburban, and they have done so with a velocity and thoroughness that often astonished longtime residents.

As far as I can tell, there is not yet a clear, commonly accepted definition of "rurbia," nor a set of quantitative characteristics that define it. The word itself is simply a contraction of three words: "rural," "urban," and "suburbia." What it means, quite simply, is the arrival of urban/suburban forms of growth in the middle of rural places. At first glance one might say, "Well, gee, there's nothing new about urban growth in rural places. That's what the suburbs have always been." Rurbia often looks a lot like ordinary suburban growth, but rurban growth is different. When cities grow, people expect them to spill out into the surrounding countryside, and the residents of these soon-to-be suburbs can readily prepare for growth. They "see it coming," often years ahead. Seldom is there anything surprising about this kind of edge development. But rurbia is the arrival of urbanism in the middle of nowhere, and it is driven by the reinvestment of wealth transported from elsewhere--in nearly every case, wealth assembled from a host of distant cities, not from one immediately adjacent city.

No metropolitan centers previously existed in the most striking examples of rurban development. "Urban" or "metropolitan," according to the U.S. Census Bureau, means a concentration of fifty thousand people or more in a single, contiguous place. Bend, Oregon; Kalispell, Montana; Moab, Utah; Durango, Colorado--these were all very small towns a generation ago. I know people of my age in Walla Walla who remember when Bend had fewer than twenty thousand people. Today Bend is pushing seventy thousand in the city proper. But rurbia is not a municipal phenomenon; it is a regional phenomenon, which means that Bend's effective population is much larger. These places are no longer small towns; they are small cities--and it's not merely that they have achieved metropolitan population numbers. In fact, some of them have not. They are cities in the sense that these places have been redesigned, radically made over to appeal to urban sensibilities.

The arrival of rurbia typically comes as a shock and upsets many of our long-held assumptions about population and economic growth. Unlike the advancing suburban rim that girdles nearly every American city, places that suddenly encounter rurban development typically stand unprepared in every respect for what is to come. They often do not possess the infrastructure, the revenue-generating capacity, or the culture of decision-making needed to accommodate gracefully the sudden urban explosion. Because most rural places in the U.S. are politically conservative, with residents who pride themselves on their determined pro-development, pro-business attitudes, a good deal of confusion often accompanies the rurban explosion.

For generations, we residents who live in rural places have been saying that "growth is good, growth is what we want." But when growth finally arrives, and it doesn't show up in the forms we imagined and fought for, we're suddenly not so sure. Most of us, operating with antiquated models of economic development--what some call the "industrial park mentality"--find it quite confusing when the five-year-old business incubator our town struggled to finance remains empty or moribund, while an entirely different, entirely unexpected form of development arrives. We were trying to recruit a regional call center, a new modular home plant, and a horse trailer manufacturer--when suddenly a group of investors shows up with notions to build a residential golf resort with an Old West architectural motif, but surrounded by vineyards. We were thinking structural steel buildings. They want a stone-and-log chateau, to bottle a cabernet franc called Old Branding Iron. We were thinking new homes for good-wage earners in manufacturing; they're wondering about the availability of low-income housing for vineyard workers and golf-course landscapers. It may not take long for places about to experience the rurban growth-wave to catch up with the dreams of the new developers, but in nearly every case what rural residents come to realize is that when rurbia hits, the future starts to look quite unlike the past.

Gauging Rurbia Readiness

Rurbia is an artifact of two strong forces in our society--the information economy and the Baby Boom--and rurbia readiness shows up suddenly like a hot blip on a national radar screen that tracks the next cool thing. For many Baby Boomers and their children (whom some refer to as "Echo Boomers"), nothing is more hip than the recently discovered out-of-the-way place, and rural people are often astonished to learn that what to them seems to be nothing more than their worn, rather plain community might be viewed by outsiders as a really cool spot. This is one of the strangest things about rurban readiness.

Places with great potential to morph into rurbia have several traits in common. First, and most important, they occupy landscapes of surpassing beauty, with ready access to outdoor recreation. But they are not necessarily gateway communities in the classic sense. Many sociologists who describe the gateway community are talking specifically about towns that lie immediately adjacent to national parks or designated recreation areas. Jackson Hole, Wyoming, would be a classic gateway community; Bend, Oregon, would not. The rurban phenomenon is thus, in a sense, redefining our notion of gateway community. The "landscape of surpassing beauty" doesn't have to mean scenery of national park grandeur. In the West, almost any mountains can serve as a worthy backdrop to rurbia. The Wallowas would be a great candidate, but even the Blue Mountains, with their more subtle beauty, might make for a fine backdrop to rurbia.

A good share of rurban development is tied to retirement, and realtors across the United States carefully map high-value retirement communities, especially the new ones where real property is still reasonably priced. Of the eighty fastest growing retirement destinations in the United States, 74 percent contain or abut national forest land. Access to forested open space seems to carry an especially high premium for rurbia-readiness.

Second, rurbia-ready places frequently have exotic or even "funny" names--the very strangeness of the nomenclature adds to their cachet of hipness. It seems best if the names derive from Native American or biblical terms, or if the name attaches to some historical novelty that touches on our sense of the mythic: Missoula is a "funny" name that does a delicious thing on the tongue. Kalispell is a memorable word; also an Indian word, it sticks in the mind. Moab carries the weight of Old Testament intonation. Jackson Hole draws from the antique lingo of the trapper era: "hole" was the colloquial name for a big valley found in the midst of mountains. (Notice that when we pair the rather ordinary name Jackson with Hole the mundane suddenly becomes romantic.) Bozeman is nothing more than the surname of a western trailblazer, John Bozeman, but notice that Bozeman-the-newly-discovered-place mutates lexicographically into "The Bozone" as soon as hipness hits. The moral here, for anyone who lives with the illusion that her homely out-of-the-way burg could never hit the Big Board, is to take notice if you live in a place with a colorful name. Think about the word Wallowa; think about names such as Walla Walla or Okanogan. Any place named Greenville is probably safe.

Third, rurbia-ready places possess hidden upscale attributes waiting to be registered by the searching public. Here's an example: Forty years ago, fishing was not upscale because most people doing it caught fish on worms and ate what they caught. And they didn't dress in any particularly striking ways, wearing blue jeans and carrying bait cans. But when the great secret about truly premium fishing got out when it became known that you can catch huge wild trout on tiny flies you tie yourself and then when fishing became catch-and-release and no longer carried the taint of being a blood sport--then and only then, fishing went upscale. Interest grew at a good clip, then went stratospheric when Brad Pitt appeared as the character Paul in the film A River Runs Through It. And he looked so great fly-fishing, wearing stuff just like the stuff you can buy at, well, at the Orvis shop in any American city. So to find the next potential rurban hot spots, think about things that are upscale today, and remember that it's hard to predict what will become upscale tomorrow. Upscale today: whitewater rafting; very exclusive golf links; telemark skiing (alpine is passe, in case you didn't know); rock climbing; vineyards and boutique winemaking; bison ranching (not cattle ranching). What'll be upscale tomorrow? Who knows? Who could have predicted the invention of the mountain bike, the snowboard, the hang glider, the $800 graphite flyrod with a single-action, stainless-steel reel made in England?

The fourth trait of rurbia is national publicity, even a little bit of it. Any place featured in Sunset or Outside magazine, or on the "Escapes" pages of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, or the Atlanta Constitution may need to brace for the shock of discovery. If celebrities have been reported visiting--and especially if they have purchased real estate nearby--the hipness radar screen is dancing. Entertainment, sports, and even corporate celebrities who buy land in the supposed rural outback may help touch off a burst of interest. Urban connoisseurs have always been arbiters of the cool, and those connoisseurs who write the travel pages of our most urbane newspapers actually help steer tastes and choices. It doesn't take much. Think about the character Miles in the film Sideways. His soliloquy on pinot noir launched millions in profits tied to this particular wine grape; his diatribe against merlot caused other growers to groan.

We laugh at such images, but we need to take them more seriously. One of the hallmarks of the information age is the symbolic reinvention of the self, and our old models of economic development are entirely unequipped for this new age. Ultimately people want romance--they want to drink it, eat it, ply its waters, carve its slopes, conquer its roughs. And they're willing to pay immense sums for the pleasure. Americans are accustomed to gambling their lives on an unappreciated frontier; and now that many of us have the means, we are reinventing frontier as rurbia.

Where and How Does Rurbia Happen?

The hardest point to get across is that rurbia is a regional phenomenon--it affects large, broad areas, not just a single growing town and its immediate surroundings. The rurban explosion is directly related to and dependent upon the surrounding countryside. Rurbia can't happen just anywhere--it happens in places with peculiar attributes that attach to shifting American values about landscape, personal well-being and fitness, recreation (or re-creation, if you prefer), and, yes, a sense of place. Rurbia seems to show up in areas we might describe as "landscapes of joy." When people come town-shopping in the West, what are they looking for? Ready access to public lands, lots of trails to hike or ride, interesting back roads where cyclists feel safe; free-flowing rivers and great places to ski, nice ball fields and ingeniously designed golf courses, security for themselves and their kids, decent schools, decency in general. People might be interested in the town, to be sure, but what they're really coming for is the area. Rurbia is all about the surroundings.

Next, rurbia is as much a process as it is a place--it is the process of converting rural space into what might be described as punctuated urban space. In Central Oregon, for example, Bend formed the epicenter for explosive rurban growth, but Bend itself is merely the largest island in a regionwide archipelago of urban excrescences. Central Oregon today possesses around two dozen golf courses, many of them residential destination resorts. The real money in golf, of course, is not in the game itself--it's in the snap, crackle, and pop that surround the game, expressed mostly in terms of exclusively expensive real estate coupled with membership in a sports resort that few people even realize exists. On the ground, the effects are plain enough: houses the size of small ski lodges parked along perfect fairways designed by the marquee names of the game. Each of those exclusive residential golf resorts is a tiny center of urbanism; each of the towns of Central Oregon, from Madras to Redmond to Prineville, quickly began to transform into "little Bends." Rurbia arrives, centers itself quickly in an existing community (usually the largest one in the area), converts the community to accommodate urban interests and people, and simultaneously stimulates growth in surrounding communities. The growth, of course, follows increases in property values: as Bend becomes a much more expensive place to buy or rent a home, Prineville begins to absorb the overflow. Bend gets more expensive; Prineville morphs into a bedroom community. Rurbia is not Bend; it is all of Central Oregon.

Third, in burgeoning rurban regions, what is left undeveloped is at least as important as what becomes developed. To return to the island image, rurbia proceeds like the formation of island archipelagos. The islands are patches of urbanism within a surrounding sea of rural countryside and communities. It is important to the progress of rurban growth that the surrounding rural sea remains "rural"--as open and undeveloped as possible--since it was this open terrain that was the generator of the growth in the first place. Ironically, in the rapid economic transformation that comes with rurbia, it is the absence of obvious development that feeds development.

What land developers call "build-out" is not in the best interests of rurbia. Indeed, the rurban model--if there is yet such a thing--in many respects does not conform with the old, static model of economic development in which a central "engine of growth" (such as a new factory) sets off a local chain reaction of related, attendant growth, which simply follows laissez-faire market principles. Rurban growth attempts to be both selective and protective: it selects for businesses that appeal to the newcomers; it protects, or tries to protect, the things they came for in the first place. Uncrowdedness becomes a premium social and economic good; a sense of high selectivity of new businesses to serve the new arrivals dominates the scene. The emphasis lies heavily on the upscale side. Things get expensive.

Fourth, the urban archipelagoes are of a distinct and peculiar character. It is as if the editors of Outside, Golf Digest, Bon Appetit, and the Williams-Sonoma catalog had come together to plan America's new Top Ten Best Little Cities. The rurban archipelago becomes festooned with specialty bicycle shops, Callaway golf club outlets, Orvis franchises, wine boutiques, microbreweries, dazzling workout facilities, hair parlors that hand you menus of hair opportunities when you walk in the door, and a staggering array of expensive restaurants and clothiers. Meanwhile, out in the surrounding rural sea you find "traditional" businesses paddling for their very lives. These are places selling sturdy old stuff like tractors, livestock feed, fabrics for home-sewing, guns, photo album supplies, and donuts out on Transfat Boulevard.

Fifth, rurbia effects a thorough economic and social transformation. Whatever is left of the natural resource economy--which invariably was the economy that gave these places their post office listings in the first place--begins a rapid and terminal retreat. Jobs in agriculture, jobs in the mines and the woods, the culture created by this kind of natural resource economy--rurbia simply wipes out whatever was left of it. With notable exceptions, local agriculture begins to seem like an elaborate hobby (as it truly is for some of the newcomers). Rurbia might leave a few old lumber mill smokestacks or retired teepee burners standing as sentimental monuments to the past, without noticing the irony that the still-living residents, who just a few years ago fed the fuel that caused the smoke that went up those stacks, can no longer afford to live in the old mill-town where the stacks now merely decorate the commerce of the day. Structures that were recently bread-and-butter to many residents--grain elevators are good examples--metamorphose into works of art.

Finally, rurbia, like every other artifact of the information age, is fast. It can be set in motion with the blinding speed of electronic capital transfers. And it can accrete with a deceivingly rapid movement toward market saturation. Just when residents of Central Oregon thought the golf industry could not possibly afford yet another resort, a group of local investors put the new Brasada Golf Resort on the fast track. It will be Crook County's first residential golf retreat, and it may indeed be the last in the region--the installation that achieves market saturation. And in fact, saturation of another kind has already begun to show up in rurban meccas: a form of saturation we might describe as too-much-of-a-good-thing. As a recent cover story in High Country News suggests, rurban growth in places like Bend is beginning to repel the original rurban "pioneers." The very thing that attracted them in the first place--the uncrowdedness of rural surroundings, the sense of the new discovery--turns out to be fugitive. As rurban regions grow, they begin to shed some of the earlier newcomers, who now want to move on to the Next Cool Place, like Daniel Boone hang-gliding his way over the next ridge.

For people living in rural places that suddenly become cool, that suddenly transform into something barely recognizable, rurbia often stirs up salty combinations of animosity and humor. Take, for example, the modern, state-of-the-art Pronghorn Golf Resort, located along a quiet county road that connects Bend and Prineville. It is a veritable sculpture carved out of the highly scenic Central Oregon landscape, which is dominated by conifer trees set against the dramatic backdrop of the Cascade Mountains. One of the dominant plants of Central Oregon is the Western juniper, a tree that thrives on the water- and soil-scarce ridgebacks and uplands of the dry country around Bend. Long the bane of cattlemen, loggers, and farmers, the Western juniper can develop enormous root systems that support the gnarled, twisted trunks of trees that can live, in extreme cases, up to two thousand years. The Western juniper, with no value as lumber and only modest value as firewood and fence posts, tends to thrive in logged areas and those grazed too heavily by livestock--but the twisted trunks and irregular crowns of these trees are often quite beautiful. Somehow they evoke a strong sense of ruggedness, westernness. For this reason, these very trees that are so hated by lumbermen and livestock producers are the featured stars of the Fazio/Nicklaus golf links at the new Pronghorn Resort. They are treated reverentially, like works of art, and at huge expense.

According to Crook County Judge Scott Cooper, "The Pronghorn designers, as part of their development, are out there transplanting full-grown juniper trees. We think that's hilarious around here because the junipers were always just something to be chopped down. They're water-hogs, nuisance plants--but Pronghorn has got specialized crews they brought up from Mexico that are digging up mature, live junipers and moving them to accentuate the views." In addition to digging up live junipers, Cooper explained, the landscaping crews sometimes move dead junipers to more scenic locations.

But Cooper also realizes that what he is describing is an immensely lucrative design scheme, and he's quick to point out that no matter how funny the careful tending of juniper trees, live and dead, may be to long-term, hardened residents of Oregon timber country, the returns on Pronghorn corporation investments have been extraordinary. Cooper says that Pronghorn's initial offering of home-sites more than covered the company's bonded debt in the first two days of sales. "This was the biggest bonded debt in the history of Deschutes County," Cooper said. "Pronghorn wiped it out in around forty-eight hours."

Pronghorn is the latest of eight high-end golf resorts that have been built in Deschutes County, beginning in 1967 with the pioneering Sun River Resort, a 6,000-acre golf mecca at the south end of the county. As a neighboring county official, Scott Cooper is intensely aware of the impact such developments have on the local tax-base. The destination golf resorts in Deschutes County produce more tax revenue than all the rest of the industrial-commercial sector combined, according to Cooper. Moreover, the new resorts add only minimal burdens to county services. Says Cooper, "They contract for things like fire and police services--they don't just get these automatically. They offer second homes and vacation homes to a socio-demographic element that doesn't require a lot of governmental intervention. They don't have kids that go to the public schools and put a burden on your education infrastructure. They're just little cash cows. They make money and are low-impact. They don't even dilute your voter base, because nobody has a primary residence out there."

For these reasons--plus the promise of an expanded employment base--Cooper supported the recent application for a brand-new golf resort to be located near Prineville, the first of its kind in Crook County. Last year, the 1,200-acre Powell Butte Ranch was sold (with water rights) to the Eagle Crest Resort Corporation for a new destination resort to be named Brasada. Cooper says it, too, will be a posh and exclusive resort, along the lines of Pronghorn--and it will employ between four and six hundred people full time. "They'll get good wages and good benefits for relatively low-skill jobs," Cooper says. That's hard to beat in an economy like Prineville's, where there is little on the horizon to replace the hundreds of blue-collar jobs lost when timber collapsed.

What drives rurbia? Put as succinctly as possible: the Baby Boom generation. The decade of 2000 to 2010 will record a 50 percent increase in the population of Americans between the ages of forty-five and fifty-four. It's the biggest, richest generation in American history, and, arguably, the most self-indulgent. It is the generation with the largest well of disposable income in history. Baby Boomers stand to harvest $10.4 trillion in capital gains, equities, real estate assets, insurance, and inheritance. According to Jim Howe in Balancing Nature and Commerce in Gateway Communities, over the next two decades, "Boomers are expected to double the demand for recreational homes and resort lodging." If Howe is right, rurbia is just getting started. If the hallmark of post-World War II America was the suburb, the postmodern hallmark of the information age may be rurbia, the dispersed "rural city" of (often) second homes located in gorgeous, natural settings.

Adapted from a lecture Snow gave in Pendleton, Oregon, on May 19, 2006, for the Oregon Council for the Humanities as part of the Commonplace Lectures series. The entire lecture can be downloaded as a PDF solely for individual use. Mass production is strictly prohibited.

Published in the Fall/Winter 2006 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2006 Oregon Council for the Humanities