Here is the latest E-mail Alert from Treadway & Associates.
Down on the Ground: Observations on Rural America
I've just spent the past three days seeing the rural West from an unusual perspective
for me.
By car.
My wife, Madonna, and I have moved our business to temporary quarters in San Diego.
At the beginning of May we'll be back in Colorado. We drove from the Denver area to the
Pacific coast via Interstates 70 and 15. It gave me an up close view of a phenomenon I
speak to frequently in presentations.
Americans are setting up home and office in rural America in unprecedented numbers.
During the 70's and 80's I traveled the same route by auto over 20 times. The look of the
wide open spaces of western Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and the high desert of California were
vividly etched in my memory. During the late 60's I had worked as a young college student
and engineer at constructing the highway system between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The
territory I saw the past few days was almost unrecognizable as the same sparsely populated
geography.
For example:
Americans have slapped down residences that fully ring Bell Mountain, a desolate section
of the high Mojave Desert north and east of Los Angeles. The suburban sprawl of Apple
Valley and Victorville looks exactly like the San Fernando Valley.
I got high speed Internet access in Richfield, Utah in the formerly isolated Sevier Valley
that used to be home only to pivot irrigation systems and good elk hunting.
Luxury homes have sprung up to line the entire section of I-15 between the I-70 junction
through Cedar City and down to St. George, Utah, the gateway to Zion National Park.
Cresting a hill just north of St. George Madonna and I gasped at the sea of warehouse and
concrete that is a Wal-Mart distribution center.
Homes and even small office buildings are within sight of one of the best kept secrets I
knew of the West: the formerly unmarked and isolated exit from I-15 that took you into the
Kolob Canyons of North Zion National Park. It was a favorite and delicious secret of the
back country shared with me once by a wise park ranger. Today a modern visitor center,
roadblocks, and a stringent quota system greet the traveler who exits there. All of this
happened in less than a decade.
I talk about the great growth areas of the future. This trip was a sobering, ground-level
view of what is happening in those areas. Usually I fly over them as I am now, preparing
this e-mail alert from the perspective of 35,000 feet. It was an up-close view that I
received beginning last Wednesday.
The What and How of Rural Growth
Percentage-wise the greatest growth in population in America will take place in rural areas
during the first decade of the "aughts."
This is not to say that urban areas will not grow but there are strong incentives for
growth especially in the rural West and Florida.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service has identified several
"magnets" attracting growth to Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Florida, Wyoming, Arizona, Utah,
New Mexico, and southern Montana:
- Retirement
- Recreation
- Climate
- Mountains
- Water
- Overall aesthetics
The growth is being enabled by dramatic improvements in rural telecommunications.
A few months ago I accepted a position as advisor to the board of directors of the National
Rural Telecommunications Cooperative. This is an association of rural energy cooperatives,
telephone cooperatives, and small telephone companies that cooperate to purchase satellite
television and other services. These operators quietly placed fiber optic backbone through
much of rural America. Creative solutions are almost within reach to extend broadband
(data transfer rates of 10 to 100 times the speed of today's dial-up 56 kbps modem) service
to some of the most beautiful and remote areas of our country.
Look for more and more individuals to escape the infrastructure congestion of areas like
Los Angeles where the average driver spends nearly 100 hours per year STOPPED in freeway
traffic. When the alternative exists to relocate to living sites where neighbors still
leave the doors unlocked and the wide open spaces beckon for at least a little while
longer the trend will heat up.
Want to look into some of the trends? See: http://www.luc.edu/depts/sociology/research.html
Dr. Kenneth Johnson's work at Loyola University in conjunction with the Department of
Agriculture.
Not All Rural Areas Are Created Equal
Some areas of America will continue to lose population in the "aughts." The trend toward
net population loss occurs in those areas of the country where there are few career
opportunities for the young and a phenomenon known as "natural decrease" occurs. Natural
decrease occurs when deaths outnumber births.
Natural decrease has gone on for over a decade in the Great Plains, especially in the Corn
Belt, in East and Central Texas, and in the Ozarks. Most recently there have been episodes
in the interior of the Southeast, in New York and Pennsylvania and in parts of the West.
The Dakotas, Minnesota, Kansas, Connecticut, and Maine lost more than 10 percent of
population during the 90's. On the other hand, Washington, California, Nevada, Utah,
Colorado, Arizona, Arkansas, Maryland, and Florida increased their populations by over
50% in the same decade.
Key Factor: Recreation opportunities
New Driving Force
The penetration of broadband telecommunications. As the decade progresses more individuals
will be able to locate their jobs along with their homes to any geographic location they
choose. The link is a huge data "pipe" that runs to the doorstep.
Today, that pipe is either at the doorstep or just a few miles away for some of the most
desirable environments in America.
Think now about how it will impact your career, company, marketing, vacations, recreation,
and retirement.
Reading Recommendations on the Rural West
Take a writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for a novel set in her native New England and
slap her down in Wyoming with incisive powers of observation. Annie Proulx wrote
Close Range: Wyoming Stories.
A chronicle of life and the geology of America's most remote region by the greatest living
writer of non-fiction (in my opinion), John McPhee:
Basin and Range
The links above take you straight to Amazon.com. In the next issue of our E-mail Alerts
we'll tell you an interesting anecdote about the contrast between Amazon and Barnes &
Noble.
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