An Out-of-the-Way Place to Call Home : Lifestyle: Feeling crowded in traditional retirement meccas, many retirees are settling down in small rural towns.
In Eagle River, Wis., the temperature this time of year hovers in the teens--no trip to the beach. There is almost always a couple of feet of snow on the ground, which rules out a day of golf. And the most popular outdoor diversion is snowmobile racing in the woods.
All of which makes Eagle River an unlikely retirement haven.
But over the past two decades, a new breed of retiree--younger, healthier and looking for a bargain--has begun to bypass the beaches of Florida and the Arizona desert to settle in out-of-the-way places such as this rural Wisconsin lake community.
Most retirees who move between states still choose the Sun Belt. But rural, small-town communities as diverse as Anaconda, Mont.; Mountain Home, Ark., and Chestertown, Md., have attracted so many retirees since 1970 that they have grown at double to triple the rate of other rural counties.
Most rural and small-town counties--those dependent on mining, agriculture and manufacturing--lost population or stayed even during the 1980s. But the nearly 500 “retirement” counties grew by about 16%. They had grown even faster in the previous decade, by nearly 33%.
“I decided a place to retire was a place you just enjoyed being around . . . even though the winters here were more traumatic,” said Helen Pankow, who moved to Eagle River from Milwaukee five years ago.
Pankow figured it this way: She could afford waterfront property in Eagle River; she enjoyed fishing, the snowmobile tournaments and the wildlife, and she felt no envy of her friends in Florida.
“I feel sorry for them,” she said. “I don’t think they have any space to breathe down there.”
The more recent appeal among unconventional communities--ranging from Cape Cod, Mass., to rural Georgia, the Upper Great Lakes to the remote Rocky Mountains--is in part the result of what some demographers say is an implicit rejection of the traditional retirement areas.
“When they think of Florida, they think of condos full of old people driving around in Cadillacs with white hair,” said Lee Cuba, an associate professor of sociology at Wellesley College.
Cuba, author of a paper titled “Anywhere but Florida,” and others who have studied the subject say there are additional factors at work.
Technology has brought amenities--the snowmobile in Wisconsin and man-made lakes in the Ozark Mountains, for example--that have made the rural and small-town communities more attractive and accessible. These areas are often remote and have been economically depressed in the past, making them cheaper than the more developed retirement areas. And many retirees have chosen to settle in places within driving distance of their families.
Finally, there are demographic changes. The past decades have seen the emergence of more and younger middle-class retirees who have enough money to allow a move to a scenic, if modest, retirement area.
“Other things being equal, these people might have headed off to Florida, but for the feeling those areas have gotten too crowded or too expensive,” said Calvin Beale, a demographer at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “There’s been a change of taste.”
Beale also underscores the importance of the snowmobile in the retirees’ choice of the north country. “They felt they were safer. They could get out,” he said. “And they built all these snowmobile trails.”
While three-fifths of retirees moving between states end up in the Sun Belt, the newer, less popular areas have experienced remarkable growth. These so-called non-metropolitan retirement counties--those in rural or small-town areas where at least 15% of the population moving in were people 60 and older--grew in population from about 8.8 million in 1970 to about 13.5 million in 1990, an increase of more than 50%.
Demographers say that has made retirees one of the primary engines of rural population growth.
It all makes perfect sense to Eagle River’s Pankow, 69, a former factory worker who had vacationed in the area when she and her late husband were raising a family.
“It just seemed like this was the spot to come to,” she said. “In a smaller town like this, everybody knows everybody. It’s much nicer than a big city. . . . I intend to die here.”
George Dorsey, a sheet-metal worker who retired to Mountain Home from suburban Chicago, speaks with the same affection for his new community in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas.
“It’s not just a retirement town,” said Dorsey, 76. He had spent time in Florida, he said, but passed it over for this city of about 9,000, which has doubled in size over the past 20 years.
“You have four seasons, none of them too severe. The crime rate is next to nil. It’s very, very friendly,” he said.
In the 1970s, about 5,000 people aged 60 or older moved into Baxter County, which includes Mountain Home, a growth rate of 115% among that age group, one of the highest in the country.
Mountain Home Mayor John Ayers said the average home costs about $60,000, an important factor in luring urban retirees who can trade in an expensive house in the city for a rural retirement home and put the leftover cash in the bank. The newcomers arrive from Illinois, Iowa, Michigan and even, in recent years, California.
The services they demand and the income they spend has meant new jobs and business for the city, which then in turn attracts younger workers.
“That money is turning over in the community,” Ayers said.
The recognition that retirees bring needed revenue has inspired a number of states to launch promotional campaigns, targeting aging workers with glossy brochures advertising nearby golf courses and new developments.
Some areas, like Anaconda, Mont., have become attractive almost exclusively because property is cheap. This rural community was the site of a smelting plant that closed down, forcing many residents to move elsewhere. But the population has risen again in recent years as elderly couples on fixed incomes have moved in.
