Essay by Ed Quillen
Demography – May 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
SEVEN YEARS AGO I attended a conference in Denver, sponsored by the Center for the New West. It concerned a common topic: what’s happening to the Mountain West as our traditional extractive economy (mining, ranching, logging) fades away.
Someone said “urbanization” was a threat to our way of life in the hinterlands, and I took issue with that. I said it was “suburbanization” that looked like the bigger threat.
I live in Salida, about three blocks from the Post Office. It’s easy to walk there, or to the grocery store, or to Gamble’s when I need hardware, or to a restaurant or bank or bakery — that pedestrian scale is a result of “urbanization,” and I like it.
When I’m forced to drive to perform the usual errands of daily life, then “suburbanization” is at work, and I don’t like it.
(There are times when I drive when I should walk, of course, but we can blame that on “sloth” or “hypocrisy.” The important thing here is that it is convenient to walk.)
One of my most unpleasant memories comes from a trip to Colorado Springs about a decade ago, back when our daughters were teenagers in the “we’ve got to go to a big shopping mall” stage. We accommodated that wish at the Citadel Mall.
Columbine needed a graphing calculator for a math class, and there was an Office Max (or Office Depot, or maybe even Staples — those big boxes tend to blur) right across Academy Boulevard. So just walking over there looked easier than getting in the car and navigating the lanes and traffic signals.
I couldn’t have been more wrong, though. The sidewalks, where there were sidewalks, were all of 18 inches wide, with traffic roaring by just inches away. The stoplight at the Academy crossing gave us about 10 seconds to cross a very wide and crowded boulevard (sort of a real-life “Frogger” game). It was one of the scariest trips I ever took, and for weeks I trembled at the thought of what could have happened if one of us had stumbled along the way.
It made me think that Colorado Springs is such a devout place because the preachers tell their flocks that if they don’t behave, they’ll spend eternity on Academy Boulevard.
At any rate, that hell is what I mean by “suburbanization.” Urbanization is where the sidewalks are wide and the streets are narrow, and where you can enjoy the benefits of concentration.
The first numbers from the 2000 census have been released, and they confirm my fear that suburbanization is creeping upon us.
For instance, in 1900, only 27.5% of the 7,085 residents of Chaffee County lived outside the limits of an incorporated town or city. That was up to 46.9% in 1990, and at 49.7% in 2000.
In Custer County, 73.5% of the population lives outside town limits. Frémont has gone from 44.3% a century ago to 55%. In the 20th century, Lake County went from 31% to 63.9% of its population outside municipal limits, and Park from 65.9% to 94.6%.
This isn’t because more people are farming or ranching, because those numbers show steady declines. American agriculture is quite productive, but as machinery improves, farms and ranches get bigger and there are fewer farmers and ranchers.
Some other factors must be at work to explain this growth outside of city limits. Those factors might be combined under the name “progress.”
MY MATERNAL GRANDFATHER, Byron Wollen, lived a very rural lifestyle. He homesteaded a section of Wyoming in 1919, right next to a section that his brother took up. His brother soon gave up and sold his section to my grandfather, so he had 1,280 acres — two square miles — all to himself, with the nearest neighbor six miles away.
My grandfather died in 1965, so most of my memories of his place and him are of the late 1950s and early 1960s, back when rural populations were dropping.
There’s little wonder why.
My grandfather had no telephone, so there was no way to summon help in an emergency. He did have a radio, a vacuum-tube model that used a big and expensive 90-volt B-battery and so was used sparingly. By the time I can remember, he had propane to power a refrigerator (but my mother remembers cutting and storing ice, and eating a lot of canned and dried food). He cooked and heated with coal. Light came from Coleman lanterns. The toilet was a privy 30 yards from the house, and water came from a windmill half a mile away.
My grandfather had neighbors (although his closest neighbor was six miles away) who had running water and electricity (from a propane-powered generator that came on when you turned on a light). Their ranches were profitable enough to support such things; my grandfather’s wasn’t.
The closest paved road, telephone, electric line or post office was 17 miles away, in a settlement called Bill, 35 miles north of Douglas on the lonely highway to Gillette (lonely then, anyway, for this was before they started strip-mining coal in the Powder River Basin.)
My grandfather lived a life that was isolated in ways that I can’t really even imagine now. But he did have a truck for trips to town, as well as mail delivery three days a week to a box along the county road, half a mile from his two-room house. Take away the radio, the truck, and the mail delivery, though, and you’ve got rural life in 1900 — isolation so severe that my grandmother seldom lived with him.
A century ago, you pretty well had to live in town if you wanted flush toilets, electricity, a telephone, regular mail delivery, prompt emergency medical and fire department response, schooling for your children, or many other once-upon-a-time amenities that are now pretty much necessities.
LIFE IN THE COUNTRY has gotten progressively _more urbane, though. The New Deal brought the Rural Electrification Administration, so that rural America got lights — and motors to do some of the routine hard work, like washing clothes. The REA also subsidized rural telephone service. Rural Free Delivery brought the mail — and mail-order goods — to almost every address. Roads improved, so that school buses could run their routes.
All these were acts of government, more or less, but the private sector has been at work, too, especially in recent years.
You don’t have to live in town to get 150 TV channels. You can put an 18-inch dish antenna on your roof, and get more TV than you’ll ever want just about anywhere. Similar dishes will connect you to the Internet at astonishing speeds. Your cell phone may well work miles from any town, and UPS and FedEx deliver overnight to almost anywhere. If the local REA wants too much to run power lines, you can install solar panels, which become more affordable every year.
In short, you can live almost anywhere and enjoy just about anything modern life has to offer — if you’re willing to drive for some shopping, or perhaps your livelihood.
That’s another big difference. Very few rural residents today get their livelihood from the land they live on. Now a dry year might mean dusty roads, or drilling the well deeper, but it seldom means selling off every cow and all except one horse and living on pinto beans all winter, the way it did for my grandfather in 1957.
So, the economy has changed so that people have more money to spend on rural homesteads, and transportation and technology have improved. Just about any way you want to measure it, that’s progress. Rural Americans don’t have to endure lives of isolation, privation and hard labor, the way my grandfather did.
That said, there remains another question: Why don’t people want to live in town? Why are our unincorporated areas growing faster?
I don’t have answers for those questions, but I can speculate. When you look at how this area is promoted — that is, what the realty companies advertise because they think it’s what people want — you see a lot of 35-acre ranchettes, rather than houses in town.
This inspires one of those chicken-and-egg circles. Are our realty companies just responding to a demand that originates with social issues somewhere else that make people not want to have neighbors? Or are the realty companies trying to create a demand with that sort of marketing?
It’s probably a reflection of both forces. Several demographers have pointed out that the Mountain West is getting a major in-migration of white California suburbanites; author Joel Kotkin calls it “the Valhalla Syndrome.”
I used to think that the solution might lie with municipal governments and community organizations — if we worked hard to make town life more attractive and comfortable, then more people would live in town.
With good “closed space,” we could have more “open space.” Increased population density means lower costs for utilities, streets and the like. We’d all live better and save money if the growth was in town.
But the people moving into this region are, by and large, people who don’t want to live in any town, no matter now nice its trails and parks.
PEOPLE WILL COME TO TOWN, of course — they’ll drive. And businesses will accommodate them, by moving to the highway and scraping out bigger parking lots. And when enough businesses move to the highway, it will become impossible to walk on my errands, and Salida will lose one of the things I most cherish about it.
I don’t see any way around this trend. I joke that the only thing that will spare us is a general economic collapse, so that people won’t be able to afford their own water and septic systems, and high energy prices, so that people won’t live where they have to drive 50 or 100 miles a day. (I note that the Bush II presidency seems to be headed in the right direction so far — if you’re demented like me.)
But actually, I don’t want to be the one wishing misfortune to anyone — even rich, suburban Republican immigrants from California who hang out in their 6,000+ square foot mountain retreats when they’re not driving their new Ford Expositions.
It’s just that this sort of rural population growth, made possible by many factors, isn’t mere growth. Growth is “more of the same,” and Salida could accommodate an indefinite number of houses on narrow lots, or mother-in-law houses along the alleys, or apartments over storefronts, without losing its character.
What the census reflects throughout Central Colorado, though, is more like an “invasion,” because it represents a transformation to a way of life determined by the invaders with their car-centered way of life.
The census also explains some of the political divisions forming in rural Colorado as more and more local people embrace development and suburbanization — because it’s becoming a more essential factor in their livelihoods.
We had a landscape that was divided, to some degree, into “urban” (even if our urbs weren’t that big) and “rural.” It’s not getting more urban with population growth. It’s getting suburban. And I haven’t got a clue what I, or anyone else, can do about it.
— Ed Quillen
