Rural gentrification, spurred by Internet, likely to keep increasing as more baby boomers retire

"Broad swaths of rural America" are being gentrified by "affluent retirees and other high-income types" whose "demand for amenities like interior-design stores, spas and organic markets ... is the biggest change since the interstate highway system came barreling through in the 1960s and 1970s," Conor Dougherty reports in The Wall Street Journal.

This "class colonization" is just part of a larger change, "from a resource-extraction economy to an aesthetic-based economy," Peter Nelson, an associate professor of geography at Middlebury College, told Dougherty, who further identifies him as "an expert on rural migration." The change is driven in part by the Internet, which allows work to be done from remote, second homes, but is expected to accelerate as more and more baby boomers retire.

As The Rural Blog has often noted, these changes create both challenges and opportunities for the rural areas being colonized. New jobs are created, but and and housing prices go up; infrastructure is strained, but newcomers can increase civic capital; retailers become more diverse, but social tensions are created "as longtime residents are either driven away because they can no longer afford housing or are forced to adapt to new careers," Dougherty writes from McCall, Idaho, 100 miles from Boise -- a farming and timber town that "is attracting newcomers from as far away as New York and Sydney."

Other examples cited by Dougherty: Bath County, Va., high in the Alleghenies; Eagle County, Colo., home of Vail; and Mono County, Calif., home of Yosemite National Park. (Read more)

How do you measure gentrification? Look for "an increase in residents' total dividend, interest and rent income," which is tracked by the Commerce Department. Here's a Journal graphic with a map based on that metric; it has one error: The marked location of Teton County, Wyo., is actually the location of McCall and Valley County, Idaho. For a larger version, click here.