In search of a quieter and more affordable place to live, many Americans move to largely rural states

The South Dakota website "Dakota Roots" claims the state is "paradise for anyone who loves the outdoors." (Dakota Roots photo)

Several rural states are seeing population growth as Americans leave cities in search of a different lifestyle that includes lower living costs.

"Nearly 15 million Americans moved across the country in 2025, with many opting for quieter and more affordable places to live, according to data company Stora's U.S. Census analysis, reports Kelly McGreal of Fox News. 

 

Saving money and living closer to nature are big factors for many movers. McGreal writes, "About 88% of movers say they're relocating to save money, while 76% are seeking better access to outdoor lifestyles often found in rural areas."

South Dakota, a state with no income tax, had the largest population gains. "The state recorded the largest net migration increase, with nearly 11,000 more people moving in than leaving," McGreal adds. "Other largely rural states also ranked highly, including Vermont, Nebraska, Mississippi and Alaska."

Home prices are also a driving factor. "Home prices in South Dakota average around $310,000, below the national average," McGreal reports. 

 

Gavin Shields, CEO of Stora, told McGreal, "It's no longer just about the house, but about having financial freedom, the ability to buy your own property that comes at a more affordable price, and a lower cost of living."

'Hub City' earned its moniker from railroad days, but it's still a place where people from all walks of life come together

‘All Are Welcome’ banner on Bethlehem’s 
exterior. (Photo by Betsy Froiland, The Yonder)

Like spokes on a wheel, nine railroad lines used to converge in Aberdeen, South Dakota —a small rural town that railroads transformed into "Hub City." And while Aberdeen's moniker was earned in the early 1900s, much of the town's reputation as a physical and social hub remains. Betsy Froiland for The Daily Yonder writes, "Many of those railways are gone. But the nickname and the identity endure."

Today's Aberdeen is different in many ways, but it's still a "place where people with different backgrounds, political leanings, and personal identities come together," Froiland writes. Hub City still offers community spaces where its residents and visitors can feel welcome, no matter their differences.

"One such space is Bethlehem Lutheran Church," Froiland writes. "The church itself is a hub of activity, discussion, and community for people from all walks of life. . . . It's politically diverse. While the majority [of members] supported Donald Trump in 2024, 37.5% of its electorate voted for other candidates. People of all political leanings share pews in worship."

The Rev. Jeff Whillock is Bethlehem's lead pastor, who takes an open view to discussing things that can divide people. Froiland writes, "Instead of shying away from political topics at church. . . Whillock takes these conversations on, thoughtfully and methodically." He told Froiland, "I’m continually committed to being a pastor with people that I disagree with."

Like a track that keeps a train moving, part of what has kept Bethlehem alive and growing is "the congregation’s shared understandings of faith and nature to relay a powerful message: all are welcome at Bethlehem," Froiland explains. "Perhaps in part due to the church’s work to connect across differences, Bethlehem is thriving."

Some evenings at Bethlehem include a meal before the religious service. Members and visitors share a meal, with some staying for the service, but some head home after the meal. "In many ways, Bethlehem is a hub of its own. A hub where people from all walks of life can share a meal together," Froiland adds. "A hub where people with different political views can speak a common language."

Pheasant hunting offers a chance for shared camaraderie among rural and urban sportsmen and women

Nick Jorgensen and family host about 500 hunters in
Ideal, S.D. (Photo by Ariana Schumacher, Agweek)

A farming family in Ideal, South Dakota, is using its hunting lodge as a venue to teach urban hunters about food and farming. Over a weekend, barriers come down, and both sides enjoy the hunt and find some surprisingly common ground, reports Ariana Schumacher of Agweek.

The Jorgensens family owns the Lazysee Lazy J Grand Lodge and Jorgensen Land and Cattle, which hosts about 500 pheasant hunters a year. One of the appeals of pheasant hunting is camaraderie built on the challenge finding the sneaky quarry; pheasants can cleverly avoid becoming prey by circling just behind hunters.

Beyond the hunt, the Jorgensens "see the hunting lodge as an opportunity to teach visitors about agriculture and where their food comes from," Schumacher writes. Nick Jorgensen, CEO of Jorgensen Land and Cattle, told Schumacher, "We view this as an opportunity for our business to do what we call agriculture advocacy. . . . [Guests come] from large metro areas, on the coast, Nashville, Houston, California ... and they are very disconnected from agriculture."

A farm tour is a required part of the hunting experience, Jorgensen told Schumacher. "So, we load them on a bus. We drive them 4 miles away to the feedlot. We go drive through the pens. We go show them a farm field that maybe has some cover crop growing in it. We stop and look at the cows out in the grass, and it’s just an opportunity for us to tell our story on how food is made."

"While many guests come in thinking this operation is a far cry from the business world they know, they soon learn that there is common ground to be found," Schumacher reports. Jorgensen told her: "They get to our operation where we farm 15,000 acres, we have a large feedlot, we have a large cow-calf herd, we are the largest seedstock producer in the United States ... and they think, 'Wow, this is a big business, and these are largely business people. We can talk about how raising food really is a business."

Pheasants came to America from China in the 1880s.
(Photo via Meadowbrook Game Farm, Tenn.)

Because the lodge is a hunting preserve, each pheasant taken on a hunt is replaced. "They want guests to have success without diminishing the wild population," Schumacher explains. "Operating this way allows hunters to take between 4,000 to 5,000 roosters a season. . . . They hope that with this experience, their guests walk away with some agricultural knowledge while enjoying the South Dakota landscape and one of the state’s most popular pastimes: hunting."

South Dakota governor signs bill to help bring lawyers to rural areas that lack them

South Dakota is giving graduates of the University of South Dakota School of Law a reason to practice in rural areas. On Thursday Gov. Dennis Daugaard signed House Bill 1096, which provides "a post-graduation payback of 90 percent of law-school tuition for lawyers who move into under-served rural counties (10,000 population or less). It would cover 16 lawyers," writes Bob Mercer of the Rapid City Journal.

South Dakota Chief Justice David Gilbertson says the signing "makes South Dakota the first state in the nation to have legislation designed specifically to assist recruiting attorneys into rural parts of the state," reports the Dakota Radio Group.

Pilot plant making ethanol from corn cobs in S.D.

A new program is testing the viability of using corn cobs to make ethanol. "A pilot-scale facility located at Scotland, S.D., has become the first such plant to produce ethanol from corn cobs," writes Dave Russell of Brownfield. The POET company has set up the pilot facility and says the process has run smoothly and that corn cobs are an excellent source of biomass for ethanol production. (Flickr photo by Dragonseye)

POET CEO Jeff Broin claims there are other benefits to using cobs. "Because they are being grown today, they don’t require farmers to grow a new crop," said Broin. "And there are lots of them, enough to produce 5 billion gallons of ethanol every year, that’s 5 billion gallons of ethanol that can come from what is a waste product today." Broin says a full-scale facility should be operational by 2011. (Read more)

Small-town America looks different from a bicycle

University of Kentucky law professor Bill Fortune, left, gained "a new appreciation for small-town America and its people" by riding a bicycle 4,100 miles with a small group from coast to coast this summer, Tom Eblen reports in the Lexington Herald-Leader. (Photo of Fortune at the Atlantic Ocean near Portland, Maine, by Bill Rund)

"What impressed Fortune most were the places he never would have stopped to see, and the people he never would have met, had he been driving through in a car," Eblen writes. "There was the couple in Waterville, Wash., who bought and renovated the abandoned Lutheran church where they had been married years before. Now it’s beautiful again, and the couple rents it as a wedding chapel. . . . Fortune now knows that Buffalo, Wyo., claims to have the world’s largest swimming pool, and Huron, S.D., the world’s largest statue of a pheasant." Fortune says, "You see the country in a different way when you’re on a bicycle. If you made the trip in a car, you couldn’t see it as slowly and intensely as we saw it."

"Fortune marveled at the vast openness of the West as he passed abandoned houses and towns depopulated by a changing economy," Eblen writes. "Many people had lived in their small towns all their lives, but their children had left in search of jobs and a more exciting lifestyle. He saw human despair on Indian reservations, and noted there was at least one bar in every Western town, no matter how small, and gambling machines in every bar and gas station."

Explorers often like to draw boundaries, and we tend to agree with our friend Bill on this one: "The cyclists agreed that the West ended and the Midwest began when they crossed the Missouri River in eastern South Dakota near the Minnesota line," Eblen writes. "Gradually, the empty country gave way to tidy farms and farmhouses and well-kept small towns." (Read more) For the blog version of Eblen's story, with a very nice, three-minute audio slide show from Fortune, click here.

Rural areas get less return on school funding because of brain drain; consolidation fights still on

In a recent article on size of school districts, The Economist magazine reported what it called a sad irony: "The better a small town educates its pupils, the more likely they are to seek jobs elsewhere. According to a study by Pennsylvania State University, returns to investment in human capital are much lower in rural areas than in urban ones."

The Economist did not cite the name or author of the study, but thanks to help from our friends at Penn State, we tracked it down. It's called "The Returns to Education in Rural Areas," and it addresses the rural "brain drain" alluded to by the magazine. The lead author is Stephan Goetz, of Penn State's Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development. In a policy brief for the Southern Rural Development Center, the authors explain that the brain drain "not only deprives local employers of an educated workforce, but it also represents a drain on local resources because the communities that invested in the education of these workers do not reap any returns on that investment."

The study crunched numbers to place an actual number on returns for education in rural and urban areas. The study found that a 1 percent increase in the share of high school graduates in a typical rural county raises per capita income by $128, while a 1 percent increase in urban areas result in a $413 increase. The graph below shows the figures vary widely by region.

The regional variances are important because key factors such as population density, social capital, classroom size and highway access ramps "have no statistical effect in leveraging the impact of educational attainment," the study says. It concludes that there are "staggering odds or disadvantages that rural areas face in terms of providing those with a high school degree a reasonable return on their investment."

The Economist examines the long-term trend toward consolidation of schools and school districts, a major issue in rural areas. Its article highlights South Dakota, where the total enrollment of students has fallen 9.4 percent over the past 10 years (Economist chart). That drop led legislators to force any school district with fewer than 100 students to merge with another. "Legislators, particularly urban ones, reckon that merging districts will create economies of scale and allow schools to offer a broader curriculum," The Economist reports. "But in many cases, a merger will lead a good school to close, forcing its pupils to take long bus journeys to the next town."

The Economist connects South Dakota's example to the "long and contentious"' history of school consolidation in this country, which had 117,000 school districts in 1939 and 14,000 in 2005. Maine passed similar legislation last year, and the transition has not been smooth. (A column in Tuesday's Bangor Daily News attacks the plan for eliminating school choice.) North Dakota considered a consolidation plan in the 1990s, but the discussion "sparked such outrage that politicians dropped the subject entirely," The Economist reports. (Read more)

Locals regain media control in Brokaw's hometown

The decades-old trend toward media consolidation seems to be stalling in some places, and there's no better recent example than Yankton, S.D. In the past week, the Missouri River city of 13,500 saw its daily newspaper and a radio station go from chains to local hands. (Encarta map)

"When Yanktonians awoke this morning, the only media company not owned locally was the venerable WNAX Radio [so old that its call letters don't start with K]. Every other media in town is back in local hands. Few cities can boast of that," Bernie Hunhoff wrote today on Road Stories, the blog of Yankton-based South Dakota Magazine.

A group of local investors, including Publisher Gary Wood, bought the Yankton Daily Press and Dakotan, circulation 7,850, from GateHouse Media, which had bought it three months ago from Morris Communications. A week earlier, a local couple bought KYNT Radio, which "discovered" Tom Brokaw, Hunhoff writes. "The chain media have perfected bland and boring and made it into a recipe for how to run a business," he opines. "It will be interesting to watch how the local owners change their product through the months and years to come. I’m quite confident the changes will be good for our region."

Press and Dakotan Managing Editor Kelly Hertz seems to think likewise. She wrote, "I genuinely believe the best thing that could have happened here has occurred. . . . However, the greatest feeling I have now is a sense of relief. The last few months have reminded me of just how coldly businesslike our business can be. . . . I've learned a lot this winter about the newspaper industry, for better and for worse. I learned of the plans that some of these other prospective suitors had for us. . . . They would have ripped us apart, not because of how we have performed but in spite of it." The sale also included the Vermillion Plain Talk, The Missouri Valley Shopper, The Broadcaster and the Town and Country Weekly News.

Permanent disaster-aid program proposal, and its price tag, are keys to agreement on Farm Bill

Two weeks before the current Farm Bill expires, negotiators are getting close to a compromise "that would provide $10 billion in new money for farm and nutrition programs and include some money for a new, permanent disaster-aid program," which is a key issue, reports Faith Bremner of the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, S.D.

House and Senate negotiators have been trying to a few key differences in their versions of the bill. Last year, the Senate passed a version that was $13.3 billion more than the baseline, including $5 billion for a permanent disaster program, after the House passed a version with $5.9 billion more than the baseline but without the disaster program. Now the House has begun to accept the program, but not the Senate's price tag. Under House rules, "all new spending must be offset by either reducing government spending elsewhere or by raising new revenues," so paying for the additional programs is the final hurdle, Bremner writes.

President Bush has threatened to veto the bill if it exceeds the baseline by more than %$8 billion. Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., told Bremner he hopes the compromise will help the House pass the Farm Bill by a veto-proof margin. The Senate passed its version with more than enough votes to override any veto. (Read more)

Slaughter no longer a U.S option, surplus horses force tough decisions for owners; pet or meat?

Since the last American horse slaughterhouse closed late last year, the fallout from that decision has received plenty of attention. Michael Booth of The Denver Post gets to the heart of matter as well anyone when he begins his story this way: "A dying dog is 40 pounds of family sadness. A dying horse is a physics problem, and 1,000 pounds of emotional debate over what we should do with the iconic Western companion at the end of its useful life." (In a Post photo by Joe Amon, a quarter horse goes up for auction.)

Booth explains how overbreeding and rising feed prices, coupled with the end of horse slaughter for meat, have created a glut of horses. "More are being abandoned on public lands," he writes from the Western viewpoint. "Neglected horses crowd rescue shelters. The pool of farms willing to put Old Paint out to pasture is shrinking. Strains in the horse world prompt ranchers to accuse city folk of a patronizing ignorance for opposing slaughter, animal-rights groups to accuse horse sellers of intolerable cruelty, and all 'horse people" to argue about how an animal's life should conclude."

The options are shrinking, but the debate continues, as we have reported here. Congress is considering the Horse Slaughter Prevention Act to prevent the trucking of American horses to Mexico (where conditions can be awful) and Canada for slaughter for meat, while in South Dakota, a lawmaker wants to reopen a horse slaughterhouse. Booth says the debate hinges on these key questions: "Is a horse a friend or a responsibility? A retired servant or a liability on the hoof? When it comes right down to it, pet or meat?"

Since the issue is an emotional one, some support other measures to control the horse population such as more neutering and more controlled breeding. Those are preventative measures, and they do not solve the issue of what to do with the 100,000 American horses that would have been slaughtered each year in the past. (Read more)

Bill to strengthen presumption that S. Dak. records are open dies after opposition from governor

A bill to make clear that records in South Dakota are public, unless the law says otherwise, is probably dead for this session, the bill's sponsor said after a House committee voted 7-6 against it, reports Terry Woster of The Argus Leader of Sioux Falls.

"Critics said the bill went too far and would not protect disclosure on private individuals and corporations, even though it included a ban on “unwarranted release' of information that would endanger the public or cause “irreparable harm to an individual,” writes intern Alanna Malone of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

The sponsor, Sen. Nancy Turbak Berry, D-Watertown, told Woster that she probably would not try to revive Senate Bill 189, which grew out of her service on a state task force and was supported by the South Dakota Newspaper Association -- but opposed by Gov. Mike Rounds. The Reporters Committee said South Dakota is the only state without a law presuming records are open.

"State law generally says records required by law to be kept are open. Numerous specific laws close different individual records or classes of records," Woster writes. But the task force "found that a vast number of records fall somewhere between those two areas. It also found that government officials have wide discretion to make decisions on whether to open or close records. The task force was unable to agree on a bill making substantive changes in open-records laws," so Berry filed the bill, which would have "put the burden on government to show why a document should be closed."

The committee did approve a bill that would "give citizens seeking government records a place to go if their requests are denied or if they are told the documents would cost a great deal to provide," Woster reports. Disputes would be settled by the state Office of Hearing Examiners. (Read more)

S.D. horse slaughterhouse bill sponsor still trying

The bill to offer state loans to start a horse slaughterhouse in South Dakota may not have been to the legislative abattoir after all. Its sponsor tells the Rapid City Journal that support for it is growing, and the Journal's Bill Harlan reports that a committee rejected it "mainly for procedural reasons" after a lobbying campaign from the Animal Welfare Institute.

Sen. Frank Kloucek, D-Scotland, "proposed the bill because the last two horse-processing plants in the United States –- in Texas and Illinois –- were closed by state laws. A bill in Congress would institute a nationwide ban," Harlan reports. "In the meantime, Kloucek said, hundreds of thousands of unwanted horses are languishing, either at taxpayers’ expense, or at the owners’ expense. And some horses are simply abandoned."

Harlan reports Kloucek might try "a legislative maneuver to force another committee vote, then the vote of the full Senate," and if that fails he "will ask the Legislature’s Executive Board for a summer study."

“It’s appalling that we don’t have horse harvesting in the United States,” Kloucek told Harlan, who writes, "He also pointed out that the Midwestern Legislative Conference of the Council of State Governments passed a resolution last year, unanimously, encouraging Congress to support new horse-processing plants."

Harlan recounts supportive messages Kloucek has received, including one from John Kabeiseman, a Yankton horse trainer, who told Harlan, “A kill market sets a base price for horses.” Harlan explains, "With no kill market, people are forced to care for old, sick or unmanageable horses, at great expense. Or, they have to put them down, which Kabeiseman said was difficult." (Read more)

National parks may hunt elk to trim growing herds

In three national parks in Colorado and the Dakotas, the elk population is straining the food supply for other foragers and browsers, so officials are considering shooting elk to restore balance, reports Peter Slevin of The Washington Post. Simply put, the elk (in an Associated Press photo by Sara Gettys) are out-eating other animals such as bison, feral horses and deer.

National Park Service "Spokeswoman Kyle Patterson said proposals to curb the elk population at Rocky Mountain have inspired 'strong feelings across the board,'" Slevin writes. "Recommendations ranged from shooting and fencing to contraception and the introduction of wolves, one of elk's few natural predators."

Wildlife conservation groups favor introducing wolves, as was done to lower the elk population in Yellowstone National Park during the 1990s. Park officials, however, "settled on 'lethal reduction,' as shooting is called, as the preferred way to control the herd," Slevin writes. "Sharpshooters with night-vision goggles and silencers would target elk after dark. A formal decision is expected to be released soon, Patterson said, with the program likely to begin next winter and continue for two decades." (Read more)

Bill promoting horse slaughterhouse in S.D. dies

The issue of horse slaughter has received plenty of coverage over the last few months as the last American facilities have closed, and the debate is not slowing down. In South Dakota, a state senator recently introduced a bill to allow $1 million in state loans to fund the building of a horse slaughterhouse there, and the response against it was overwhelming, reports Bill Harlan of the Rapid City Journal.

The bill died in a Senate committee last week, "but not before lawmakers sounded off about the hundreds of e-mails and telephone calls they received from out-of-state opponents," Harlan writes. The Animal Welfare Institute, a non-profit advocacy group in Washington, D.C., led the campaign against the bill. The group's Web site listed the numbers and e-mail addresses of the committee members and provided talking points. The committee's chairman said he received more than 1,000 e-mails and 600 calls in the space of two days. The bill was defeated after state officials testified against it, saying that it was unclear whether such a facility is even legal anymore in this country.

The bill's sponsor, Sen. Frank Kloucek, D-Scotland, defended his proposal, telling Harlan, "There's a market for it and a need for it." Kloucek said that because of the end of horse slaughter in the United States, there is more neglect and humane societies are "overwhelmed." (Read more)

GateHouse Media purchases 14 dailies, three non-dailies from Morris Publishing Group

A deal between two community newspaper chains will make 17 newspapers in eight states change hands. GateHouse Media Inc. announced late Tuesday its purchase of 14 dailies, three non-dailies and a commercial printing operation from Morris Publishing Group. The sale totals $115 million, reports Editor & Publisher.

The 14 daily newspapers, mainly in the rural Midwest, range in size from the 4,700-circulation York (Neb.) News-Times to the 21,000-circulation of The Grand Island (Neb.) Independent. Here is the complete list of the dailies and their circulations:

• Dodge City (Kan.) Daily Globe, 9,700
• The Newton Kansan, 7,647
• The Morning Sun, Pittsburg, Kan., 10,312
• Hillsdale (Mich.) Daily News, 7,285
• The Holland (Mich.) Sentinel, 18,345
• Hannibal (Mo.) Courier-Post, 8,171
• The Examiner, Independence, Mo., 14,022
• The Grand Island (Neb.) Independent, 21,204
• York (Neb.) News-Times, 4,695
• The Daily Ardmoreite, Oklahoma, 9,753
• The Shawnee (Okla.) News-Star, 8,830
• Yankton (S.D.) Daily Press & Dakotan, 7,855
• The Oak Ridger in Tennessee, 7,554
• News Chief in Winter Haven, Fla., 9,817

The deal also includes three non-dailies:

• La Estrella (Spanish counterpart of Dodge City Daily Globe)
• The Girard (Kan.) City Press, 1,300
• Vermillion (S.D.) Plain Talk, 1,630

Morris Publishing CEO William S. Morris IV said the sale is "in line with our strategic plan to focus on our larger markets and will enable us to pay down our existing bank debt." Before the sale, the Augusta, Ga.-based Morris Publishing owned and operated 27 daily newspapers, while the Fairport, N.Y.-based GateHouse, one of the nation's largest community newspaper chains, owned and operated 86 dailies. "This is an excellent acquisition opportunity for GateHouse," GateHouse CEO Mike Reed said in a statement. "These are strong local media franchises in small markets, many of which are near existing GateHouse properties and offer compelling synergy opportunities." (Read more)