By Jonni Good

I grew up in a tiny town - so tiny that it doesn’t show up on some maps. Until last year, however, I’ve spent all my adult life in big cities. I’m now a happy citizen of a small rural city, along with about 12,000 other people, give or take a few. When I announced that I was moving away from the city, my friends were worried that I’d ‘miss out’ on all the excitement of the city life, but I haven’t missed a thing.

I'm not the only baby boomer who’s finally escaped from the stress, traffic, noise and air pollution of city life. Since many of the folks in my generation grew up in rural areas, like I did, it makes sense for us to want to go home when we get older, even if ‘home’ is loosely defined as a somewhere quieter, less crowded, and nearer to the mountains or the beach. However, I’ve met a number of younger people, Generation X-types, who have never lived in any city with fewer than a million people, but who see the lower housing costs and the easy access to recreational areas, and start planning to make their move to a smaller town.

The city where I now live, La Grande, Oregon, was recently cited as one of the best places you’ve never heard of by The Mother Earth News. Because the area has been ‘discovered’, real estate prices are higher than they were when my grandfather lived here, 15 or 20 years ago, but houses are still far less expensive than homes in Portland, our nearest city. In fact, the house I bought here in La Grande is more than twice as big as the house I sold in Portland, but it cost half as I got when I sold my Portland house. Yes, that’s twice as much house for half as much money - a true bargain. If I didn’t mind going even a bit more rural, I could have moved to an even smaller town where homes sell for much less.

For years, people in Southern California have known they could sell their homes and use the proceeds of the inflated sale price to buy a house in Oregon, for cash. Now people inside Oregon are discovering that it’s possible to do the same thing, as long as you move from a large, overpriced real estate market to a reasonably-priced area in a smaller city.

Don’t I miss the plays, the movies, the waterfront festivals, and other amenities offered by the city I left behind? Not really, since I rarely had time to enjoy those things anyway, and I hated to park downtown. I do enjoy an occasional movie, but we have a movie theater here - two actually. In the summer we can go to the drive-in theater for a bit of nostalgic fun, and all year long we can see first-run movies in the theater downtown. We have an excellent library and a university, and we’re within an hour’s drive of one of the most spectacular summer recreation areas in the Wallowa Mountains.

But more importantly, as far as I’m concerned, is the friendly way people respond to you when you meet them at the post office or while walking your dog. I attribute this small-town friendliness to the simple fact that my neighbors don’t need to drive for 40 minutes through smog and ungodly traffic to get to work and back each day. They aren’t jostled by strangers as they do their shopping, and if something does go wrong and they need to call the local police force, it’s not unlikely that they’ll know the officer who responds to their call. Less stress makes it easier to be more relaxed when you meet someone new on the street.

For years city folks have assumed that people in smaller towns will be less liberal, and voting statistics do show that smaller cities in more agricultural areas do tend to vote Republican. However, a closer look at the numbers will show you that a sizable minority in every city and county, even in the most rural areas, did not vote for Bush in either election.

If you want to hang out with peace activists, you can find them in smaller cities, along with people who support their sons and daughters in the military, while at the same time believing that their Commander in Chief made a big mistake.

At one time, lop-sided politics may have been a good reason to stay away from smaller cities if you had a more liberal mindset, but now everyone in America sees the same news on TV, and has access to the same information on the Internet, so these regional differences are slowly disappearing. And many of those more liberal former-Californians have already made themselves at home in the smaller cities and towns, which helps to even out the political landscape. No matter what persuasion you might be, you’re likely to find like-minded folks enjoying a break from the big-city stress if you move to a smaller city.

If high living costs, pollution, traffic and stress are getting you down, start thinking about making your move to a less crowded city or town. Since large corporations like Google, Microsoft and Amazon are discovering that small town folks make good employees, you may even be able to get a good job once you get there - and you can be guaranteed to have a shorter commute to work. Other Articles:
- Fix it and Flip it - How I Lost Money on Real Estate

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