Renewed appeal of 'quiet country'

After living in Los Angeles for eight years, Mary Ashley Burton was taken aback when her new doctor in Ventura County accompanied her out the door after a check-up, and personally wrote out directions for her lab work and imaging.

“Here in Ventura, people will actually strike up conversations or give helpful advice when they find out I’m new to the area,” said Burton, 36, who last year moved to a quieter location in Ventura County, which is about 65 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

Burton said she was just as “amazed” with how helpful a postal service worker was in making sure her mail was forwarded to her new address. The postal worker even gave her his contact information in case she didn’t get her mail.

“Experiences like that have made me realize how much I was lacking in community in L.A., how that aspect of life in L.A. wasn’t necessarily normal, and how having a relatively low level of general stress can help everyone be kind and generous to their neighbors,” Burton said.

Return to slower pace

Burton’s experience is an increasingly common one in the United States amid the fallout from the novel coronavirus pandemic. The economic and social upheaval related to quarantines, government shutdowns, and business closings is impacting demographics, especially in the country’s larger metro regions.

Specifically, real estate professionals, public officials, and economists have seen indicators that more Americans, especially young adults but also older people, over the past year have been leaving crowded urban centers for suburban, rural, and exurban spaces that are less densely populated and offer a relatively slower pace of life and other benefits, such as lower taxes, less noise pollution, rare traffic jams, and cleaner air.

“I think any suburb is going to give you the sprawl that you’re looking for, where you’re now in a single-family detached house with a yard. That’s just different from a downtown major metro urban housing environment,” said Kevin McElwain, the owner and president of Allentown Mortgage Corporation in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

McElwain, a member of Legatus’ Lehigh Valley Chapter in Pennsylvania, said he has seen a larger number of people from New York City and northern New Jersey moving into Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, which has a lower cost of living and a growing economy with several large companies, such as Crayola and Olympus, that have headquarters in the region.

“It’s been cheaper to live in Pennsylvania and for years, we’ve had people reside here and commute to New York,” McElwain said. “But now I think we’re getting more people who are saying, ‘I’ve had it with New York, and I might not even work there anymore, so let’s find employment elsewhere.’”

For about ten years, New York City was home for David Raposo, 31, an actor who spent his days working for a nonprofit theater company, auditioning for acting gigs and working part-time as a waiter and bartender for a Manhattan wine and cheese restaurant.

Financial incentive fades

“All the things I was doing to make money and live in the city, it all just kind of evaporated. It was gone,” said Raposo, who tried to “hunker down” in his Brooklyn apartment for several months when the pandemic shut down New York’s theater scene.

Eventually, Raposo said it no longer made sense to spin his wheels and “hemorrhage money. So last summer, he moved back to where his family lives in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, a suburb of about 34,000 people located halfway between Cape Cod and Providence, Rhode Island.

Raposo has used the opportunity to go back to school for his degree in education. He is making money by helping his sister out with her pierogi business, and was recently going to be starting a new job as a behavioral therapist.

All in all, Raposo said he liked New York, but added that there was a part of him that felt “trapped” in the city.

“There’s this weird cycle, where you have to make a certain amount of money just to live there,” said Raposo, who added that while a city like New York is filled with opportunities, after awhile the returns from the constant hustling “start diminishing.”

Much less ‘alone’

Being in a smaller community, where many of its residents went to the same high school and are connected to a common network of friends and relatives, is also a stark change from living in a metropolis of eight million strangers.

“I am so much more alone in the middle of Times Square than I am walking through the Dartmouth Mall. I mean, I will never see any of those people [in Times Square] ever again,” Raposo said.

Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, the influx of New Yorkers is driving up real estate values as the demand for housing is higher than the available supply.

“It’s a good seller’s market because you’ve got plenty of buyers to buy,” McElwain said. “The problem is you’re competing with more buyers too, so that’s causing you to pay more. But still, in relative terms it’s considerably less (expensive) here than in a New York market or a northern New Jersey market. And our tax base is about half.”

Besides the lower cost of living and smaller tax burden, McElwain said the Lehigh Valley also has good school systems and a solid employment market with decent-paying jobs that show that people do not have to live in a major city like New York to have a high quality of life.

“The attraction to the city was two-fold before,” McElwain said. “You had your economic and cultural aspects, the hustle and bustle of the night life, and everything else. All that was attractive to a millennial-type person.

“But when all that is shut down, when the cultural attraction is nonexistent, and a third of the businesses are shut down, so that the city is no longer an employment hub… Once those things dissipate, then there’s no reason to be in New York City,” McElwain said.

Easier, safer, cheaper

Los Angeles’ film and theater industry are what drew Burton, a practicing Catholic who works as a screenwriter, producer and director. The elements that made L.A. a good fit for Burton — the theater workshops, film events, and networking — vanished when COVID-19 hit Southern California.

“I had always enjoyed Ventura when I passed through, so I decided to look there, and managed to find an apartment that is cheaper overall, with an ocean view, in a quiet neighborhood where almost everything I need is within walking distance,” Burton said. “Everything is easier, including simple things like running errands, because there isn’t traffic. There’s always parking, and there are fewer people, which makes me feel generally safer in terms of COVID.”

Burton said she wouldn’t have previously expected to enjoy living in Ventura County, as she used to “really love all the hustle and bustle in L.A.” But Burton said the relative peace and quiet in her new home has helped her to realize “how stressed” she used to be in Los Angeles, especially by features of city life that she had long ago stopped noticing, like loud helicopters at night, bad air quality, and gridlock traffic.

“I would only want to go back (to the city) if I really needed to, and at this point I can’t envision a scenario where I would have to. I live about an hour away now, and so far I haven’t had a problem driving into L.A. for the times I’ve had to go,” said Burton, who sees a promising future for herself in Ventura County.

“Since housing prices and cost of living are lower here,” Burton said, “I can see myself wanting to buy a home here in the future and actually being able to, whereas that seemed like a hopeless dream in L.A.”

BRIAN FRAGA is a Legatus magazine staff writer.