Beyond the ribbon of eight-lane highways, out where the deer are regular road kill and auto emissions stickers are not always a given, greater Atlanta’s next wave is putting down roots.
Developer Everett Royal Jr. and his wife, Jane, trekked 60 miles east to Morgan County, leaving behind the relative real estate certainties of Sandy Springs to build a new home amid the antebellum architecture of Madison.
Crane operator and union member William Byrd found his rural paradise on four acres of timberland in rural Spalding County. He still lives in Morrow with his parents, wife and three children, but Byrd is already carving up the forest for his dream house far from the crowds and congestion of Atlanta.
Ray and Krista Kall, both pharmaceutical sales representatives, searched in Atlanta for the perfect old home, but then discovered Newnan in Coweta County. Now they live on a tree-lined street with sidewalks and front porches and are renovating their 4,000-square-foot craftsman-style home.
Though their lifestyles differ, all have at least one thing in common. They are part of an early wave of people who are moving beyond suburbia to areas more rural in character than metropolitan.
Some seek more land and larger houses for less money. Others have sought rural destinations for the atmosphere and environment.
“I wanted to move away from all the noise and people so I could relax and enjoy life a little bit,” said the 32-year-old Byrd, who works for Superior Rigging and Erecting in Atlanta and bought land 40 miles south of downtown. “That’s about as far down as I was willing to go. Any farther, and the commute would just be too much.”
As the No. 1 destination for domestic migrants within the United States, metro Atlanta’s borders continue to sprawl into areas that were once rural farming communities. The newcomers cover the demographic spectrum, but some patterns seem to emerge.
At-home workers and telecommuters are one part of the rural renaissance. With the advent of the Internet and modern telecommunications, people who once had to report to an office every day are now able to work out of their homes and live farther away from the city limits.
“They are middle-class people for the most part,” said Everett S. Lee, a demographer and professor emeritus at the University of Georgia. “And they are moving because they have the money to go.”
On the rural fringes of the metropolitan statistical area, the newcomers from other counties or other states account for population increases of more than 40 percent since 1990.
Among the state’s non-metropolitan counties with populations greater than 5,000, those north of Atlanta had the greatest percentage increase in migrant populations between 1990 and 1996.
Three ranked among the top 40 in the nation. Dawson County, which is linked to Atlanta by Georgia Highway 400, ranked 13th, followed by Union County (ranked 30th) and Gilmer County (39th), according to an analysis of recently released 1996 U.S. Census figures.
To the north, the newcomers have been almost exclusively white–more than 98 percent of the people who have moved into Dawson, Pickens and Gilmer counties.
As much as they like rural living, though, the Atlanta job market remains a strong draw. Sixty-seven percent of Dawson County’s more than 12,000 residents continue to commute south to Atlanta or its northern suburbs to work.
“These people are moving from the Atlanta area and probably most of them are moving from apartment and condominium-type housing,” said Horace Hudson, coordinator of community and rural development for the University of Georgia’s extension service. “I would imagine that what you’re getting is a middle-income person, perhaps with a few very high-income who are buying large tracts of land.”
Development on Lake Lanier in Dawson County and its proximity to the Georgia mountains has drawn a number of higher-income people who can afford large homes with grand lakeshore vistas.
“There (are) a lot of retirees up there,” said Douglas C. Bachtel, a sociologist at the University of Georgia. “They’re from Indiana, Ohio and Michigan. They got sick of Florida and moved to northeast Georgia. They call them half-backs, because they moved halfway home.”
While the same can be said of other outlying counties, more moderate-income people are also choosing to live beyond suburbia. In some cases, they are blue-collar workers and single-income working families who can’t afford land closer in.
“There’s a duality to the Atlanta metro area. There (are) high rates of mobile homes and low-income people,” Bachtel said. “It isn’t just a bunch of yuppies moving to Atlanta, and it isn’t all professional people.”
In 1990, 12 of 20 counties within the Atlanta metropolitan area had a higher percentage of mobile homes than the state average, according to an analysis of census figures. Most of the 12 had an abundance of farmland, and the percentage of people living in the counties who had not completed high school was greater than the state average.
For example, mobile homes constituted almost 26 percent of the total housing units in Bartow County in 1990. The state average was 11.6 percent. Also, about 29 percent of the land in Bartow was farmland, and 41 percent of the county’s population had not completed high school.
Bachtel said the number of mobile homes usually increases when an area has a high job-growth rate but still lacks available and affordable housing.
“Economic development does not end with the creation of jobs. You have to have available and affordable housing. If you don’t have that, mobile homes will take up the slack,” Bachtel said.
David Aldridge is co-owner of Regional Properties Inc., which buys large tracts of mostly timberland outside Atlanta, subdivides the properties and resells them for a profit. Many of his customers are in the middle- and lower-income ranges, he said, people who want land and a place of their own.
“About 50 percent of our market consists of people who are buying tracts and putting double-wide mobile homes on them and people who are buying tracts to build houses,” Aldridge said. “They would just as soon be out there and take that 45-minute drive every day.”
Though retirement is still years away for 56-year-old Everett Royal, he and his wife chose to relocate in Madison because of its small-town feel and picturesque setting.
They bought a lot in Madison’s exclusive historic district and built a new home almost indistinguishable from the antebellum mansions that line Main Street. The white picket fences, sidewalks and front porches make for a place where neighbors know and talk to each other, they said.
The couple’s children, ages 12 and 14, had attended the private Lovett School in northwest Atlanta. Now they are going to public schools.
“They were getting caught up in the private school syndrome. I wanted to move to a small town where the kids could walk to school and to the store,” Jane Royal said. “We decided this really was a town that had everything to offer.”
Byrd, 32, bought his land in Spalding because the price was right, about $6,000 an acre.
After six years in the Navy, Byrd returned to his native Clayton County in 1990, married and now has three children. He plans to start building his house on his own after clearing the timber.
“I think it will be better for the kids growing up to live in not such a crowded area,” Byrd said.
Among the inhabitants of Newnan’s historic district are people from throughout the eastern United States, including Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio and New York, said Krista Kall, 34, who lives with her husband, a New York transplant, and 6-year-old child on Greenville Street. The Kalls searched for an older home in north Atlanta but found Newnan suited their needs and price range.
“I lived in a house in Dunwoody in a beautiful neighborhood and never saw a neighbor I could talk to,” Krista said.
