Folks who move to Idaho and now want to leave (Moscow: calculation, to live)

[mistyriver]

Originally Posted by Keim

I was referring to how you limit north Idaho to the cda area. My portion of n Idaho meets just about any definition of rural. IOW I was referring to your definition of noryth idaho, not your definition of rural. I dont think of cda as rural at all. But you can be into rural from there in about 20 minutes.

Yeah, mine does too, and meets most people's definitions of wilderness besides that.

[jem22]

My commentary on the rapid, unchecked growth of Kootenai County/CDA in no way precludes similar phenomena in the rest of the panhandle; quite the opposite, actually. To illustrate, I can drive 40 minutes north of CDA and experience the same aggressive driving and hear natives bemoan the loss of their former (rural) way of life to developers, etc.

[Keim]

Here is a map of North Idaho. Get out of the CDA-Post Falls-Spokane metroplex, and off of Hwy 95 by about a mile and it gets rural fast. The area you are commenting on is a TINY part of North Idaho. The place has lots and lots of rural areas.

[jem22]

Must have hit a never here.

Again, I'm not limiting my commentary to CDA, so stop positing to this effect. Realistically, there is only so much usable land to go around in n.Idaho. You're map clearly demonstrates this, as much of the area is alpine country and not habitable for year round use. The average reader looking for an authentically rural experience that also entails a year-round home with good water, soil, etc will face more challenges in n.Idaho than neighboring states, where usable, rural land is more plentiful and affordable.

[Sage of Sagle]

Originally Posted by jem22

Must have hit a never here.

Again, I'm not limiting my commentary to CDA, so stop positing to this effect. Realistically, there is only so much usable land to go around in n.Idaho. You're map clearly demonstrates this, as much of the area is alpine country and not habitable for year round use. The average reader looking for an authentically rural experience that also entails a year-round home with good water, soil, etc will face more challenges in n.Idaho than neighboring states, where usable, rural land is more plentiful and affordable.

I think what several of us find annoying is that you appear to have little idea of what you're talking about with describing an area's land use and zoning and "realistic" population density.

For example...

Has the area around Sandpoint been built up more, pushing out all around town? Sure. Has Sagle seen many areas built up more (albeit on 5-20 acre parcels)? Sure. However, Sagle would still qualify as rural in anyone's description of land usage, regardless of how an old timer may decry the changes in population density.

Do people tend to drive fast on 95? Sure. But when I drive home late at night on 95 after taking my wife to the movies in CDA, we can go the whole way home from CDA to Sagle and not see 20 other cars the entire drive home. In fact, not long ago, coming back from Seattle at 2:30AM on a weeknight, I actually made it from I-90 to Sagle without seeing a single other vehicle either way the entire length of Hwy 95.

Bonner County has 41,000 people in 1920 square miles. Boundary County has 11,000 people in 1278 square miles. I would consider Bonner County "rural" and Boundary County "extremely rural".

Kootenai County? 141,000 people in 1316 square miles. OK...partially rural, partially suburban, partially city, depending on where in the county you live, sure. I know in 2006 it was in the top 100 fastest growing counties in the USA, but most of that growth was on the west side of 95 on the Rathdrum Prairie area.

Me? I'm in "non rural" (according to you) Sagle, where we've had cougar and wolves on our property (on top of the usual suspects of course). We're rural enough to have only a volunteer fire department, no fire hydrants, no broadband, no cable, power going out all the time in storms so neighbors needing to rely on each other for food and emergency help, selective logging of our land to keep our forest healthy, and neighbors having to pool money to maintain roads since all our roads except our MAIN east-west road are all dirt. Sure SOUNDS rural, but what do I know...I guess I'm lucky to have you to come enlighten me or I would have been blissful in my ignorance...I think you get the picture.

I believe the nerve you struck is that people are finding you personally offputting, not that we're somehow "convicted" at the soundness of your arguments.

[Keim]

That's it, Sage. Though the original commentary did limit itself to the area around CDA.

[jem22]

So far only three members, yourself included, have responded to my post; that hardly constitutes “several,” although now that a mod has reacted defensively to it more may very well follow suit. If you’ll revisit my post, you’ll note I never claim there is no rural habitat to be found in your region, only that there isn’t much about it I personally consider particularly rural in the authentic sense. Nothing definitive here. You seem to be suggesting I can’t posit such a position unless I’m also a land use/zoning professional. Absurd.

The fact you can drive certain times of the night with noticeably less traffic only demonstrates that less people drive at night. I’ve driven stretches of 1-5 in densely populated King County at 2:30am and noticed the same phenomena. Cougar, bear, and such regularly ventured into suburbia and coyote are still a SeaTac mainstay. You cite the number of people per square mile but I question how much of that land is actually usable for year round habitation or even available for purchase, as much of it is likely state land.

To be clear, I’m not dismissing the fact your property may be zoned rural. If that’s all you got out of my post you missed a salient point. Part of my argument is making the distinction between what a city slicker from somewhere like Los Angeles may perceive as rural as opposed to someone from a less urbane environment. I find it amusing, for example, that a person living in a Post Falls tract home can refer to the experience as “laid-back,” and “country.” Everything is relative.

[Clark Fork Fantast]

Okay Jem, here's another member's voice. And the reason we don't have more activity here on this thread, challenging your assumptions and arguments, is, for one, that we're a small group, and for another, that we're not in the habit of pouncing on posters we disagree with. This forum is one of the more polite and congenial forums in C-D. But I did take the trouble to look at some other posts of yours, and it looks as if you can't wait to move out of the Spokane area to Western WA (not coast, but mountains). I'm not going to make assumptions about your reasons in connection with your assessment of NID--that would probably constitute an ad hominem argument--so I will just conclude that you're somehow fed up with the entire area and feel a need to vent. Sage expresses the view that I believe most of us who have a connection to NID hold.

[Sage of Sagle]

I'm not suggesting you must be a land use or zoning professional to be qualified to have an opinion worth posting here. I'm simply stating that your view on what is "authentically rural" comes across as pretty goofy to me if northern Idaho is dropped off your "rural" list for the reasons you provided above...

[banjomike]

I think it's all in the numbers.
When a single family moves into a rural area, or even a few families, they don't change the rurality.

But when a rural area grips the romantic imagination of the public strongly enough for any reason, rurality can vanish very quickly and become an essentially urban place that only has more physical separation between neighbors than a city. And that's a social mess that is neither one nor the other.

This happened in Colorado in the early 70's. All it took was a string of John Denver hit songs and a little attention to do it.
I watched it happen again a decade later in Montana. Different singers, different songs, different movies, different attention, but the results were the same. i saw it happen before Colorado in Wyoming.

In the end, the immigration always tapers off, but never completely stops. And what was once rural, especially the best qualities that the rural area possesses, are gone for good, never to return.

I don't believe there is much NID can do about it one way or the other. The only thing that seems to stop it is when all the attention goes to another place, or when a huge passing fad passes. The problem is there's always a new fad rising to replace the one that's passing, and no matter what, the changes that were brought on always remain. The country living never goes back to how it once was.

Maybe that's not always a bad thing, either. Rural Colorado had been in a perpetual economic depression for decades before John Dusseldorph changed his last name to Denver and his rhapsodies packed in a lot of people with them. A lot of formerly poor ranch owners became millionaires, a half-acre at a time, and the area has become almost recession-proof since then. Aspen, Vail, Telluride, Durango, and a bunch of other dying towns all still thrive more now than they ever did earlier.

There's no place in Idaho that's close to filling up yet. NID still has plenty of room for urban and border-zone expansion. There are places here that couldn't handle sudden growth, though, and could be ruined; Salmon is one. There's not enough room in the little Lemhi valley for a lot of romanticized rural growth.