A lot of talk is had on how people are moving into York County and destroying its rural feel. A recent report in the Wall Street Journal says it is a trend all over the country. But interestingly enough, most of Pennsylvania, including York County, is not on the list of places nationwide that are getting hit hard by what the paper refers to as rapid "gentrification."
See the Journal's story and map here.
Maybe York County is absent because our rural feel is already gone, our gentrification already coming to pass. If I were looking for a rural place to settle down, I sure wouldn't pick here. It's already not rural enough to have enough charm in that regard.
I look at the only county in Pennsylvania that is both on the Journal's list and with which I am familiar — Sullivan County, north of Williamsport, the home of my deer-hunting camp — and I see a really rural county. Glen Rock is a metropolis by comparison to little Hillsgrove and Forksville.
Most of that county is state forest land, state game land and rocky soils that couldn't easily be pocketed as badly with the on-the-cheap, haphazard developments that currently scar most of Pennsylvania. Until now, I guess.
For me, York County is a place where posted and safety zone signs fill the woodlots and where the cornfields are silhouetted by this year's mega housing development. The little of what remains feels more like Central Park than a national park or forest.
At the same time, it's not exactly a hub for young urban professionals, a demographic that is becoming increasingly environmentally minded, while still living in cities or suburbia and wanting to shop at Starbucks and Wegmans. And a demographic we crave for its tax base.
I tried the other day, for example, to find a store selling high-quality, 100 percent recycled paper around York. I failed.
So is it time we start thinking of York County from an outsider's perspective, as a quick-growing bedroom community instead of a bucolic getaway, and make our decisions accordingly?
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