For Janna and Randy, the visit became a relocation. They bought a 700-square foot cabin on an acre of land near Hill City for $42,000 – a price that seemed incredibly low compared to Southern California real estate prices. And for awhile Janna was happy to “hang out in my house in the woods, and unwind from the California pace.” But when the euphoria of inspiration and impulse began to wear off, the couple realized that their employment opportunities in the Hills were not what they had hoped.

Sioux Falls natives, Janna and Randy had met and married in the 1980s. She was an Augustana graduate with a degree in Social Work and Sociology; he was a carpenter. In Sioux Falls winter weather often affected his ability to get work, so they decided to move to California. He became a master craftsman, doing high-end woodwork for expensive homes in coastal communities like Laguna Beach and the Newport Coast.  Janna went looking for work. The job she found challenged her intellect, provided an outlet for her creativity and eventually offered her a path to the untethered world of New Pioneers. But it started as a simple typing position.

Registered with a temporary employment agency, Janna was sent one day to the offices of a Laguna Beach-based film production company that needed someone to type a script. MacGillivray Freeman Films had pioneered the development of spectacular IMAX films like TO FLY, which debuted with the opening of the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. in 1976. By 1987, it was involved in a variety of exciting projects.

Over the next seven years, Janna’s work with MacGillivray Freeman expanded from typist to producer’s assistant to researcher to premiere planner. She worked on dramatic films about the nature of time, sailing and the wind, the performance limits of the human body, the cultures of Indonesia, life on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, and the wonders of the world ocean.. It was exotic work. She collaborated with smart, creative people from all over the world.  “Essentially, I got paid to learn,” she adds, “it doesn’t get better than that.”   Nevertheless, she and Randy never imagined that they would live the rest of their lives in California.

“We always knew we were coming back,” she says. But there was no plan, just a dream. When they moved to Hill City, she said goodbye to her colleagues in California. Randy imagined that he would be able to do the same kind of carpentry in the Black Hills that he had been doing in Southern California, but as it turned out, there was no market for his high-end work.

Initially, the lack of work was tempered by the excitement of being home. “We have a big family” Janna says, “and we had lots of visitors, including friends and relatives from Sioux Falls and Minneapolis.” Janna set up a little desk in the cabin and Randy had a work bench. But after a 3-month hiatus and a couple of job interviews, Janna made a call to California.

“I asked my old boss if there was anything I could do from South Dakota,” she says. Soon she was researching, working with scriptwriters and collaborating remotely from her little cabin in the Hills. Three or four times a year she flew to Southern California for meetings, production work, or – best of all – film premieres. Eventually Janna used her Social Work skills to help the company establish a non-profit foundation for which she is now Director of Development and Programming.  As her work expanded, Janna even employed a local writer, Kristin Donnan-Standard, as a researcher and collaborator. Kristin, who spent part of her childhood in the Black Hills, had worked in television in L.A. and New York.  She understood the world of scripts and production.

Meanwhile, Randy began designing custom frames for artwork, experimenting with his own concept that blended woodworking with leather. They began selling the frames at art shows around the region and discovered a strong market for Randy’s designs. In 1997 Janna and Randy opened Warrior’s Work, a Main Street art gallery in Hill City.

With a business in town Janna and Randy became more socially connected and increasingly involved in economic development and the arts. Some long-time members of the community didn’t know what to make of Janna and the work she does on IMAX films. “People make the assumption that she is not like them,” says Kristin, “because what she does is not in their realm of experience. They think she has some magic skill and all these connections with famous people.” Janna laughs, reminding us her work is on educational documentaries and the film premieres are most often in museums!

Together Janna and Kristin have worked with others to promote the arts and make Hill City a destination for visitors to the Black Hills. They have asserted that the community’s future lies in attracting the kind of people that writer Richard Florida calls “cultural creatives.” Some of these efforts, including a new sign ordinance, sparked friction in the community between newcomers and long-time residents. But other projects, such as the commissioning of a sculpture of a buffalo – THE PATRIARCH – for the entrance to downtown have fostered cooperation.

“People came together,” Janna says, “to raise the money for that sculpture, arts people and business people, long-time residents and new.”

These efforts to position Hill City as a cultural center have begun to pay dividends. Business investment in the community is rising. Last year, the NEW YORK TIMES featured Hill City as a good place to retire to. For prospective retirees, cultural creatives and others, THE PATRIARCH symbolizes the confluence of the past, present and future of the community. It represents the natural history of the region, and it reflects the promise of creative minds like Janna Emmel, Randy Berger and Kristin Donnan-Standard.

At the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology in Rapid City, he studied computer science and thought about becoming an astronaut. That dream dissolved, he says, after he spent several months as an intern at IBM in Rochester, Minnesota. “I realized that if I kept chasing this unrealistic dream, I would end up in a cubicle somewhere doing something I wasn’t passionate about.”

Instead, after graduating, Reinbold took a job with Digitech, maker of the famous “Whammy” pedal for electric guitars. With his college classmate and new wife, Valarie, he moved to the suburbs of Salt Lake City to work in the town of Sandy.

Despite the Whammy’s role in the music industry, Reinbold discovered that his job wasn’t especially creative. Then came the attacks of September 11. In the economic downturn that followed, Digitech laid off staff and just before Christmas, Reinbold found himself without a job.

“I had been weaned on WIRED magazine,” he says, “and believed that if you write code, you will be set for life. That Christmas I discovered the stark reality: you have to fend for yourself.”

Out of work, Reinbold went back to school to learn more about business. At the University of Utah he earned an MBA with a focus on emerging technologies. “I had been focused on hardware at IBM and Digitech,” he says, but he developed a strong interest in web-based applications. “You can work from any computer, put things up and get feedback right away.”

Soon after earning his MBA, Reinbold launched his own company – Vox Pop Design. Working from the basement of his home, he designed web pages for local clients. As his business grew, “the clients became more sophisticated,” he says, “and so did the sites.” He began doing remote work for companies as far afield as New Jersey and Oregon.

Reinbold networked with other programmers in the Salta Lake City area. He got involved with a technology user group. From that group he recruited a number of people who work for him on a project basis. He also found more remote collaborators including Matthew Orstad in South Dakota (see earlier profile below) and several programmers in the Chicago area.

Reinbold has read the work of Richard Florida who writes that the rise of the creative class is the driving force in economic growth in the world today. Florida shows that members of the creative class tend to concentrate in a handful of cities in the United States and he suggests that this tendency is like to continue for years to come.

Reinbold understands this dynamic. “In an urban area like Salt Lake City, you see the talent, the off-the-wall energy and the excitement. You can get together for a social media meet-up, a Twitter get together or a geek dinner,” Reinbold says. This kind of professional social interaction helps overcome the isolation of working at home.

Florida asserts that the continuing rise of the creative class will lead to further declines in rural America. Reinbold sees a somewhat different scenario framed by his personal dreams.

Every year he and Valarie take their two young children back to South Dakota for long vacations in the spring and around the holidays with either her parents or his. “When we go back to the rural areas,” he says, “it helps us to get a sense of what’s really important and valuable in life.” In the future, he believes, more people will shuttle back and forth between rural communities and big cities.”

Ultimately, Reinbold hopes to move his family and his business back to Timber Lake, but he is not going to move home and “wait for something to happen. I want to put together the capital and connections so that I’m able to go back to Timber Lake and provide jobs,” he says.

In the meantime, Reinbold continues to grow his business, and he looks forward to what the federal government’s stimulus program might do to improve access to broadband in places like Timber Lake. “That rutty, broken-down community is home,” he says. “I would love to take my kids back there. I got a great education, and I want my kids to have that same small town opportunity.”

For big city dwellers the answer is yes. Most of the major metropolitan areas in the region grew at a healthy rate between July 2007 and July 2008. Seven of ten major cities (Billings, Bismarck, Casper, Cheyenne, Fargo, Rapid City and Sioux Falls) expanded by an average of 1.9 percent. These growth rates don’t compare to the boom in some parts of the West and the South, but they are significant to a region that has been losing population for such a long time.

Not all metro areas in the region were winners. Grand Forks, Great Falls and Sioux City grew by just under half a percent over the year. These cities have been struggling to hold population throughout this decade. Since 2000, for example, Grand Forks has lost nearly 200 residents. Meanwhile, the metropolitan population of the Sioux City area has been essentially flat for eight years.

But did urban growth rates come at the continuing expense of rural counties and micropolitan communities? Out of 20 “micropolitan” areas (see Census definition) with populations ranging from 15,878 to 70,694, growth rates between 2007 and 2008 were all below the average of the metropolitan areas. Collectively, they grew by an average of just over half a percent. Communities that lost 1 percent or more of their population included Pierre, SD and Wahpeton, ND-MN. Micropolitan areas that gained more than 1 percent included Brookings, SD; Grand Island, NE; Huron, SD; Laramie, WY; Riverton, WY and Sheridan, WY. Thus, with some variation, the micropolitan communities are holding their own within the northern Great Plains region, but they are not growing as fast as the metropolitan areas.

State-to-state variations are significant as well. With its energy resources, eastern Wyoming’s metropolitan and micropolitan areas all have net positive growth in this decade. In North Dakota, however, while the metropolitan areas have shown healthy growth, the micropolitan have, for the most part, lost population since 2000. Meanwhile, in South Dakota and Nebraska, micropolitan areas have experienced more uneven growth with some communities growing by several percentage points since 2000 and others losing population.

What about the rural counties? In all of the counties in easter Montana, Wyoming and the states of North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska, population outside the metropolitan areas has continued to decline. The economic opportunities offered by the Internet and telecommuting have not begun to influence the larger demographic wave of history that has carried people out of these rural communities and into the major towns and cities of the region. The slow growth of some micropolitan regions, and even the slowing of the exodus from some rural communities, may reflect the presence of new pioneers working remotely from the northern Great Plains, but until we get richer data from the 2010 Census, we won’t know for sure.

(An earlier version of this post also appeared on www.dakotaday.com)

(For direct access to the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent population estimates, visit U.S. Census)

Orstad grew up in Crooks, South Dakota, a small farming community along the rail line northwest of Sioux Falls. Surrounded by corn and soybean fields, his high school served several nearby towns and rural areas. After graduation in 1997, he moved across the state to attend the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology or “Tech,” where he majored in computer science and fell in love with a classmate named Keri Bachmeier. She graduated in 2001. He graduated the following May, and they were married in June.

“At Tech it was assumed that you would move out of state to find a job,” he says, but that option wasn’t open to Matthew. Keri had been accepted at the University of South Dakota’s School of Medicine in Sioux Falls. For the next three years, while she went to school, he worked for the EROS Data Center northeast of the city.

“As a student I figured I would a traditional job,” Matthew says, “and so did most of my classmates.” As traditional jobs go, EROS was an interesting place to work. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) operates the Earth Resources Observation and Science center to collect and manage satellite data. But after Keri finished her course work and accepted a residency in Mason City, Iowa about 225 miles away, Matthew had to decide what he was going to do for work.

Fortunately, the federal government is one of the most progressive employers in the country when it comes to telecommuting. Matthew’s bosses let him work from Mason City. “It was convenient,” he says, “but there was still the expectation of the 7:30 to 4:30 work day.” Like many in the millenial generation, he chafed at the rigidityof the structure which seemed so out of synch with his increasingly virtual worklife.

In Mason City, Keri and Matthew welcomed their daughter into the world, and suddenly Matthew’s work-at-home life changed. To gain more flexibility to take care of his daughter, Matthew took a leave from EROS and began freelancing. He developed websites for local clients. “But I had trouble finding the magic mix,” he says. At Tech he had learned how to program, but “there were no marketing courses. I learned nothing about how to run my own business.”

As he struggled to make it on his own, Orstad discovered an unlikely source of work. Matthew Reinbold, a fellow alum from Tech, was living in Salt Lake City and had launched his own business developing websites with complicated backend elements. Reinbold needed programmers he could trust. He began feeding Orstad work. “I knew him from school,” Reinbold says, “and I knew the quality of his work.”

When Keri finished her residency in Mason City, the couple decided to move back to South Dakota. “We are both country mice,” Matthew says, “I grew up on my parents’ farm. Keri was raised on a ranch south of Rapid City where they had ostriches.”

Small towns in South Dakota are hungry for doctors, so the Orstads had their pick of communities. They chose Wessington Springs, a town of less than 900 people east of the Missouri River in the heart of the state. “We wanted to be reasonably close to family,” Matthew says. They also wanted a community that made them feel welcome.”

“The community welcomed us with open arms,” he says, “and it’s been that way since we moved in.” While Keri goes to the clinic, Matthew continues to work from home, taking care of their daughter and lending his expertise to the community as it tries to develop its presence in the on-line world. He continues to learn more about how to market his skills and sees a business model evolving from his work with the local newspaper.

He is concerned about the declining population in rural South Dakota. Wessington Springs, for example, has lost nearly a third of its population since 1980. “Not everybody can move to the cities and have a Starbucks on every corner,” he says. “Somebody has to farm.” Maybe there’s hope in the life and work that Matthew has found for himself as a new pioneer in the heartland of America.

The number of Americans who telecommute occasionally rose 39 percent over the last two years according to a study released this week. Rising fuel prices in 2008, improving technologies for communications and growing concerns for work-life balance among the newest generation of employees no doubt contributed to this dramatic increase. Today, an estimated 17.2 million Americans work from home or some other remote location at least one day a month.

Data in WorldatWork’s TELEWORK TRENDLINES 2009 report also suggests, however, that the New Pioneers trend of working full time from a remote location may be stalling out. According to the report, the number of  people who telecommute on contract, are self-employed or are business owners has remained essentially flat for four years, increasing from 16.2 to 16.6 million. In 2006, 77 percent of the nation’s 28.7 million employed telecommuters worked out of the office at least one day a week. In 2008, that percentage fell to 72 percent. Meanwhile, those who telecommuted “almost every day” fell from 51 percent of all telecommuters to 40 percent. The absolute number of these full-time remote workers dropped from 14.7 million in 2006 to 13.5 million in 2008.

If the number of hardcore telecommuters is on the wane, other changes suggest that telecommuting is becoming a more serious and less social activity, at least within the context of the local community. When asked where they telecommuted from, respondents offered answers that were somewhat different from two years ago. The number of those who worked from home (as opposed to an airplane, hotel, car etc.) rose from 76 percent to 87 percent. Working from a customer or client’s place of business also rose from 28 percent to 41 percent. More people also acknowledged telecommuting while on vacation (up from 18 percent to 23 percent).

One of the most interesting patterns seems to be a decline in telecommuting from what some sociologists and planners call “third places” like cafes, libraries and parks. The percentage of telecommuters who worked from cafes or restaurants fell from 31 percent to 23 percent. Working in libraries declined from 16 percent to 10 percent. Meanwhile, beaming in from a park or some other outdoor location dropped from 19 percent to 14 percent. For those who champion third places as important sites for the development of social capital in communities, this may be a disappointing trend.

The profile of changes taking place in telecommuting also has some interesting gender characteristics. Without question, and despite employer exhortations to the contrary, some parents, and especially women, have chosen telecommuting as a way to be closer to the needs of their children. Two years ago, WorldatWork reported that employed telecommuters were nearly equally divided between men and women, with men accounting for 53 percent of the total and women 47 percent. In 2008, however, the percentage of women dropped to 39 percent while the percentage of men rose to 61 percent. Does this shift suggest that women, who may have tried telecommuting to achieve a better work-home balance, are less interested in this option?

Other changes in the profile of telecommuters suggest that telecommuting is an option increasingly available to people without a college education. Since 2006, the number of telecommuters with a high school degree or less has risen from 18 to 23 percent.  However, the number of telecommuters in the moderate income bracket (under $75,000 a year) has declined from 46 to 42 percent since 2006.

Finally, given the timing of the survey in the weeks immediately following the election and in the middle of the growing economic crisis, the responses seem to have captured a shift in attitudes. With retirement portfolios shrinking and growing fears of layoffs, many people preferred job security and income to the quality of life improvements offered by telecommuting. While more than half of all the respondents said they were “interested” or “very interested” in telecommuting, 61 percent said they would not be willing to take a cut in pay in exchange for the ability to telecommute two days per week.

Overall, the TELEWORK TRENDLINES 2009  report suggests that more workers and their supervisors are becoming accustomed to the idea of occasional telecommuting. Althought it seems likely that this growth will eventually lead more people to become full-time remote workers, this change is taking place slowly right now. It remains to be seen whether the current economic crisis will accelerate or slow the trend in the near future.

TELEWORK TRENDLINES 2009 was published by the Telework Advisory Group of WorldatWork, a 53-year old association of human resource professionals. The survey, conducted in November and early December, included more than 1,000 adults from throughout the United States. For a copy of the report, visit http://www.workingfromanywhere.org/index.html

For years the debate has raged over the need for federal telecommunications subsidies to rural areas. Opponents argue that it is basically unfair to tax urban Americans to provide a lifestyle benefit to people who choose to live in the country. If rural Americans want broadband, they say, they should pay the cost of laying cable, stringing wire or erecting towers to beam signals to distant homes.

Advocates for government subsidies insist that affordable broadband has become a basic necessity and all Americans are entitled to service. If the market can’t provide affordable service because the cost of construction is too high relative to the number of users, then, just as we did for rural electric and telephone services in an earlier era, government should help out. Having more people on the network will benefit everyone in the long run.

Aside from the philosophical debate, the issue becomes more complicated because no one really knows how many people in rural America still need or want access to broadband. To answer that question, the stimulus bill provides $350 million to map the nation’s broadband infrastructure.

Opponents of the study argue it’s a waste of money. Telecommunications companies, they say, already have this data. The government just needs to get them to release it. The companies say that if they release it, it would help their competitors identify market opportunities. Consumer advocates say that would be a good thing — it would stimulate competition.

Coincidentally, a major study just released by the Department of Agriculture provides some insight into the question of who has broadband access and who doesn’t in rural America. As part of its regular survey of agricultural producers, the government asked farmers throughout the country in 2007 if they had high speed internet service. The results confirm many assumptions, but also raise questions.

According to the Department of Agriculture, across the country fewer than one in three farms in rural and exurban counties have a broadband connection. In areas where farms are larger and produce more revenue, however, including the northern Great Plains, the number of farmers and ranchers with a high speed connection is much higher. Even in relatively isolated country like Harding County in the northwest corner of South Dakota, for example, 44 percent of the agricultural producers have high speed access to the internet.Looking at county-by-county data, however, suggests that an enormous digital divide still exists on the northern Great Plains.

In South Dakota, for example, comparing one of the wealthiest agricultural communities with one of the poorest reveals a predictable disparity. While nearly two out of three farmers in Brown County have a high speed connection, only one in five in Shannon County (home to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation) has a similar onramp to the Information Highway.In between these two highest and lowest ranking counties, however, the data is somewhat puzzling. Agricultural producers in Sully County north of Pierre, for example, are so well connected that the county places second in the state’s rankings. Meanwhile, fewer than four out of ten farmers in rapidly urbanizing Lincoln County near Sioux Falls have a high speed connection. Similarly, 56.9 percent of Spink County farmers (south of Aberdeen) have broadband connections, while only 37.6 percent of farmers in adjoining Day County have similar download speeds.

In general, West River counties, challenged by greater sparcity or mountainous terrain, rank among the least connected in the state. Of the twelve counties in the South Dakota where one-third or fewer agricultural producers had a broadband connection in 2007, nine of these counties are west of the Missouri River. Three are in the Black Hills (Fall River, Custer and Lawrence Counties). As these Black Hills communties seek to attract remote workers and retirees, the lack of broadband access may become a critical factor for economic development.

When the fiscal stimulus stage coach arrives in Pierre and other state capitols on the Great Plains this spring, the broadband package will bring joy to many rural residents. Deciding where to spend those dollars will undoubtedly spark new debates about equity and access. Policymakers will need to keep in mind that the Information Highway may provide the path to prosperity for many small towns and rural communities. 

For direct access to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2007 Census of Agriculture: www.agcensus.usda.gov

For an analysis of the nationwide data, visit the Center for Rural Strategies “Daily Yonder”: http://www.dailyyonder.com/broadband-connection-highs-and-lows-across-rural-america/2009/02/11/1921.   

An earlier version of this post was published at www.dakotaday.com

According to a recently released nationwide survey by the Pew Research Center, nearly half of all Americans say they would prefer to live in a small town or rural area. Of those who haven’t already acted on this dream, most live in cities (as opposed to suburbs) and are over the age of 30.

What keeps these people from moving? For most, it’s the lack of a job. But as more Americans discover opportunities to work remotely, many are likely to seek their ideal communities in rural America. The New Pioneers profiled are already moving to small towns and rural communities in South Dakota and working for employers or clients far away.

The American attraction to small town and rural life is deeply rooted in our culture and history. The Pew survey found that perceptions of a higher quality of life in small town America still color our attitudes about where many of us want to live. Three our of four Americans, for example, say they want to live somewhere where the pace of life is slow rather than fast. By nearly the same percentage, Americans prefer to live in a community where people know one another well — a small town as opposed to a city.

Residents of small towns and rural areas, as well as suburbs, are more likely to be satisfied with their communities. They say crime is not a problem, and well over 80 percent of those surveyed felt that their communities were good places to raise children. Small town and rural residents were bothered less by traffic than their urban or suburban counterparts.

People in small towns and rural areas, as well as suburbs, fell more connected to one another. Compared to city dwellers, a greater percentage of them say they have plenty of friends living nearby. Rural and small town residents also report that they have more family living with an hour’s drive.

But the Pew survey also highlights factors that could present challenges to small towns and rural areas seeking to attract the create workers who drive the knowledge economy. Young people, for example, still prefer to live in cities — although not all of them. A little more than one in four under the age of 30 would rather live in a small town or rural area.

Embracing different races and cultures is also an issue. Although 65 percent of all those surveyed said they preferred to live in a community with a mix of different races, rural and small town residents were more likely to say that they preferred to live with people of their own race. Small towns and rural areas were also more likely to have older and less educated populations, suggesting they would be less open to new ideas.

Overall, the Pew survey suggests that small towns and rural communities interested in revitalizing their economies by attracting more residents can capitalize on the longing of city dwellers for a more leisurely and connected way of life. But to be successful, they will need to prepare their communities to be more accepting of people who may not look or think like everyone else in town. The reward for greater tolerance may be greater prosperity.

To link to the Pew Research Center report: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1096/community-satisfaction-top-cities.

(This entry originally published on www.dakotaday.com)

With this work in 1995 Jill began her professional consulting career studying radiation and other contaminants in the environment. In recent years, she has collaborated with teams of scientists evaluating sites including the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Although she travels to collect data and meet with colleagues and clients, most of her work is done from her home office in the small town of Freeman, South Dakota.

Growing up in Sioux Falls, Jill loved math and science, as well as playing basketball and the alto sax. Her teachers recognized her academic talents and encouraged her to look far and wide at colleges, but Jill chose to stay close to home. “I am a momma’s girl,” she confesses, “and I just wasn’t ready to leave yet.”

At Augustana College in Sioux Falls, she was challenged academically. During the summers, she applied for and accepted interships at various national laboratories, including Brookhaven in New York, Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington, D.C. These jobs gave her a chance to see other parts of the country and work with top scientists from around the nation.

Offered a NASA scholarship for graduate school, Jill enrolled at Colorado State University to study radiation and its effects on living organisms. But biology was never her first love. As she progressed toward her degree, she became increasingly interested in the dispersion patterns of radiation and other contaminants in the environment. Answering questions in this arena demanded sophisticated math, which she enjoyed.

Near graduation, Jill began looking at jobs that demanded a physics background, but none of them appealed to her. One of her professors suggested she talk to John Till. A Naval Academy graduate, former submarine commander and a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering, Till had launched Risk Assessment Corrporation (RAC), a consulting firm, to perform environmental assessments of radioactive contamination.

When she interviewed with him, Jill discovered that Till had a very unusual organization. Wanting to maintain the rural lifestyle he had grown up with and offer that to his family and children, Till lived on his family’s dairy farm in South Carolina. To do his consulting work, he had assembled a virtual team of scientists from around the country. There was no central office. The team communicated by telephone, fax and dial-up modem.

In the interview, Till made it clear that he would not be supervising Jill’s every move. “One of the things that I need from you,” he told her, “is to trust that you’re going to do the work and that I’m going to get what I’m paying for.” It was a very adult agreement, Jill says.

Fortunately, even in her mid-twenties, Jill was not intimidated by this kind of autonomy. Although many people who work from home find establishing boundaries and schedules difficult, Jill made the transition pretty easily. “It’s probably some weird personality quirk of mine,” she says. “I was always one of those kids who did my homework right away.”

The Rocky Flats project was the first thing that Jill worked on with RAC. As she became involved in other studies in other parts of the country, however, she began to think about moving back to South Dakota. She could have moved anywhere, “but I’ve always been a homebody,” she says. “I didn’t want to move in with my folks, but I wanted to be close enough that I could have that relationship.”

In Sioux Falls, Jill also had friends from high school and college that she would run into from time to time, including Jason Aanenson. “We ran into each other at Best Buy,” she says with a smile. “I was buying a new mouse for my computer and he was buying a big TV.”

Jason had grown up in a small town in northern Minnesota. Like Jill, he graduated from Augustana. Then he went to dental school at Creighton University in Omaha. With his small town roots in mind, he was purchasing a dental practice in the town of Freeman about an hour west of Sioux Falls.

As they started dating, Jill hesitated over the idea of moving to Freeman. It seemed small and remote, but she was increasingly committed to the relationship with Jason. When they decided to get married, Jill thought “I’ll figure it out.” Fortunately, her work with RAC gave her the freedom to live anywhere as long as she had a telephone line and an airport relatively nearby.

When she made the move to Freeman in 1999, Jill was still on dial-up, as were most of her associates at RAC. But soon after she moved MediaCom, the local cable company (now Golden West), installed high-speed coaxial cable. Jill was one of the first people in town to sign up. She was also one of the first on the RAC team to get high-speed Internet. “Nobody could believe it,” she says, “because here I was living in this small town.”

For Jill, the social transition to Freeman was more challenging. She traveled frequently and people in the community did not understand her work. “Instead of a physicist, they thought I was a physical trainer,” she says. Others understood that she did science and studied radiation and the environment, so they associated her with Hollywood’s Erin Brockovich.

After she and Jason had their son Tryg, however, Jill’s roots in the community grew deeper. Through Trig’s daycare she met other parents. She started joining community groups and helped promote the construction of a new library. At times, there were tensions over her insider/outsider status in the community.

Nevertheless, Jill likes living and working in Freeman. “I think it’s a lot less distracting,” she says, gesturing out the window to the open yards of her neighbors and the fields beyond the highway. She talks about the noise in urban areas. “I know for  a lot of people that’s white noise, but for me that’s always been very distracting. I like to be focused and able to really concentrate. That’s a lot easier to do in a place like this than it is even in a city the size of Sioux Falls.”

Jill also like the connectedness she feels in Freeman. She doesn’t worry about leaving the keys in the car when she goes to the store. “Everybody knows whose car that is,” she says, “so if somebody other than me gets in and drives away, it’s going to cause a stink.”

In Freeman, she says, people watch out for one another and for the community’s children. “I like having everybody know who I am, and everybody knows who our son is.”

In the Rocky Mountain West the influx of the new gentry sparks demand for everything from interior design to organic produce, but the biggest impact is on land values and uses as wealthy urbanites buy acres of newly subdivided farms and ranches. The impact of the new gentry on communities in the northern Great Plains is not as dramatic as in the Rocky Mountain West, but it is evident. A map pubilshed by The Wall Street Journal hows significant growth in income associated with retirement in Lawrence and Pennington counties in the Black Hills, as well as in counties along the Missouri River in South and North Dakota.

The retirees or “early grays” cashing out of high-cost economies on the West and East Coasts often get the attention of local realtors and economic development officials. Some of these immigrants take advantage of the Internet and the new communications technologies to continue gainful employment from a far, leveraging their relationships in urban communities to become new homesteaders on the Great Plains. As reporter Conor Dougherty notes that since the Internet allows people to work from anywhere, “the distinction between first and second homes has become blurred. Many people are buying retirement property while they are still employed.”

Demographers will miss a major trend, however, if they ignore the impact of remote work or telecommuting on younger workers as well as early grays, and if they think that only upper income workers can take advantage of the new technologies. Students and service workers, many of them prodigal children and connected agrarians, are living in remote rural communities and competing for flat world jobs. These opportunities may lead some communities to a prosperity that isn’t dependent on a host of land-hungry retirees.

To read Conor Dougherty’s story go to: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120069319738001353.html

Winner, South Dakota was a long way from Disney’s studios in southern California. The town of 3,000 people offered no role models or mentors for a would-be animator. At 18 she had shouldered serious adult responsibilities, becoming the mother of a baby girl. She and Albert Miller, her daughter’s father, needed to make some tough decisions.

Growing up, Kara had lived in various small towns in South Dakota. Her father was a teacher and school administrator. Between kindergarten and graduation Kara had lived in McGlaughlin, Hurley, Hoven, Freeman and Winner. Her mother worked as a writer and editor for various small town newspapers. After her parents divorced when Kara was in third grade, she and her four brothers had lived off and on with each of her parents.

With their new daughter, Kara and Albert decided to move closer to Kara’s mother who was living in Grand Island, Nebraska. Trying to keep herself on track, Kara enrolled at the University of Nebraska, Kearny as a graphic design major. She took various jobs so that she and Albert could keep a roof over their heads, but trying to be a student and a working mom didn’t go well. When her younger borther was killed in a car accident, the family was devastated. Kara’s mother moved to Columbus, Ohio to be closer to her own parents. Kara and Albert packed up the baby and went with her.

Columbus was a shock. With as many residents as the entire state of South Dakota, the city “was a mad house,” Kara says. The day that she and Albert moved in an FBI agent knocked on their door to ask questions about a neighbor. She couldn’t get used to the traffic. The cost of living was so much higher. Albert got a job with a pavement contractor. She looked for work. When she found a job selling fine art out of a catalog door-to-door, she took it because she thought it would keep her closer to her dream. She also enrolled in a distance learning program with the Art Institute of Pittsburgh to major in game design.

She liked learning online. After her son was born, distance learning gave her the flexibility she needed to tend to the children, work, and go to school. She often studied late at night after the rest of the family had gone to bed. The faculty made her feel comfortable with what she was doing, but Kara soon realized that game design was not for her. It was very technical and expensive, demanding a powerful computer and high-priced software.

Fortunately, one of her professors at the Art Institute told her about Guru.Com. Founded in 1999, Guru was one of several online start-ups hoping to build a business by connecting freelancers with employers in a world increasingly reliant on outsourcing. On Guru, Kara could post her resume and scan lists of projects offered by people looking to commission art work. Bidding for jobs was extremely competitive. With people in India and other developing nations competing for the work, the pay could be very low. On her first job illustrating a number of children’s books, “I worked for pennies.”

The work for Guru clients gave her a portfolio. She began to build a loyal clientele of her own. Working part-time as a secretary as a local church and illustrating for various clients, Kara began her transition to a career as a professional artist with clients scattered around the world.

Kara and Albert were still not comfortable living in Columbus. They were barely getting by. They had purchased a camper and were living in it with their two young children, moving from one place to another throughout the year. They often talked about returning to South Dakota.

In 2003, Kara’s father offered them an option. He was leaving his job as superintendent of schools in Hoven to teach in another community. Located far from any metropolis in the north central section of South Dakota with a population of only 500 people, Hoven didn’t have an active real estate market. Kara and Albert could have his house if they were willing to take over the mortgage payments.

Moving was a gamble. In a small town economy, Albert might not find a job right away. Commuting more than eighty miles to Pierre or Aberdeen, the closest cities with more than 5,000 people, would cut deeply into whatever take-home pay he would earn. Kara’s income from illustrating would have to continue and grow. They wanted that small town quality of life, and they were willing to take the chance.

Since moving to Hoven, Kara has had to overcome a number of challenges to make her work viable. She invested in a satellite dish to give her a broadband connection. To meet her deadlines, she sketches while the kids are in school and then returns to the work at night. Because she spent so much time at home, a lot of people in this tight-knit community weren’t sure what to make of her. ”A lot of people didn’t understand what I do,” she says. Her anonymity disappeared in November, however, after the Hoven paper ran a front-page story on her “Free Lance Home Office.”

After four years in the community, life has settled into a rhythm. Albert works for the school district as a custodian. Kara designs business logos and T-shirts for clients far away and shows her art in a gallery in Florida. She has become the art director for a publishing company in Canada. She frequently does illustrations for another publisher in Indiana. Her illustrations appear in children’s stories and steamy romance novels. From her home on the prairie, her art travels digitally to clients and printing presses hundreds and thousands of miles away.