This town is the exception that proves the rule.
Its slight uptick in population in recent years driven by efforts to make this Allen County town of just under 2,000 people buzz a little with chic restaurants and shops bucks trends that define rural Kansas.
A group called A Bolder Humboldt spent years revitalizing with a layer of hipster sheen on a handful of older buildings that would otherwise sit vacant and crumbling.
“There was a sense of, ‘Let’s make the town that we want to live in,’” said Paul Cloutier, a leader of the group.
The efforts have seen moderate success, with the town generating buzz beyond its borders and drawing notice from The New York Times as “an unexpected and affordable oasis of cool surrounded by fields of wheat and soybeans.”
It’s behind the rarest of trends: a rural Kansas county experiencing slight — 0.5% — population growth in recent years after seeing a marked drop-off the decade before.
But Humboldt remains a rarity.
In 2014, when he was the governor of Kansas, Sam Brownback made the bold prediction that the state would soon reach a new population milestone — Kansas would surpass a population of 3 million by 2020.
Three years after the date he predicted, Kansas is still waiting for that three-millionth Kansan. U.S. Census figures show Kansas had a population of 2.93 million people in 2020. That’s an increase of just 85,000 residents in a decade — driven by growth in its larger cities and suburbs, not its small towns.
Rural parts of the state continue to see significant declines. People like Cloutier and some state officials are trying to staunch the seemingly endless bleeding.
Politicians have also homed in on issues they think are to blame. Republican lawmakers contend taxes push people to leave the state. And Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly argues new laws restricting transgender rights scare away businesses and new residents.
But Ken Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire, suggests the plummet of rural population is much bigger than any state policy. In the grand scheme of things, it comes down to a simple truth — young people like to move to bigger and brighter cities.
“Many rural counties,” Johnson said, “especially rural farm counties — of which there are a number in Kansas — typically are more likely to lose young adults than anyone else.”
Reimagining Rural Life
A Bolder Humboldt has led several projects that turned historic buildings with rough looks into shiny new destinations for out-of-towners.
The Honeybee Bruncherie is a good example. Sitting in the northeast corner of downtown Humboldt, the restaurant features a bespoke look. Cloutier said it’s the kind of bright and vibrant restaurant you would never expect to see in a small town.
Several other restaurants, coffee shops and bars supported by the group take on a similar aesthetic. And the town now boasts a community garden and a fitness center with an architecturally progressive design.
“(The organization) works to revitalize the town,” Cloutier said, “restart the economic engine, and also just sort of give energy to the community to bring that vitality back to town.”
The group’s efforts appear to be working. Humboldt has a strong reputation in other parts of the state. And after losing more than 6% of its population in the last decade, census numbers now project actual growth in Allen County.
But Humboldt may only be able to grow so much. The town doesn’t have enough new homes for people to move into, and construction prices run higher in rural areas than in cities and suburbs. That could bring the community’s growth to a screeching halt.
“We have people who want to move here,” Cloutier said. “But there’s just not enough of a demand yet to justify building new houses.”
That’s a problem the state wants to address.
Source: flatlandkc.org
Photo Credit: istock-alenamozhjer
Categories: Kansas, Government & Policy