The Rural/Urban Conundrum

The cover of Grounds for Murder, on bookstore shelves in September

My writer friend Elinor Florence posed an interesting question on Facebook: Where would you rather live? She portrayed the options by posting two recent real estate listings. One showed a two-bedroom bungalow on a huge corner lot in the southwestern town of Eastend, Saskatchewan. Its price—$140,000. The other showed a similar but much shabbier house on a modest-sized lot in Vancouver. The asking price—$2,599,000. 

Although Vancouver is particularly notorious for pricey housing, urban real estate in general is expensive. Yet despite its cost, cities—especially big cities—are magnets to rural people. They’re leaving farms and small communities and moving to Saskatoon. Regina. Calgary. Winnipeg. Once-thriving villages like my husband’s hometown of Ormiston, Saskatchewan (population of 10 in 2016), have become virtual ghost towns.

But Eastend is different. Its population increased from five hundred and three in 2016 to six hundred and seven in 2021. That’s an amazing increase of 20.7% in only five years! How in the world did they do it?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but the town’s website gives one reason for its appeal to those of us who love the arts. Eastend has an active arts council.  The council owns and operates the Wallace Stegner House, once home to the famous author of Wolf Willow and now a residence for artists and writers. (Elinor Florence is artist in residence for the month of June.) And this summer, it will host its first annual Big Flat Folk Fest. The town also boasts two pottery studios, two resident visual artists, and three writers.

The protagonist of Robert Stead’s Canadian novel Dennison Grant (published in 1920) would have approved. “Our statesmen are never done lamenting that population continues to flow from the country to the city,” he says, “but the only way to stop that flow is to make the country the more attractive of the two.” One of Grant’s proposals for the utopian community he envisions is to replace the isolated farmsteads and ranches of the Alberta foothills with villages that feature attractions such as “movie shows.”

If we read “movie shows” as a twenty-first century metaphor for the arts, that’s what Eastend appears to have done. Television, DVDs, and the internet provide us with entertainment, but they don’t bring us together. For that, we need writers, artists, dancers, and musicians. So rural people who love the arts flock to the city. Or, like me, they stay home and dream about poetry readings, book launches, and writers’ groups. Eastend provides some of those attractions—and offers housing at a cost that is kind to the pocketbook. Maybe other rural communities should do the same.

Thanks to Elinor Florence for unintentionally inspiring this blog. Elinor is the gifted author of Bird’s Eye View and Wildwood. She posts monthly on her blog “Letters from Windermere.”