Country roads lead to good jobs in cities.

• Position: Brief Article

Mitch Renkow is an associate professor of agricultural and resource economics at N.C. State University. He recently studied migration and commuter trends for 43 counties that ring North Carolina's urban counties, which he defines as the 25 most-populated. Between 1990 and 1999, net migration into rural North Carolina, the other 75 counties, exceeded 250,000 people, with nearly 85% settling into counties surrounding the urban counties.

BNC: Why are more people moving to rural North Carolina?

Renkow: It's easier to live farther away from where you work because the roads have improved. There are also quality-of-life issues. People like living in less-crowded, more-scenically attractive locations. And it's cheaper to live in a rural county -- one, because of property taxes and, two, just because housing is cheaper.

How many miles are people willing to commute to work?

It drops off pretty sharply after 35, and then it pretty much falls down, not to zero, but to very small after 70.

What kind of problems does population growth bring to these counties?

With growth comes growing pains -- people move to a new area and they bring with them demands for police protection and schools and solid-waste services and things that are provided by the local government. You have a bigger demand on, in some cases, already stressed public goods.

Doesn't new housing increase the tax base and help pay for these services?

The question is whether or not new residential development pays for itself. I've been involved in some other work that's looked at the cost of community services. In this case, it was Chatham County. We found that, in general, the commercial sector tends to subsidize the residential sector. If you look at tax revenues and the services provided by county government, the commercial sector provides more revenue than it draws in services. And exactly the opposite is the case for the residential sector.

But doesn't population growth prompt commercial development?

I'm thinking of Surry County, where there's just tons of residential development going on, primarily serving people who are going to be working in Winston-Salem. To do those developments, the county is maybe extending sewer lines, maybe extending roads, and that's very costly stuff. Once those people start paying property taxes, there will be some recovery of that expenditure, but it's front-loaded. Sometimes new developments have fees that people are charged to finance that infrastructure...