Some Iowa small towns are growing, despite statewide trends

CEDAR RAPIDS - While most small town Iowans still describe their communities as safe and friendly, their close-knit fabric is beginning to fray, according to the findings of a new Iowa State University survey.

'That's a pretty fair assessment” of the survey results, said Terry Besser, an ISU sociology professor and team leader of the project.

Besser said the survey also found increasingly positive ratings for governmental services, including fire protection and emergency response service as well as parks and public schools.

Notwithstanding a generally high level of satisfaction, 'there has been erosion across the board in the bond between small-town residents and their neighbors and their level of involvement in their communities,” Besser said.

Since 1994, the ISU research team has conducted a survey every 10 years to examine quality of life and social capital in the 99 towns, one in each county.

The towns selected range in size from 500 to 10,000 residents, and about half those towns have lost population since 1994.

But three survey towns in the Corridor - Center Point in Linn County, Hills in Johnson County and Atkins in Benton County - are bucking that trend.

Besser said growth is occurring in towns close to available jobs in metro areas.

Growth stimulates infrastructure improvements - libraries, parks and aquatic centers, for example - that improve a community's quality of life, she said.

In general, residents in towns with fewer than 750 people rated government and non-government services as well as the social environment lower than residents in bigger communities, she said.

In small towns, 'the same people are often called upon for community projects, and there aren't enough of them to carry the weight and accomplish what they want to get done,” Besser said.

The main reasons people live in a particular small town - family ties and childhood roots - have not changed since the first survey, said Besser's colleague, sociology professor Stephen Sapp.

'People enjoy living in small towns. They want to be there for the quality of life,” Sapp said.

The survey results square with the observations of 35-year Hills resident Cathy Fitzmaurice-Hill, who served the town as mayor from 1996 to 2006 and now is city administrator.

Most Hills residents, she said, feel safe and comfortable in the community and enjoy knowing their neighbors.

She said the spirit of neighborliness stood out during a 1998 wind storm that felled trees and knocked out power to the community for four days.

'The response was amazing - firefighters leading a volunteer cleanup effort with high school kids going house to house. If you lacked a piece of equipment, someone else had it, and it was yours,” she said.

Fitzmaurice-Hill is particularly concerned about the slippage in community participation noted in the survey.

'Residents cited lack of time, which is one issue we can't help. But many of them also said they hadn't been asked. That stuck out to me as something we can improve upon,” she said.

Fitzmaurice-Hill said she has also witnessed a change in residents' attitudes toward the growth of the city, whose population has increased 18 percent, to 783 residents, since 1990.

'When I was mayor there was little interest in expansion and growth, but people have come to recognize that controlled growth is healthy and beneficial,” she said.

Two of the town's greatest attractions to new residents, she said, are the easy 10-mile commute to Iowa City on four-lane Highway 218 and a kindergarten-through-sixth-grade elementary school that is part of the Iowa City district.

The city also is installing a municipal water system to replace individual wells, which should makes Hills more attractive to homebuilders, she said.

Although Atkins's population nearly has doubled - twice - since 1990, zooming from 637 to 1,899, government services continue to earn strong positive ratings, with overall receiving approval from more residents in 2014 than in 1994, according to the ISU survey.

Not surprisingly, with a massive influx of new residents attracted to the community's good schools and proximity to Cedar Rapids, ties between residents, sense of community and resident involvement have declined since 1994, the survey found.

For example, the percentage of residents who say they know more than half the people in town by name has declined from 46 percent in 1994 to 18 percent in 2014.

Mayor David Becker, who has lived in Atkins all 38 years of his life, said he has noticed the change.

'I don't know as many people as I used to, but they are just as friendly as they were 30 years ago. People may be a little bit more reserved, but Atkins still has that small-town atmosphere,” he said.

Becker said Atkins has made a concerted effort to upgrade its water and sewer infrastructure to accommodate the growth, which he estimated at 250 new houses in the past decade.

The next steps in enhancing the city's attractiveness are to expand recreational opportunities with parks, trails and athletic fields and to encourage retail and commercial development, he said.

In Center Point, 12 miles north of Cedar Rapids just off Interstate 380, government services continue to earn strong positive ratings with seven of nine services receiving approval from more residents in 2014 than in 1994, according to the survey.

'We feel fortunate to be in a growth mode,” said Mayor Paula Freeman-Brown, a lifelong resident of Center Point, whose population has increased 56 percent since 1990, to 2,646 in 2013.

Many of the new residents come for convenience and good schools rather than to be close to family, she said.

With more-recent residents concentrated in new housing on one side of town, it's a challenge to meld them into a single community with residents in the more established parts of town, she said.

Even so, residents' assessments of social ties and sense of community have remained constant since 1994, although community participation has declined since 2004, the survey found.

To accommodate the growth, the community has been upgrading infrastructure and amenities, Freeman-Brown said.

The next focus, she said, is helping the community prepare for commercial and light industrial development.