Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 4, 1995 TAG: 9503060004
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE AND CATHRYN McCUE STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
When you're building hideouts, it helps to have a lot of woods. At their home in Burnt Chimney, Sarah and Kevin Wimmer have plenty of trees and room to run and play.
"When I'm outside, nothing can bother me - it's just me and my sister all alone," 10-year-old Kevin says.
Playing outside is one of the things Sarah, 8, likes best about where she lives. And it's one of the reasons her family chose to move there.
Their family left the city for the reasons many rural residents cite: room for the kids to play, safety and the sense of belonging that a small town gives them.
Mary Beth Wimmer, her husband and four children moved out of an apartment in Roanoke more than five years ago to Burnt Chimney, a wide spot in the road in Franklin County between Roanoke and Smith Mountain Lake.
The kids have land with a creek to explore. And the low cost of living in the county allows Wimmer to stay home with her children, a luxury she couldn't afford in Roanoke.
"When we started having children - living in an apartment, the traffic, crime, all those concerns you start having when you have kids," she says. "I can put them outside, and I don't have to look out the window constantly. In Roanoke, I wouldn't let them out the door without one of us with them."
For Wimmer and many transplants from cities, one of the strongest appeals of rural living is a sense of safety, low crime and peace of mind.
Another is space.
Clark Runyon and his family are part of a common pattern in outward mobility: subdivision dwellers who move farther and farther out for more house and more land.
The Runyons moved into a new home in Botetourt's Wyndmere subdivision nearly two years ago, after living in Rainbow Forest for years. At least six of the families on their new street came from the same subdivision.
The houses and lots are bigger and, "I wanted to go someplace that had all the [overhead] wires hidden," Runyon says.
What he doesn't like about his move farther into the out-country is the lack of cable television. His wife didn't spring the news on him until after they bought the house.
Runyon doesn't feel that he should have to go without such a basic luxury just because he lives in a rural area. The street he lives on used to be a farm.
"That's a sore subject around here," he says, pointing to neighbors' houses sporting satellite dishes.
Other than the large, 1 1/2-acre lots, the street would fit in any Roanoke County subdivision. The paved driveways and landscaped lawns look more suburban than rural.
But instead of a view of another cul-de-sac, Wyndmere residents see woods and fields. No streetlights block the view of the stars, either. "It's real quiet and dark," Runyon says.
While living in a subdivision and living in the country may sound incompatible to some people, it's the combination of convenience and spaciousness others demand. The American dream, one developer says, can be boiled down to "five, four and a door."
"If people wanted stacked condos, that's what we'd go build," says Blacksburg developer David Reemsnyder. "But people want 'five, four and a door' - that's five windows on the top, four windows on the bottom and a door - a two-story house on a small lot. That's the prevalent desire. And as long as people want that, someone's gonna try to find a way to fill that need. It's the capitalistic way we have in this country."
What about that commute to Roanoke every day that comes along with a house in the country?
"The drive's not so bad," Runyon says. Although, "it used to be a lot nicer before they put all the traffic lights along" U.S. 460.
While some residents say they left the city in search of better schools, Runyon's three kids are driven into Roanoke schools every day by their parents.
"There just isn't a big enough tax base out here to handle all the technology" students need, he said.
For Steve and Angela Cash, Botetourt's school system was a plus when they moved six months ago.
They left Roanoke County because they worried about being annexed into Roanoke someday - even though Roanoke County is, by law, immune to further annexations - and because they wanted a few acres. They soon realized, as did the Runyons, that undeveloped land is hard to come by.
The view of the mountains behind their Knollwood Drive house was one of the selling points for Steve Cash. The fact that they have to pay a private contractor to haul their garbage away doesn't bother him, because taxes are cheaper and the schools are good.
"There's always a little tradeoff somewhere," he says.
The tradeoff for Sam and Kitty Worrell is the longer drive into Roanoke, which they make nearly every day for one reason or another, even though they're retired.
When they married in 1990, they each owned a house. Sam's Roanoke place was the one they sold, and he moved to Knollwood Drive in southern Botetourt County.
"I like the country," he says. He won't move farther out, though, and he certainly won't move back into the city. The only thing he misses about living in Roanoke is the convenience of being close to shops and services.
He likes his neighborhood, where the ranch-style houses and two-story homes sit snug on a former apple orchard. The farmer who sold the land still owns a hayfield behind Knollwood Drive that rises just enough to block the sight and some of the noise from U.S. 460. Several years ago, the neighbors tried to buy the land, but the price was too high.
"Eventually, something's gonna come through there," he predicts. More houses would be OK, but a 24-hour fast-food restaurant would be a nightmare.
What he doesn't like about his subdivision is the traffic. "I tell you, it's like a demilitarized zone," Worrell says. "It's gotten congested because more people are moving in this way."
He's right. The number of vehicles that travel one section of Knollwood Drive on a daily basis has jumped from 211 in 1986 to 1,547 two years ago, according to Eddie Wallace at the Virginia Department of Transportation. That's the same number of cars as on Wallace's street, and he lives in downtown Salem.
Pete Wood also has seen the population burst, if not explode, northeast of Roanoke along the 460 and 220 corridors. A real estate agent with Boone & Co., Wood says half his clients are from outside Southwest Virginia, and half are from the valley. They all want basically the same things, though.
"They want everything Botetourt has to offer, but they need a little bit of the city with it," he says. They want mountain views and cable television, privacy and neighbors, farms to look at but not to smell - in short, space and convenience.
Many who ask for 5 acres don't realize what that means, Wood says.
"It's a lot of land, once you start to mow it. It's rare for people to ask for that much. Mostly they want an acre or so."
These days, not many can afford the larger parcels, he says. And although chopping land into 1-acre lots is in some ways ruining the rural landscape, Wood says, "at least its not quarter-acre or half-acre lots."
by CNB