Recreational Homes and Migration to Remote Amenity-Rich Areas

Counterurbanization pressures in remote amenity-rich regions present a host of land use and development planning issues. In the work reported here, we identify, examine and spatially analyze residential housing characteristics, land ownership, land developability, nat-ural and human-built amenities, infrastructure density, and socio-demographic data at the minor civil division level for an eight county region of Northern Wisconsin. This is done us-ing spatial error and spatial regime models to distinguish between rural “remote” and “fron-tier” levels of population density. Our intent is to develop initial empirical insights into the counterurbanization process that has been at the core of forest fragmentation and land parcelization during the latter half of the 20th and early 21st Centuries. Results suggest that land developability and the presence of public lands are central significant factors involved in in-migration to the frontier region. Further, we note that seasonal, recreational, and occasion-al use housing units, while an important metric, only partially captures important transitions in housing options for both full-time and part-time residents. Both policy implications and further research needs serve as segues into future regional science effort.