The Price of Popularity

If your town makes one of the "best places to live" lists, don't count on it staying that way.

BY WAYNE CURTIS

For the fifth time in as many days, I'm faced with a vexing dilemma. It's time for dinner, but where? The choice of restaurants within a few minutes' walk of my downtown hotel is bewildering. There's "nuevo Latino," "pan-Asian," and "polyethnic vegetarian." There's "neoclassic Italian," "Delta fusion cuisine," and "Pacific Northwest fare with a French influence." An ad for "Micronesian and Central European cuisines and cocktails" piqued my interest earlier today, but that place is four miles out of town and I'm running late after browsing in some of the half-dozen bookshops in town. A David Lynch film starts in an hour at the theater next door to the hotel, so I opt for something quick and easy and amble down the block for—ho-hum—sushi and sake. Again.

It's the sort of aggravation I imagine is familiar to denizens of the nation's most fashionable urban neighborhoods, like Manhattan's West Village and Chicago's Lincoln Park. But this is Ashland, Ore., with a population of just 20,000. And this is no trendy little suburb from which the digitally and financially astute commute to jobs in a nearby big city. Nearly 300 miles from either Portland or Sacramento, Ashland is a long, long drive to anything remotely resembling a major metropolitan area. I am seriously out in the boondocks.

You may already know about Ashland. Not only is it home to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Southern Oregon University, but it has also become something of a celebrity in the life-style press. Ashland is a perennial top performer in those exclamation-point-filled lists of Great Towns! to consider if you're in the market for a new life. It was hailed as one of the nation's top two dream towns in a Men's Journal cover story that championed the "wildest, tastiest, smartest mountain and beach communities in America." It made a cameo last year in Outside magazine's "Live Here Now" issue, a compendium of "perfect places to live big, play hard, and work (if you must)." Time listed Ashland among seven great small towns for retirement, and Modern Maturity likewise gave it a favorable nod. It's also been touted in two popular guidebooks, 100 Best Small Art Towns in America and Great Towns of America—Guide to the 100 Best Getaways for a Vacation or a Lifetime.

Small, remote, hip-haute cities like Ashland may be to the '00s what the suburbs were to the '40s and '50s—a whole new kind of place that defines an era. These aren't suburbs, exurbs, or boomburgs, nor are they splashy but seasonal vacation resorts like Aspen, Colo., and Jackson Hole, Wyo. They've been dubbed "micropolitan" towns, and they're often way out of the way, places like Camden, Maine, Shelburne Falls, Mass., and Driggs, Idaho.

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