When John Haase moved to the country in 1989, he was the exception to the rule.

At that time, Lawrence’s population was exploding. Haase, meanwhile, just wanted some peace, quiet and a place to garden.

“We essentially live on a 15-acre plot,” Haase said of his home between Lawrence and Lecompton. “We just took to country living immediately.”

But Haase, who owns the Collection Bureau of Lawrence and serves on the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission, isn’t so isolated anymore.

“Certainly, on our trip between our residence and town, we’ve noticed continued development,” he said in July.

Estimates released last summer by the U.S. Census Bureau confirm Haase’s observations. Lawrence is still growing, the numbers indicate, though not as fast as it did during the booming 1990s. But smaller towns and rural areas along the Kansas City-Lawrence-Topeka corridor are seeing their populations skyrocket.

“I know it’s keeping me busy,” said Eudora City Administrator Mike Yanez, whose city grew 12 percent in the two years after the 2000 census. “It’s keeping all of us busy as we deal with growth.”

Scale difference

According to the estimates, Lawrence population increased from 80,098 in 2000 to 81,604 on July 1, 2002. That growth rate of 753 people a year is just more than half the average rate of 1,449 new residents each year during the 1990s.

“If you’re growing, you’re growing,” said Luke Middleton, an analyst with the Policy Research Institute at Kansas University. “The only difference I could see is in the scale.”

Middleton said the census estimates “are not the most reliable numbers out there,” but said another sign of the city’s growth rate — the number of electric meters being installed — also has been slowing.

“If we grow at only 1 percent, instead of 2 percent, for the next 10 years, that’s still a positive rate,” he said. “A lot of rural communities have stable population or declining.”

City Manager Mike Wildgen warned against looking at the numbers as a trend.

“It goes up and down over time,” he said. “I don’t know the significance of a two-year period.”

Jean Milstead, former interim chief executive officer of the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce, said she had seen no signs of a slowdown in the city’s growth.

“The economy is picking back up again,” Milstead said. “We did go through a slow time in the last year but not enough to warrant a drop in growth.”

She added, however, that there might be a reason for residents to seek other places to live.

“People,” she said, “may find it too expensive to live here.”

Rural growth

Yanez said that’s exactly what he had been told by new Eudora residents. Land is cheaper in Eudora, he said, and residents still have easy access to Lawrence and Kansas City.

Those factors helped his town grow from 4,307 people in 2000 to 4,829 in the estimate. Those numbers mean Eudora supplied nearly a third of Douglas County’s 1,816-person growth in the estimates.

“We still don’t have a stoplight,” Yanez said. “People feel like they’re close to the big city, if they want to, but they can sleep in a small town.”

Other northeast Kansas counties saw population surges in their rural areas. Leavenworth County added 1,000 residents to its unincorporated areas, as did Shawnee County. Jefferson County’s rural population growth of 300 residents offset a decline of 60 people in the cities. And the 451 new country-dwellers in Franklin County provided the bulk of that county’s 538-person increase.

Donna Graf, the Leavenworth County appraiser, said so many new homes and commercial buildings were going up around Tonganoxie and Basehor that average property valuations for the whole county are going up 13 percent this year.

And with the Kansas Speedway and Cabela’s just across the border in Wyandotte County, she said, more growth is expected.

“They have all kinds of plans for strip mall, hotels, restaurants,” she said. “The future will tell what will happen.”