The Great Plains Real Estate Boom

Mark Dent reports for the Hustle on the latest turn of the screw in the "boom and bust of the Great Plains."

Dent starts his history from the forced removal of Native Americans and the 1862 Homestead Act to a long period of population decline and, finally, a nascent episode of rebirth: "After a year of soaring real estate prices in every city and suburb, long-depressed and depopulated Kansas is going through a lower-key real estate boom of its own."

Since the 1990s, many Kansas towns have pursued a contemporary version of the Homestead Act, offering land for free to "anyone willing to move in and build a house," according to Dent. In 2003, for instance, the city of Marquette offered about 60 free lots to entice new residents, and sparked media interest from the Hutchinson News, the Associated Press, and the CBS Evening News. Almost 30 Kansas towns have launched free land programs—but only a few have managed to stop population decline, reports Dent.

The story's foray into the pandemic years centers mostly around the city of Lincoln, where "houses that used to sit on the market for a year were selling within weeks in 2021," writes Dent.

Now cities that once pulled out every trick in the book to attract demand are preparing to meet a new challenge: more demand than anticipated.

The deeply reported source article, linked below, includes a lot more human interest and local economic data and examines the question of whether the demographic shifts of the pandemic are narrowing the gap between the rural and the urban.