In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, environmental planning researchers began to study the challenges experienced by small cities and rural towns located near popular outdoor destinations across the American west.
With a rising demand for access to national parks, public lands, scenic rivers and other natural amenities like ski areas, researchers at the universities of Arizona and Utah found that these regions faced development pressures and planning challenges rarely tackled in rural areas. Surveying public officials, researchers found that population growth associated with “amenity migration” presented more complex and upsetting challenges than increased tourism. Unlike tourism, the challenges of amenity migration threatened the small-town character and ethos cherished by the survey’s respondents. Housing and cost of living were chief concerns among respondents– two factors that drove workers further from their jobs and compromised quality of life for many long-time residents.
In the process of that study, researchers coined a term to group these places under a common umbrella: “Gateway and Natural Amenity Regions,” or “GNAR” communities. The authors of that original report, Drs. Danya Rumore and Philip Stoker, identified three pillars of “GNAR” communities:
1. They must be a census designated place of 150 to 20,000 people.
2. They are within 10 miles of the boundary of a national park, national monument, national forest, state park, wild and scenic river or other major river, or lake.
3. They are more than 15 miles from a census-designated urbanized area by road.
See Stoker, Philip, et al. (2020). “Planning and Development Challenges in Western Gateway Communities.” Journal of the American Planning Association. 87:1. Pages 21-33. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2020.1791728, as well as the Gateway and Natural Amenity Region (GNAR) Initiative at Utah State University. The GNAR Initiative houses research and planning tools for GNAR communities: https://extension.usu.edu/gnar/.
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