Millennials in Leelanau seek a place to call home

Photo by Adrian Meli

By Sam Brown
Sun contributor

“So like, what do you guys do out there?”

We get this question a lot, often loaded with presumptions of who we are and what we like to do. Which is fair. Let me be clear, my wife and I, a young married couple in our mid-20s, are outliers.

When Laura and I got married, we did not have a home to live in four weeks before the ceremony. Before you roll your eyes and furrow your brow at this millennial procrastinating and his failure to provide for his future wife, allow me to explain.

I tried, hard, and I rarely settle for less. This includes moving into our first home, where we would create our first memories as husband and wife. This couldn’t be an apartment in town (couldn’t afford it), or semi-affordable home on the edge of town (no dogs allowed) or even rundown mobile home with neighbors within earshot (no dogs allowed).

We believe in a strong sense of place. How our surroundings influence our lifestyle, mood, and decisions. To us, the sacrifice of a well-paying job was a small cost to pay to be surrounded by the places that gives us goosebumps.

Not many 20-somethings looking for a place to call home do so with such peculiar expectations like ours. We wanted peace and quite. We wanted space, to think, to roam. We craved a home unbound from the stereotypes of our generation—rural, disconnected, quaint, humble, simple.

We got married in 2015, and used our young love and energy to find somewhere to settle. This, as many know, was no easy feat. We needed to have enough money to achieve a basic standard of living after we paid rent. Our dog, really our first child, would have liked to call this place home as well.

I spent my childhood growing up in this area. Making the short trip from Chicago with my family to our cabin during the summer months. My wife, born and raised in the south, first got to know the area when we began dating.

During our courtship, driving back roads, eating cherries, and diving shipwrecks, we began to weave our future together into the landscapes around us. After school, I moved from Montana to Alabama to be closer to the women I loved while she finished school in Auburn. Once we were engaged, we headed north. It was my wife who decided to have the ceremony up here, on a small vacant lot next to our cabin. The fact that a southerner would leave her home, her roots, and sweet tea for the North should give you a good idea of the magnetic draw this area had her.

We settled in a seasonal rental in Glen Arbor. Through word of mouth, forces out of our control and understanding, and sheer luck, we found an affordable place to live, for nine months out of the year. We were ecstatic, the thought of where to go or what to do when the lease ended never even crossed our minds. Jobs? We’d worry about that later, and instead explore our back yard, the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. We found peace, we found quite, and our dog found enough smells to inhale and critters to chase.

This, and only this, was the reason we’re able to call Leelanau County home.

I prefaced this essay by saying we were outliers, but I know for a fact that this county, this perfect little peninsula, is attractive to many others my age. Unfortunately for many, the challenges of moving here outweigh the payoff of growing roots in this beautiful place.

I am a writer, my wife is an artist, which is just a cute way of saying we job hop to make ends meet. Bouncing around to seasonal jobs because we love this area and will do anything we can to stay here—landscaping, substitute teaching, freelance work, warehouse production, property maintenance.

We’re not complaining, or asking for your sympathy. This is our choice, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. If we wanted higher-paying jobs, a shorter commute, we could just move to Traverse City, right? Kind of. Have you ever countered a job offer with, “I’d love to work here, but just so you know, I will be homeless from June until September.”

The community that surrounded us is just as important as the hardwoods and cedars that hem in our backyard. Yes, our neighbors might be older, but that usually means wiser. Developing relationships with the people that call this place home is an important step to create awareness. People just figure these rural areas are of no interest to us young folks. They wouldn’t associate a rural home in a secluded area without neighbors, nightlife, or microbreweries as our dream home.

I wish I could present a cohesive strategy to this problem of how to attract a younger generation to this beautiful county. How to create jobs and affordable housing to keep people here. To replace the diligent store owners who want to sell, to buy the rundown homes, vacant lands, and instill a sense of permanence, with a population that ebbs and flows with the seasons. To inspire a generation that seeks a life of simplicity and gratefulness for the places like this that still exist, and to dig their heels in to create a young community here.

A step toward creating awareness, that we the millennials love these places, and believe it or not, we have the mental capacity to step away from our screens and notifications to enjoy our surroundings. That some of us will go out of our way to create a life for ourselves here, even if it means forgoing job and financial security.

As I write this, tree branches cling to hardy buds, waiting for their chance to bloom. We’re looking for a place to live during the busiest time of year. Last summer we lived with a generous homeowner who gave us a temporary place to stay until our lease renewed, in exchange for a small fee and house chores.

We realize that both of us cannot sustain this lifestyle. We love it, but packing up every nine months, and never really having a place to call your own—well it gets old. It’s difficult to squirrel away enough savings in most rentals with the current job market.

I don’t want you to feel bad for us, I want you to think about the future of this wonderful place, and what we can do instill a sense of responsibility for the future of the county. I want to remind you how much value this county holds for a younger generation, year round, (cause we love winter just as much as summer), and the real potential for growth, community and protection of the places we love.