I found this item in the Wall Street Journal to be particularly interesting. While urban and especially suburban property values have plummeted,

the average residential sale price climbed 7% last year from 2006 levels, before the recession began. This year, says the firm, based in Kansas City, Mo., prices are expected to be up 2% from 2006. That's compared to an expected 22% median price decline nationally in existing single-family homes in 2009 from 2006 levels.

So now more people are moving out of cities and suburbs and heading for the country, or at least the exurban fringes, what Leo Marx would call "ruburbia."¹ Being a ruburban myself, and perhaps what this article might consider a second generation 'ruralpolitan', it's not surprising at all that city-folk would turn to the country in an economic downturn. Here the city is seen as the site of economic instability and unpredictability, and the countryside, as always, its antidote. This deep-seated anti-urbanism is congenital to American development, and the desire to be both outside the city yet connected to its commercial and social benefits is fundamental to the history of sprawl–and, indeed, suburbia in general. For me, then, this is just a further development of centrifugal growth, and, more broadly, another iteration of the tradition, from Jefferson's gentleman-farmer-citizen to Wright's Broadacre City, of binding political hope to the landscape.

With the possibilities of the internet and 'online commuting,' now even the most rural community can be, effectively, a bedroom community. What's worrying is that these displaced suburbanites aren't likely to drastically alter their lifestyles to suit their new environments; most importantly, they aren't likely to give up their dependence on the car. If anything, moving to the country aggravates one's reliance on the car in daily life. The supermarket, instead of being four or five miles away, is now ten or twenty. School is thirty; work, in this article's example, is sixty. Any sort of community thought to be found or made, as opposed to the anonymity of the city, will be stretched to its physical limits. While this certainly seems like a fleeting trend (the move to the city being one of the more inescapable forces of the modern age), it's not hard to see that, if combined with the small town nostalgia-mongering of the worst of the New Urbanists, it could prove to be a significant real estate development or even planning trend.

[1] see Leo Marx, "The American Ideology of Space" in Denatured Visions

Also:

He and his nine-year-old, James, decided to try killing one—"My wife didn't want anything to do with that," he says—and cooking it. It turns out that roosters can be tough. "We took one bite and it was like, 'We can't eat this thing,' " says Mr. Dawley.

Isn't that why you cook it for like a whole day in red wine and make coq au vin? C'mon now people.