Real Estate Hunters Go Old School
GAYLORD, Kan. — Gwen Archut steps cheerfully over the bat droppings that lie thick on the gymnasium floor. The room is dark and icy, crowded with splintery, gray bleachers.
But thanks to an impulse buy on EBay, this is home.
Not just this gym -- the entire Gaylord Rural Elementary and High School. Gwen and her husband, Oliver, own 30,000 square feet of leaky classrooms, dented lockers and rust-streaked urinals. And they are ecstatic.
They stride the gloomy halls, under burned-out bulbs, and remind themselves they own it all: The sixth-grade classroom, which they've filled with firewood. The first-grade cubbies Gwen uses as a closet. The blackboards Oliver scribbles full of business calculations. The girls' locker room, painted lilac, where they wash in the communal shower.
Never, ever did they dream of buying so much space for $25,000. Their entire house back in Seattle would fit in two classrooms here.
True, they're out on the prairie now, an hour from the nearest McDonald's, in a town of 97. Gaylord's streets are rutted dirt. There's not much to do on an autumn night beyond hunting skunks. But the Archuts find life fuller here.
"There's a difference between living and existing," says Oliver, 35, who builds recording equipment. "In Seattle, we were just existing. Here, we can live."
That same calculation is drawing others to fading towns across the heartland.
In the past year, at least a dozen communities have turned to EBay to sell schools shuttered for lack of kids. They've attracted tremendous interest from entrepreneurs seeking a bargain and an escape.
The schools are cheap, generally priced at $1 to $3 a square foot. They're big, too, and some are beautiful -- solid brick with hardwood floors and quaint cupolas. In most small towns, there are no zoning ordinances to limit commercial or industrial activity. And the communities offer a refuge from the anxious anonymity of urban life.
"Not only do you know your neighbors, but everybody really does drop by for a cup of sugar," said Suzanne Azzarella, 33.
She and her business partner moved their engine sales business from Phoenix to McCracken, Kan., (population: 210) in May and can't get over how much costs have dropped. They haven't lost a single item to theft. They own three times as much space as they rented in Phoenix, for half the cost. They have so much room, in fact, they're thinking of opening a microbrewery in the elementary school and confining their engine business to the middle school.
