If You're Thinking of Retiring in...
The Hill Country
The Texas town of Kerrville has agreeable weather, natural beauty and -- for the moment -- affordable homes
By RUSSELL GOLD
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 27, 2005; Page R7
KERRVILLE, TEXAS -- Like many people, Ginger Robertson was first sent here by her parents. Decades later, she returned to Kerrville of her own free will.
On the edge of the Texas Hill Country, a region of rivers, lakes and rolling hills, the countryside around Kerrville has long been home to many sleep-away summer camps. Because it's appreciably cooler than the rest of the state, many city parents sent their kids to Kerrville to get them out of the heat
And so it was with the now 62-year-old Mrs. Robertson, a former organizational consultant. A few years ago, while living in northern Virginia, she and her husband, Robby, started thinking about retirement. They considered the Carolinas and Florida. But they found themselves drawn back to their native Texas.
"I always said to Robby, 'I just want the big sky back,' " she says, munching a home-cooked lunch of beef tenderloin and chipotle chutney. Their home is located on the nose of a hill, and the informal dining room offers generous views of blue Texas sky and hills covered with cedar and live oaks.
"I'm one of those obnoxious Texans that you can take out of Texas, but can never take the Texan out of me," Mrs. Robertson adds. "This was coming home."
Of course, in the half-century since she shot bows and arrows and sang songs around the campfire, Kerrville has grown up. Once a small commercial hub for nearby ranches, it's now a town with a flourishing homegrown arts scene. And the sturdy, understated homes built by 19th-century German immigrants with locally quarried limestone and metal roofs have new neighbors: ornate, Tuscan-style custom homes with red tile roofs that affluent retirees are building.
The Three T's
Still, says Mr. Robertson, a retired executive with TRW Automotive Holdings Corp., Kerrville has kept its small-town Texas roots. The people are straightforward and honest, he says, a nice change from their former life outside the nation's capital.
"I always tell people we moved to Kerrville because of the three T's: Texas, Texans and taxes," he says. There's no state income tax, and the local city and school district freeze real-estate taxes for people over 65 years old.
Before building their home, the Robertsons considered other cities around Texas, but found them either too cutesy, too large or too expensive. Kerrville is a real city, not a tourist trap, and isn't overrun by wealthy retirees, Mr. Robertson says. "It isn't Palm Beach, where everyone is glitzed up."
The Texas Hill Country, an undulating region west of San Antonio and Austin, is quickly becoming a retirement destination for both Texans and, as they say in these parts, the less fortunate who don't live in Texas. Other Hill Country cities, particularly those closer to a string of man-made lakes created beginning in the 1930s to provide electricity, are better-known retirement communities. Kerrville's relative anonymity has suited it just fine.
But now the word is getting out. A Denver-based developer that has built communities in Santa Fe, N.M., Jackson Hole, Wyo., and Sonoma County, Calif., is building a 900-home golf-course community in Kerrville, the most prominent sign that the outside world is taking notice. Sixty percent of calls for information about homes in the development come from outside Texas. Families from New Jersey, Ohio, Colorado and California will build homes soon, according to signs posted on still-empty lots.
Easy Acceptance
Still others found out about Kerrville a long time ago. James L. Dobie, 71, retired in the mid-1990s as a biology professor at Auburn University in Alabama. He had traveled in the nearby Hill Country while studying soft-shell turtles, his field of specialization, and liked the pristine environment. He and his wife, Wanda, chose Kerrville because it offered good medical facilities and because of Schreiner University, a local Presbyterian college with 840 students, which brought a lot of well-educated people into the community. He still writes scholarly articles, and the school's biology staff helps him order the scientific-journal reprints he needs. "There's a recognition in this area that education is important," he says. He also adds: "You don't have to be a native to participate in the activities -- social and financial and so on -- which I think is quite beneficial."
Joseph Takach took early retirement from the finance department at Trans World Airlines in 1970 when he was 46 years old. He was living in Shawnee Mission, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City, Mo., and wanted a place where he could live less expensively. "The real estate was reasonable. The air was clean and the area is beautiful -- the hills and the live oak trees," he says. Also: "They had no state income tax. That helps." Now 82 years old, Mr. Takach and his wife, Ruth, stuck around Kerrville because they liked the city, the people and the weather. Even during the summer, the evenings are cool enough for Mr. Takach to tend to his tomato and pepper plants.
Many retirees moving here from the frothy coastal real-estate markets are finding that Kerrville is still a bargain. The median price for the 169 homes sold in town during the first months of the year was $129,000, according to the local Multiple Listing Service. Three of the houses fetched more than $500,000.
Andy Phillips, chief executive officer of custom-builder Integrity Homes in Kerrville, says construction budgets run from $200,000 to well over $1 million. An employee regularly emails photographs of homes under construction to clients, more than half of whom live far away. What's more, the cost of labor and building materials per square foot in Kerrville is only 40% of the costs on the coasts or Florida, he says.
Higher and Drier
Heading out of San Antonio, the interstate rises from the flat Gulf Coast plain. By the time you arrive in Kerrville, it's clear you've entered the Texas Hill Country. The slow Guadalupe River cuts through downtown, and several hills -- sprouting homes at a rapid clip -- ring the city. It is cooler than the more heavily populated eastern part of the state. It's also at a higher elevation, which keeps away the heavy blanket of humidity that settles for several months every summer on large parts of Texas.
"It's not too hot and not too cold, but the weather changes with the seasons so it's not too boring," says Betty Boynton, 67, who moved here with her husband, Frank, from the Dallas suburbs almost nine years ago. Kerrville's keep-your-windows-open-for-months weather has a downside: allergies. Central Texas has an abundance of cedar and oak pollen, and even people who don't have a history of bad allergies have been known to develop hay fever after a few years.
Drawn by the pleasant weather and natural beauty -- two things in short supply in most parts of Texas -- the Boyntons soon discovered how easily doors were opened for them in Kerrville. There is no old guard of longtime residents who erect subtle barriers to keep newcomers from becoming part of the community.
Two years ago, Frank Boynton was invited to join the board of the Museum of Western Art, which boasts a nationally known collection of what is often called cowboy art. The couple also got involved in restoring a shuttered vaudeville theater downtown. Thanks to all the charity events and fund-raisers, Mr. Boynton is on his third tuxedo since he moved here. He never owned one in Dallas.
"As a non-Texan, it is the easiest state to make friends in," says Mr. Boynton, who grew up near Orlando. "Texans are fun and relaxed and not standoffish. You're either going to have fun here or shame on you." Friends who retired elsewhere are having a tougher time fitting into their new communities. A good friend from Dallas, he says, retired in Arkansas. After a couple of years, he realized he was an outsider and would always be an outsider.
Valuable Asset
In Kerrville, retirees are seen as a valuable asset to be put to work to support the cultural scene. When the Postal Service outgrew its 1935 post office, a group of retirees took over the building and opened an arts and culture center. The property was purchased by local businessman James Avery, who runs a chain of jewelry stores across the Southwest and Southeast.
There's a vibrant local art and music scene that is far larger and much more sophisticated than what you would expect for a city of 21,000. Today, there are 60 nonprofit organizations in Kerrville -- or about one for every 350 residents. This includes a part-time symphony housed in the municipal auditorium, which was remodeled in 2003. The six performances each year sell out the 842-seat facility. There are also two theater companies and a handful of art galleries. Schreiner University also helps support the local arts scene.
But most of the credit for this overabundance of cultural happenings is usually given to the retirees. "They expect a certain cultural infrastructure, and they make it happen," says a former mayor, Joe Herring Jr. He is the president of Symphony of the Hills and estimates that two-thirds of the board are retirees.
Kerrville took its first steps toward becoming a cultural hub in the early 1970s when a local civic leader persuaded Texas state officials to locate a new Arts and Crafts Festival in town.
Festival planners decided that some live music would appeal to out-of-towners attending the festival. So, a three-day event featuring songwriters, mostly from nearby Austin, was organized. This has grown into the annual, internationally known Kerrville Folk Festival, an 18-day event held in May and June that attracts more than 25,000 fans. The Arts and Crafts Festival, too, has grown and has become an annual gathering of top Texas ceramicists, wood workers and other artisans.
All of this "brings a city culture into a very small town," says Frank Stovall, 70, a recent arrival from Houston. But that's not what drew Mr. Stovall, a retired lawyer, and his wife, Barbara. They came to Kerrville first for a golf tournament and were amazed by the sunset and scenery.
"I felt like I was in a different state," Mrs. Stovall says. "I felt like I was in a resort in Wyoming or Montana."
Unusual Wildlife
Dining on the patio of their Tuscan-style home at night, the Stovalls sometimes feel as if they're on a different continent. That's because exotic species introduced into Texas in the early part of the 20th century now thrive in the hills and plateaus around Kerrville -- and venture onto the golf course behind the Stovalls' house. It's not unusual for them to see blackbuck antelope, originally from India, with 20-inch corkscrew horns, or North African aoudads, large sheep with curved horns. The Stovalls say their favorites are the spotted axis deer, from the Himalayas, which have enormous racks of antlers. "They'll sit out and ram each other on the fairway to establish superiority," says Mr. Stovall.
Of late, Kerrville has attracted its share of another kind of exotic: celebrities. Recent home buyers include Texas country musician Robert Earl Keen Jr., a member of the Dixie Chicks and a couple of retired astronauts. Oscar-nominated actor Thomas Haden Church lives on a ranch southeast of town.
Of course, all this growth has led to growing pains. Fearing that runaway development on the commercial corridors would blot out Kerrville's character, the City Council voted earlier this year to approve a "unified development code" to regulate everything from sidewalks to commercial signage. "There was a feeling that development was getting a little helter-skelter,'' Mr. Robertson says.
But soon after the council adopted it, residents gathered 800 signatures on a petition to oppose it. Large signs dotted the city and called on residents to "protect your property rights." In May, voters overwhelmingly rejected the code by a 2-to-1 margin.
--Mr. Gold is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's Dallas bureau.
Write to Russell Gold at encore@wsj.com.
