Baby boomers face a key decision: To rent or to buy?

After 20 years of a car-centric lifestyle in a large house in Bethesda, Md., and nearly a decade of lobbying her husband, Roxanne Littner achieved her goal of moving into the District of Columbia.

“My husband was more attached to the house than I was, and wanted to stay longer, but when we had a plumbing issue and the basement flooded, I put my foot down and set a date to sell our house in a year,” Littner says. “We started looking downtown at different neighborhoods and couldn’t find anything we wanted to buy with 1,500 square feet or more that we liked and that wasn’t outrageously expensive.”

Littner and her husband, ophthalmologist Roy Rubinfeld, opted to move into an apartment in the Kennedy-Warren in Northwest Washington. They quickly discovered that the services provided and the freedom from maintenance suited their lifestyle.

“It seems to make financial sense to rent, because we don’t pay high condo fees or have to pay for repairs,” Littner says. “We own a second home in Italy, and renting gives us the flexibility to be gone for months at a time if we want, since we know the Kennedy-Warren staff will take care of our place in the city.”

The rent-or-buy decision is more commonly thought of as a dilemma for young professionals establishing their households, not people approaching retirement. But whether it’s a financially savvy decision or simply the only solution when they can’t find a suitable place to buy, some baby boomers are choosing to rent an apartment downtown when they downsize.

“Many of our clients who are at or near retirement like the idea of downsizing and moving into the city or closer to the city, and they assume it will be less expensive than maintaining a large home,” says Laly Kassa, managing director of financial planning at Chevy Chase Trust in Bethesda. “The reality is that it’s just as expensive to move closer to the city to an area that’s walkable and close to transit. Some are opting to buy, and some are opting to rent, but

chair when he befriended the forward-thinking president at the local community college. From there, it wasn't long before he was helping the college to launch an innovative project, the Institute for Rural Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (IREED), aimed at diversifying the regional economy of West Virginia's eastern panhandle. Over the past two years, Josh Frye had become one of IREED's most promising clients as he tried to develop his chicken farm into something much more ambitious: an innovative business with wide-reaching economic and environmental potential for the state.

And yet, determined as Kapp was to help West Virginians like Frye, he was initially blind to the challenges of such a project — not just the systemic obstacles that have kept West Virginia from adapting to a rapidly evolving economy, but the personal roadblocks he would encounter as an affluent, liberal urbanite living in a rural culture he didn't understand. He would eventually find himself the object of a vicious online campaign, targeted with homophobia and maligned as an arrogant carpetbagger. But easy as it might be, especially in the Trump era, to write off this response as pure bigotry and partisan ignorance, Kapp took another perspective.

“I had to take some time to muck around in chicken s---,” he says. “I learned humility. If we can drop our sense of ‘we know best,' that animus that I have been the target of doesn't need to be there.”

Kapp has become an unlikely advocate for rural communities and their largely conservative, working-class populations. He believes this demographic has far more potential than they are given credit for. They deserve economic self-determination, he says, not empty promises to revive dying industries. He is certain that by harnessing local knowledge, like agriculture, they can start businesses and put their own people back to work.

At the same time, Kapp knows that urban partners are vital to helping these communities access resources and take entrepreneurial risks. Which creates a problem: At a moment when our country is increasingly divided, convincing West Virginians to trust the liberal, urban elites who have long maligned them isn't easy. No less simple, Kapp has discovered, is getting these elites — himself included — to recognize their own shortcomings.

Kapp can be reckless for the sake of his cultural education. In early October, while visiting a defunct coal mine with Josh Frye, he ventured to the edge of a river swooshing with toxic runoff. Between 1 million and 6 million gallons of this polluted water flowed into the Potomac every day. “If they didn't use lime dust to treat it, the Potomac would be dead,” said Amo Oliverio, coordinator for Eastern's biological and environmental technology program, who was showing the men around. “Part of this place is like the surface of Mars. There's nothing.”

As it turned out, Frye had a potential solution to the runoff problem — one that was less expensive and more permanent than lime dust. About a decade ago, he discovered that the special machine he'd been using to heat his chicken houses could be reconfigured to create poultry biochar: a black, sandlike substance made from chicken litter, whose chemical properties both improved deficient soil and trapped heavy metals. Biochar can be created from a variety of materials and is used in industries like agriculture and landscaping. But after reading a U.S. Department of Agriculture white paper on poultry biochar, Frye realized that it could help clean up mines, which often leached heavy metals into the surrounding environment. He buckled down, became a self-taught expert in the molecular composition of soil, and spent years talking to government agencies, universities and companies, trying to find partners and clients for a poultry biochar business. The project consumed his life and ran down his bank account.

Frye's current distributor, a fertilizer and soil amendment company called Southern Organics & Supply, says that to its knowledge, Frye is the first person to turn poultry biochar into a business. But Frye's formal relationship with Southern Organics is recent. For many years, few people took him seriously. “You got something that no one has ever produced, and it's made out of s---. And you've got to tell people how great this s--is and make them believe it. If I go to the city,” he says, “there's a lack of respect.”

In 2012, the machine Frye used to make poultry biochar fell into disrepair. With no money to fix it, he was ready to give up. As a last resort, he called the Launchpad. He'd heard plenty about Kapp, of course, but he decided to withhold judgment. He had nothing left to lose. Kapp, meanwhile, says his “mind was blown” when he heard what Frye was up to. “I realized how many Joshes there are in other states, struggling for access to capital and resources.”

Kapp, Metzer and Frye began meeting weekly at the Launchpad. Kapp helped Frye develop his business and reach both investors and clients, including state and federal institutions. Frye gave him a new way to think about economic diversification in the Potomac Highlands. IREED's main goal should be to help the agricultural community think of itself as entrepreneurial - "one of the biggest challenges for individual farmers," Kapp discovered. And so IREED created a centralized online marketplace, now in beta, where farmers can connect with buyers; it runs conferences where farmers scout and present new technologies; and it hosts monthly workshops with the West Virginia Department of Agriculture on topics from public relations to aquaponics to agro-tourism. As it turns out, a lot of area farms want to open their doors to weekenders and tourists - the same people that Hitchcock and Yandura hoped to lure to Wardensville. But the approach matters. "The big piece is that it all has to be locally led," says Ohle of the Rural Community Assistance Partnership. "Give the community a playbook and allow them to drive that.”

Kapp may not be a West Virginian, but he is now shouldering a lot of their indignation. At one economic development conference, an audience member questioned Kapp's decision to work with community colleges, calling them “the lowest common denominator.” At another, Kapp was talking about the challenges of rural entrepreneurship, and someone countered that it was easy to drum up “a few million dollars” in business investment. The problem, Kapp says, is that elites have not invited the rural working class into their conversations. And that needs to happen, not just to achieve economic equality, but to close the cultural gap.

There's another shift happening these days, too. Since the election, Kapp says, a growing number of funders, foundations and corporations have come to him about reaching rural communities. Kapp is developing a program that will allow community colleges to offer low- or no-interest microloans, around $5,000, to aspiring entrepreneurs. These individuals would then take entrepreneurship and business-development courses at the lending college. “A bank might say, ‘This guy's too risky,'” Kapp explains. “But a community college can say, ‘I know this guy. We work with him. I am vetting and validating his ability to be able to pay back the loan.'”

Last fall, Kapp, NACCE and the National Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education won a grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission to introduce entrepreneurship education in eight community colleges across coal-mining-affected areas of Appalachia. The grant also provides curriculum resources for 28,000 K-through-12 students. The hope is that some of these students — perhaps many — will feel newly empowered to look beyond the fading economy that sustained their grandparents and parents. But, Kapp warns, they must feel supported — and respected — along the way. If not, the fissures between rural and urban, and working class and elite, will only keep growing.