01:00 AM EST on Saturday, December 10, 2005

BY JANE GORDON
The New York Times

Connecticut's northeastern edge, in Windham County, has long been known as the Quiet Corner. It is a place of rolling hills, small towns and family-owned dairy farms, where thousands of acres of farmland hang on to a disappearing way of life, where old stone markers establish property borders as they did two centuries ago. This is home to the University of Connecticut, where herds of cows chew grass along the college's main roadway. Drivers can go for miles without hitting a gas station, a Dunkin' Donuts or, sometimes, even a house.

Even though it is packed with acres of federal and state forests, and with miles of beautiful open space, the Quiet Corner has never achieved the cachet among weekenders that Litchfield County has in the northwest, with its relatively easy commute to New York City. But times are changing.

If Connecticut residents have ignored the Quiet Corner, Rhode Island and Massachusetts residents have discovered it and rural areas of New London County, and marked them as affordable bedroom communities. The area is becoming, in many ways, less a Connecticut county, and more a suburb for commuters working in Providence, Boston and Worcester. To local real-estate agents and land-use officials, Windham County is New England's next great real-estate frontier.

"There's talk all over Providence about this," said Dylan LaGrandeur, who commutes to his job as a part-time loan officer for A to Z Mortgage in Providence a few days a week and works the other part as a real-estate agent in the Danielson section of Killingly, close to Route 395 and the Rhode Island border. LaGrandeur, born and reared in Providence, moved to Danielson two years ago.

"We're been getting tons of calls from Rhode Islanders running from high taxes," he said. "Knock $100,000 off anything you're looking at in Rhode Island, and add a couple of acres to it. In Connecticut, you're getting more land and lower taxes."

Betti Kuszaj, executive director of the Northeastern Connecticut Chamber of Commerce, says that in Windham County, "the quality of living is very, very good, yet the cost of living is very reasonable."

Brooklyn, with 7,660 residents, is one town west of the Rhode Island line, and two towns south of the Massachusetts line. It is a 40-minute drive from Providence, an hour from Framingham, Mass., and 1 hour 20 minutes from Boston.

For a long time, about 25 new houses a year, on average, were built in Brooklyn. But in the past several years, about 100 have been built each year, said Chuck Dobrowski, Brooklyn's land-use officer. Larger plots of land and larger houses are both available for less money than in neighboring states, he said.

"I think it's pretty much common knowledge over there that there are a lot of people moving in from Rhode Island and Massachusetts," Dobrowski said. "We've got people who work in Framingham, Boston and Providence and live here, buying into the rural-atmosphere idea."

Jim Raftery Jr. drives about 1 hour 20 minutes from Thompson, in the most northeastern corner of Connecticut, to a sales job in Bedford, Mass. His wife, Orla, commutes 1 hour 10 minutes each day to Newtown, Mass., as an accounting manager for a travel company.

Traffic can make their respective commutes more than two hours. But with two small children, the cost of day care in Boston ($1,400 a month) sent them packing from their previous home in the Boston suburb of Natick. In Thompson, they bought a three-bedroom, 1 1/2-bath Cape for $185,000.

"In the Boston area, it would have cost us in the neighborhood of $600,000 to $1 million for what we have here," said Raftery, who grew up in Thompson and whose parents help care for the couple's children. "I've got apple trees and grapevines and peach trees, hardwood floors and French glass doors and nice moldings, and I didn't need to do any work whatsoever."

LaGrandeur, of Danielson, was living in a three-story apartment house he owned in Providence and working as a lead-abatement site supervisor for the city when his parents took a drive on Route 6 one day and spotted a listing for a Connecticut property in Windham County. They told their children about their find. One by one, family members sold their properties in Providence and moved to Connecticut. LaGrandeur bought a ranch-style house for $130,000. In the past two years, he said, he believes it has appreciated by at least $100,000.

"We bought five houses out here in the past two years," LaGrandeur said. "We were like a clan moving here."

LaGrandeur's wife, Eileen, commutes each day from Danielson to her job as a housing advocate in Providence. His sister, Angelina Newbury, lives in Plainfield and travels to her job as a community health educator at Women & Infants Hospital, in Providence. His sister-in-law, Jessica LaGrandeur, who also lives in Plainfield, operates a hair salon in Providence and drives in every day, too. They each spend about 35 minutes each day going to Providence.

Longtime political ties could not even keep LaGrandeur's stepfather, Nicholas W. Easton, a former Providence City Council president and an ancestor of Nicholas Easton, a former governor of Rhode Island and founder of Newport, from a good deal.

"We were tired of Providence politics, and we wanted to try something new," said Easton, who bought a 4,000-square-foot warehouse with his wife, Sally Easton, LaGrandeur's mother, and refurbished it to live in.

"We looked at property in Rhode Island, and we kept saying, 'That's all we're getting for $300,000?' We got a map, we kept driving and I said, 'If we keep driving, we'll be in Connecticut,' and she said, 'So what?' And we got over the Connecticut line, and the prices dropped. We had very deep roots, but if you know anything about Rhode Island politics, you'll know it wasn't that hard to tear ourselves away."

The Eastons paid $90,000 for the warehouse and three acres, of which a stretch of 500 feet runs along the Moosup River.

"For $90,000, I would have been able to buy a tool shed on a 500-square-foot lot in Providence," Easton said, laughing. The Eastons rehabilitated an existing structure. But some people are more interested in the availability of new houses for tens of thousands of dollars less than they would cost in Massachusetts or Rhode Island.

One Rhode Island builder, Belmont Homes, operates exclusively in Connecticut. Land availability and cost attracted Rick O'Keefe, the company's owner, to New London County, in the southeast of the state, just below Windham.

In Rhode Island, O'Keefe said, it takes about three to five years to complete a development, mostly because of the need to comply with the state's relatively stringent environmental regulations. In Connecticut, these regulations are set by each town, not by the state, and so compliance takes less time, about six to eight months on average.

"We've managed to do the same amount of work in Connecticut in three years that would take us 10 to 15 years in Rhode Island," he said. "It's a much more favorable atmosphere for development. Plus we're seeing a lot of migration from Rhode Island and Massachusetts because of the affordability. We can build a comparable product in Connecticut for $20,000 to $30,000 less due to land-acquisition costs."

Real-estate agents in northeast Connecticut said a new 1,600-square-foot three-bedroom, two-bath house in Killingly, for example, would cost about $300,000. In Providence, the same house would cost at least $400,000. Taxes are also higher in Providence, raising the cost of a monthly mortgage payment.

Dick Loomis, of LoomisReal Estate in Putnam, said he began to see people from Massachusetts move to the area once before, in the 1980s, when real-estate prices rose substantially in the Boston area. Prices leveled off, and many residents moved back into greater Boston, he said. Then prices rose again.

"About two years ago, Rhode Island came over," Loomis said. "Now we're looking to see where the calls are coming from, and they are from 617 calls, from the Boston area itself."

But even paradise has its rotten fruit, and some people bemoan the fast pace of development. One longtime resident is William R. Morse, associate dean of the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester. He lives in Woodstock, population 7,750, where he moved 18 years ago, after rejecting housing in Worcester-area towns as too expensive.

"We wanted a certain type of housing, rural, quiet, and that was already becoming hard to find," Morse said. "It was at that point that a colleague mentioned that he lived over the border in Woodstock, Conn., and he had found that prices were in the range of 30- to 40-percent cheaper."

Morse and his family bought a house in Putnam, and a few years later, moved to a house in Woodstock. But others who followed him have altered the scenery, he said, and he's not happy about it.

"We moved to the town because it was rural, and now there's a lot of growth and tons of building of new houses," he said. "Larger and larger tracts of houses are going in, and the houses are getting bigger and bigger."

Perhaps more important, Morse said, taxes cover only about a third of the costs of new children in the schools.

"This is creating a crisis in Woodstock and surrounding towns," he said. "The old timers are pressed by rising tax rates."

But like others who are commuting from surrounding states to the countryside of Connecticut, the drive has never been a problem, and over all, he said, the town has retained its allure.

"It's wonderful, living in a rural community," Morse said. "We moved into the house three days before my oldest son went to kindergarten, and he's now in college. He went to school with kids whose parents were farmers, and kids whose parents were in high tech. In a small school, you get to know all the parents. You can drop the kids off at a sporting event and know there are 30 parents there who will keep an eye on them. I'm personally very loyal to Woodstock. I expect to probably live there the rest of my life."