If you’re looking for a microcosm of how Kenosha County has changed over the last decade, try counting the traffic signals on Highway 50.

It’s an unscientific exercise, to be sure. But it points toward a continued move westward, and a change in the area’s traffic patterns that continued to evolve during the last decade.

Around the turn of the 21st century, there were eight traffic lights on Highway 50 (75th Street), westward from Highway 31 (Green Bay Road).

There are 13 today, the most recent two added last year.

The city of Kenosha, which effectively ended at Interstate 94 in 2000, now stretches west to Highway MB (152nd Avenue). On land formerly in Bristol, where strawberry pickers toiled a decade ago, hundreds of city dwellers now occupy homes beside a golf course, in a subdivision aptly named Strawberry Creek.

Farm tractors are now all but absent on Highway H (88th Avenue), another road that was firmly outside city limits not too many years ago. They’ve been replaced over the last 10 years by large residential subdivisions and industrial developments.

That’s not to say all of the action has been away from the city’s center.

A new neighborhood of condominiums and town houses took root on the lakefront area east of downtown over the last 10 or so years, and other, former industrial sites have been cleaned up in older neighborhoods across the city.

Former Mayor John Antaramian, who piloted the city during eight of the last 10 years, said he believes the last decade marked a continuation of quality-of-life improvements the Kenosha area has made over the last 30 years.

“I think that Kenosha is continually changing,” Antaramian said recently. “It’s an incremental change, though. It’s not an overnight kind of change.”

Crossing the border for employment — the trend of Illinois residents moving to Kenosha, holding on to their jobs and commuting southward — is one major issue that has helped drive these changes over the last decade and beyond, Antaramian said.

The positive, he said, is that those residents have brought more diversity to Kenosha, which, he added, improves quality of life. The downside, he joked: more Bears fans.

New communities emerge

Laura Wolkober’s rural neighborhood is a sign of these times.

She and her husband, Joseph, were relatively early arrivals to the area from Illinois.

They moved to Brighton in 1993, in search of affordable country property where they could keep their horses. They bought 35 acres along Highway JB (31st Street).

Then the wave started.

“Around ’99 or so, a friend moved in down the street,” Wolkober said. “Then they trickled in after that.”

Now there are five families living in her area — all former Illinoisians, all members of the Lake County Mounted Posse, a south-of-the-border horse group.

“All these people, they wholeheartedly appreciate the value of what they can get out here,” Wolkober said.

Since she moved here, Wolkober said she has come to sense more of an Illinois-like feel in the Kenosha area.

Her daughter, she said, is in a LakeView RecPlex soccer league in Pleasant Prairie, where she said it seems a majority of the families are Illinois transplants.

Traffic is more intense, too, Wolkober noted.

“Even back roads, it definitely has changed,” she said.

Ray Forgianni, who retired in 2005 after more than two decades as Kenosha’s city development director, said the Illinois-to-Kenosha migration and its relationship to Interstate 94 — the road that leads many of them to their jobs — has defied the old notion of concentric circles in development.

Rather than considering the distance between one’s home and his job or the places where he shops, now the main question is time; how long it takes to get there, Forgianni said.

Consequently, Forgianni said, many newcomers to the area might never make it into downtown Kenosha.

“It’s not just housing,” Forgianni said of the effects of Illinois transplants. “Effectively, a new community grew.”