USA TODAY International Edition
More are leaving ’ burbs for cities
Shift in population driven by retiring Baby Boomers and young professionals.
BALTIMORE When the City Sports running store opened here in 2006, then- manager Cami Walker found himself “begging people to come in.” The store was one of the first in the new Harbor East neighborhood near the popular Inner Harbor tourist zone.
“They’d say, ‘ Where’s Harbor East?’ and you’d say, ‘ Well, it’s east of the harbor.’ They’d say, ‘ Where’s that?’ ”
Mostly an empty space until the middle of the last decade, the neighborhood is now one of Baltimore’s most densely populated areas, bristling with restaurants, hotels, shops and condominiums. It has more in common with glass- clad, high- rise Manhattan than the marble- stooped row house areas of Baltimore.
Harbor East symbolizes a population shift taking place across the nation, reflected in data released today by the Census Bureau, which finds that population growth has been shifting to the core counties of the USA’s 381 metropolitan areas, especially since the economic recovery began gaining steam in 2010. Basically, the USA’s urban core is getting denser while far- flung suburbs are watching their growth dwindle.
Driven by young professionals and retiring Baby Boomers, the trend is “180 degrees” from the last decade’s rush to the exurbs, says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington. “People are hanging tough in ur- ban areas,” he says. “Some of them are going to stay there for the long term.”
The trend also is driven by increasing numbers of young people delaying or forgoing marriage and childbirth, which often prompt moves to the suburbs.
Frey says many outlying suburbs once grew in spite of whether the cities they orbited were thriving. Now, he says, the equation is changing. If exurbs are “part of a prosperous region” such as Washington, D. C., they’ll survive. If not, he says, “those places aren’t going to come back.”
Abi Frederick and her family moved here from San Francisco in 2010, landing in the neighborhood after her husband’s employer rented corporate housing on the block. She loved the fact that she and her three kids could walk to the National Aquarium and shop across the street at the Whole Foods Market, a neighborhood anchor.
Last July, Frederick opened Haute Blow Dry Bar, an upscale salon, in suburban Towson. Four months later, she built a second salon here.
“I’ve always thought Harbor East is just going to be an amazing location,” she says. “It just seemed like the perfect spot. It’s like a big city in a little area.”