Maryland has weathered immense population changes during its three and a half centuries: From 1800 when it was the geographic center of U.S. population, to 1850, when Baltimore's 170,000 residents made it the nation's second largest city behind New York, to the middle years of this century when Maryland's population doubled.
But never has this state witnessed such an internal population upheaval. Maryland's overall growth this decade has hardly been dramatic -- barely 5 percent, exactly the rate of the nation as a whole. Yet the movement of people from city to county and county to county has been striking.
Baltimore City lost 80,000 residents from 1980 to 1992, largely a result of the black middle class moving west into Baltimore County, and whites going north to Harford County. Prince George's County, suffering from some of the same urban ills as Baltimore, lost 22,000 people to Anne Arundel County. And as Anne Arundel urbanized, it lost people to Howard and Carroll. If not for foreign immigration, Montgomery County would have lost more population than it gained -- to Frederick, Howard and Anne Arundel.
Free State? Soon, it may be the "Flee State," with Marylanders abandoning one jurisdiction for another. The price of this disposable homesteading is immense in terms of environmental impact and infrastructure cost. A lot of empty housing has been left in the wake of people washing farther out. Baltimore City alone had a 30 percent jump in boarded-up housing in the past four years. Meanwhile, the state allocated more for school construction in the suburbs last year than since the early '70s and this barely made a dent in the demand.
Maryland's population churn is a quality-of-life issue throughout the metropolitan region and beyond. We'd like to think otherwise, but our political leaders may have no more power to affect these seismic shifts in the landscape than a boy with his finger in the dike. Most disturbing is that unlike great population changes in the past driven by positive missions -- filling jobs created by the Industrial Revolution or to support the war effort -- this transformation seems more negative, more escapist. As Maryland approaches the 21st century, we wonder what kind of communities can be sustained with roots of clay.