Don't count on lasting relationships with your neighbors if you live in Howard County. Don't even count on staying long yourself.
It's the most domestically mobile place in the state, per capita: An average of 92 people arrived or left with their belongings in the 1990s every single day.
All told, 336,637 people moved to or from the county in the past decade, tens of thousands more than the total population, according to federal tax return data analyzed by the Census Bureau and the Maryland Department of Planning.
That's not even counting newly arrived immigrants or the thousands of people moving from one part of Howard to another.
"Isn't that amazing?" said Jeff Bronow, chief of research for the county's planning department, which released a report on the migration data two weeks ago. "It's huge numbers."
That doesn't mean everyone is moving or that every neighborhood is continually being transformed. But a large portion of the pop- ulation is coming and going. Seventy percent of Howard's households - families as well as singles - moved into their homes in the 1990s, according to new Census 2000 statistics.
Experts say the high mobility rate is partly about growth (21,500 homes were built in the past decade), partly about jobs (many are within driving distance) and partly the result of being in the middle of transient Maryland, where slightly fewer than half the residents in 2000 were natives.
In the Baltimore region alone, more than 2.6 million people moved from one jurisdiction to another in the 1990s, according to the tax data.
But Howard is gaining more residents from the mass domestic migration than the rest of the Baltimore area. Roughly 26,700 more people moved in than out in the past decade. Harford, which gained 20,400 residents, ranked second.
A postal hassle
For the U.S. Postal Service, all this roving is an added expense at a time when funds are tight because people are sending fewer letters. More houses mean more routes. More moves mean more paperwork.
"If someone moves, we must ensure that their mail is forwarded to them," said Helen Skillman, spokeswoman for the postal district that includes most of the state.
For Craig Dawsey, manager of Short Hop Moving's Laurel office, mobility is good news. He knows a lot of people are heading to and from Howard - they account for about 80 percent of his customers.
"It's very affluent, so they can afford us; it's still being developed, so that tends to encourage movement," he said. "That's good for a moving company. I like ... people who can afford to constantly move."
On Monday, he and a crew of workers started the morning by hauling a Columbia family's belongings onto a truck headed for Baltimore County.
"Steady - slow and easy," Dawsey cautioned as two men maneuvered a piano down concrete steps.
In the 1990s, thousands went in the opposite direction: Baltimore County alone sent 28,200 residents to Howard, according to the tax data. More new Howard residents came from the Baltimore region than any other place, a total of 62,129 people.
But the two big suburban Washington counties are giving Howard more net migration. In the past decade, Montgomery and Prince George's counties lost 22,000 more people to Howard than they gained in return.
Howard, in turn, lost more residents to Carroll, Harford and Frederick than it took in.
Housing costs
"That would make sense, in terms of housing costs," said Mark Goldstein, an economist with the Maryland Department of Planning, who is studying the data. "A bigger house for the same or less money [was available] in those jurisdictions, at least during the '90s."
One person who can attest to that is Martin Bonura, who moved to Dayton from Connecticut in 1999 when he took a job in Columbia. Last year, he and his wife moved again, to Finksburg in Carroll County. Their Dayton rental house was not for sale, and everything else in Howard was too big and expensive.
"We knew we wanted about an acre of land; we knew we wanted a two-car garage," said Bonura, 51. "And my wife wanted a porch - so she got her porch."
The Finksburg house was $259,000, a deal the Bonuras are not seeing in Carroll anymore.
Andrea Thomas, a real estate agent for 13 years, has also found that the price difference between Howard and its neighbors is not what it used to be. She has had people look in Carroll and Frederick and end up settling in Howard after all.
"You might be looking at a swing of $5,000 at the most," she said.
Half of Thomas' business is from people house hopping in Howard. She has moved her family twice since settling in the county 20 years ago - most recently in December, from a house in Ellicott City to a condominium in Columbia's Town Center.
Between the size change and the style change, it was one of those moves where the movers do not have much to do.
"A lot of the stuff had to go," she said.