When Angela and Duane Collins house-hunted, they didn't think twice about where. Not that they didn't like the other places they'd lived, but only Catonsville would be home. After all, it's where Angela grew up, and near where Duane was raised.
"We chose it to have the home, the family and the support system that we need," Angela Collins said. "We know what the schools are like - we turned out OK; we know the neighborhood hangouts - we have friends there. We always liked it."
It's not just that her parents, who still live in the Catonsville house where she was raised, can babysit or that they help each other out. Angela recalled her childhood there, down to the time spent with her grandmother, and she wanted to foster that kind of bond between her parents and her daughter Mackenzie, who is now 2.
Lynn and Gary Morningstar watch their granddaughter learn to swim at the YMCA. Lynn Morningstar picks up Mackenzie at day care twice a week for special time together. The Collinses meet friends at restaurants and pubs in which they've dined for years.
"I feel better surrounding myself with all my friends and family than not," said Duane Collins, who lived in neighboring Woodlawn.
Christine Kogok, a Coldwell Banker agent in Ellicott City, said many clients, the Collinses among them, say they want to return home to Catonsville, lured by affordability, safety and a sense of community.
While people initially may say they want to move far from their family and old stomping grounds - relocating for work aside - many end up right back where they started.
Especially where the neighborhood hasn't changed much, those buyers are drawn to places they recall fondly from younger days, agents said. While some buyers seek out towns elsewhere that remind them of where they were raised, others head straight home.
The desire to be closer to family, relatives and friends was the top reason for purchasing a home in a particular area for 5 percent of buyers, according to a 2007 survey by the National Association of Realtors. Generally, buyers don't move all that far from their most recent home to a new one: The median distance was 13 miles.
Patrick Bollinger, who last fall moved from Delaware with his wife, Brooke, said he can't explain why it feels right to be a stone's throw from the Timonium house he grew up in and where his parents still live.
But he fondly recalled a childhood filled with friendly neighbors and a sense of security. Bollinger likes eating at the Michael's restaurant he remembers from his teen years, and he plans to buy an anniversary ring for his wife at Smyth Jewelers, where his parents have long shopped.
"There is something about moving back home, I don't know how to put it, whether it is nostalgia, but there is a certain comfort factor," he said.
Their real estate agent, Trish Denny, of Long & Foster in Bel Air, agreed: "It's kind of that Linus-and-his-blanket thing."
Known as place attachment, such sentiments, particularly in Southern culture, can be potent - a jumble of feelings knotted in a desire to put down roots where family, familiarity, social context and history come together, said Jim McDonell, associate director of the Institute on Family and Neighborhood Life at Clemson University, in Clemson, S.C.
"People really do become very attached in a variety of ways to the place where they grew up. It has a social meaning for them, it even has a physical context. It does, in fact, 'feel' familiar. It's a very evocative sort of experience," he said.
Calling herself a "cheap psychiatrist," Aileen Miller Braverman, an agent with Long & Foster in Towson, said a warm-fuzzy thread has run through her experiences with buyers going home.
"People yearn for comfort. We are in such a computer-age, cold, voice-mail society, but people want comfort," she said. "So maybe they want to go back to where they are comfortable. There is something about familiarity."
Family interdependence - relatives offering to babysit or cuddle a grandchild or children helping an ailing parent - often magnifies the draw.
Allen Codd, a Long & Foster agent in Eldersburg, knew his nephew and his nephew's wife wanted to buy a house in her old Sykesville neighborhood. So he found one for Kelly and Bryan Koslosky and their three children behind her mother's house. A park separates the two backyards. The house is down the road from Kelly's father. And a 20-minute drive from Bryan's parents.
"I already knew the neighborhood, and it is good," said Kelly Koslosky, who wanted to be close to her ailing father as well as her mother. "I love the location, and I love the area." Before they moved in last week, they had decided to settle in a place that they wouldn't want to leave. It took a year to find this house.
The family has been renting not far away, and Kelly Koslosky said she often cooks dinner at her mother's, and they eat there. Now, they won't always need a car to go home.
Donna Norman, Kelly's mother, said that she can watch her grandchildren in the playground from her backyard, and that they can also run between the houses.
Two years ago, Jennifer Fleming bought a house 12 doors away from her parents' home in Bel Air, where she grew up.
Fleming had moved in with her parents after her marriage crumbled. Then, she wanted to keep her three children in the same school district they were in to simplify their transition.
That her parents can watch them, whether so that on a recent Saturday only the child with the medical appointment had to be hustled out the door, or as they play on the same streets she did as a child, is a huge relief.
"It's comforting to know they are there for me," she said.
There are other comforts. She knows people in the neighborhood, former schoolmates and her parents' contemporaries. Fleming said she likes the feeling that her children can play safely in her cul-de-sac and on her parents' dead-end street.
Beth Incorvati, a Long & Foster agent in Bel Air who helped Fleming locate a home, said buyers often speak of what they want in a community for their children. She said clients often tell her they want to "duplicate the feelings they had when they were growing up."
Kathy Brennan wanted her three children to have the "living in summer camp all year long" feelings that she had growing up in the Whitehurst area of Severna Park, with its waterfront pool, pier and clubhouse.
The neighborhood boasts several families that returned, or whose children returned, or whose siblings moved in.
Brennan went beyond that. She not only returned from Pennsylvania to the old neighborhood, but she also bought her childhood home from her mother.
"I can't imagine leaving this house for good," she said.
andrea.siegel@baltsun.com