HAGERSTOWN, Md. — More Marylanders chose longer commutes from bigger homes as a population shift from established urban areas to outlying counties continued into 2003, census numbers show.
Southern Maryland, Queen Anne’s County and the areas flanking Baltimore County grew rapidly in the 12 months ending July, while Baltimore city’s population declined, according to estimates released late last week. Howard and Montgomery counties, once the suburban growth leaders, expanded at a slower pace than their outlying neighbors.
Calvert County’s 3.9 percent surge placed it among the 100 fastest-growing counties in the nation. Queen Anne’s and Charles counties also grew at least 3 percent during the year, the Census Bureau reported.
Allegany and Somerset counties lost population, according to the bureau.
The rapid growth since 2000 of largely rural counties raises questions about the effectiveness of policies Gov. Parris N. Glendening initiated in the late 1990s aimed at slowing suburban sprawl, one economist said Friday.
“This is an astonishing result, given the ballyhoo that has surrounded Smart Growth,” said Anirban Basu, an economist with Optimal Solutions Group in Baltimore. “It suggests that Smart Growth doesn’t have as much teeth as we had thought it might; that it has not interrupted this tendency toward sprawl that has been in place now for decades in Maryland.”
Mr. Basu said the numbers suggest that people preferred the larger homes they can afford in outlying areas, even if it meant longer commutes. “People are willing to live with having to drive an extra 15, 20, 25 minutes to work,” he said.
Smart Growth is supposed to retain and attract residents to older communities by discouraging development outside designated areas, but it may be too soon to call the program a failure, Mr. Basu said.
“We know that where growth management has worked, it has worked because there has been a great deal of commitment over the course of decades,” he said. “If Smart Growth is to have a major impact in this state, it will take a decade and a half to two decades of that type of commitment.”
John W. Frece, spokesman for the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland, said the county population estimates tell an incomplete story, because it isn’t clear whether the growth occurred in priority growth areas.
Smart Growth policies bar state support for development outside those areas, but they don’t prohibit building there.
“The real issue is, where is that growth going?” Mr. Frece said. “It isn’t necessarily a bad thing that it’s going to all these counties if it’s going to the right places.”
He said his organization has started working with the Maryland Department of Planning on a set of indicators for measuring the effectiveness of land-use regulation.
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