One Maryland city is offering up to $20,000 to individuals looking to make a move. The city’s mayor says a “loss of population” prompted a financial relocation program, but a look beyond the Benjamins reveals a regional pattern that the cash is trying to combat.
Cumberland, at one time the second largest city in Maryland thanks to the railroad at the turn of the 20th century, had 29 factories and mills. Now, many of the city’s original industries have closed and the “Queen City,” once behind only Baltimore in the state in terms of population, has fewer residents than it did in 1910.
“We have an infrastructure within the city that’s capable of handling 40,000 residents,” said Cumberland Mayor Ray Morriss, in a phone interview, “and we at this time are looking at ways of bringing people back out to Western Maryland.”
The population of the nestled-in-the-mountains city peaked as industry expanded during World War II with 39,483 people in 1940, according to United States Census Bureau data. Figures from the bureau last year estimate less than 19,000 live in Cumberland currently.
The issue, if you look at it, is all up and down, about 300 miles off the coast, when you get into Appalachia, said Morriss, calling the region the “Backbone of the East Coast.” “The same type of history has gone all the way up and down — from Georgia through Tennessee, Kentucky, southern West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania. The same lack of industries.”
“We understand that it’ll probably never come back exactly the way it was before,” says Morriss, of Cumberland, but that has not stopped city officials from considering the community’s future. And that is where the new “Choose Cumberland Relocation Package Program” comes into play.
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Former Salisbury Mayor Day commends Cumberland relocation program
The pilot program is initially offered just to 10 home buyers.
“We would love for it to be young families,” Morriss said.
The program’s only eligibility requirements, however, are that an applicant must be 18 or older, eligible to work in the U.S., from outside Allegany County (where Cumberland is the county seat), have employment and be able to move to the city within six months, among a few other things.
The up to $20,000 comes in two parts. $10,000 is in relocation cash, and there there is up to $10,000 in dollar for dollar match on “approved renovations on an existing home, or for a downpayment on a newly constructed home,” according to the city’s application eligibility requirements.
“It’s something that, if it goes well, that we’re able to continue in the future,” Morriss said. The mayor indicated that half of the total funding ($100,000) for the pilot came from the city and half through the state of Maryland’s Department of Housing and Community Development.
That department’s secretary, Jake Day, a former mayor of Salisbury, called the new initiative “a great example of how communities can be thoughtful and creative in the work of addressing our state’s housing and economic development challenges.”
He indicated in an Aug. 30 email that the state’s portion of the effort is funded through the department’s Community Legacy grant program, which was created in 2002 and aims to strengthen communities through reinvestment and revitalization.
“Not only does this program support Cumberland’s economic growth, but it also supports the preservation of its much-needed existing housing stock,” Day said.
The secretary said late last year the state was short a total of at least 96,000 housing units.
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Applications being accepted until Tuesday for relocation program
In addition to the cash consideration for out-of-towners, Cumberland’s Mayor Morriss highlighted the city’s property improvement program for local low-income residents.
“I just wanted to point out that we also have programs in place to help local residents,” said Morriss, calling Cumberland a “diverse, family-friendly, small-town community.”
He also highlighted the city’s “great arts community,” with the Allegany Arts Council and the Cumberland Theatre, as well as the Embassy Theatre.
The Western Maryland Railway Station sits downtown near the C&O Canal Towpath and the northern branch of the Potomac River. Outdoor recreation is another draw, the mayor says.
“A lot of people saw after covid with the remote job possibilities that this could be a place that they could come out and enjoy, quite frankly, a lifestyle a little different from the major metropolitan areas,” Morriss said.
Critical to those remote job possibilities has been expanded broadband. A ribbon cutting for the downtown business district, a “new, revitalized Baltimore Street,” is set for Nov. 14, the mayor said. All of the buildings in the downtown area are equipped with broadband, he indicated.
But the precipitating pull to Cumberland this week wasn’t the arts, the outdoors or the broadband; it was the cash. As of a Aug. 29 phone interview, the mayor said there had been “several hundred inquiries into the program,” mostly from the Baltimore and D.C. suburbs, with some from Northern Virginia. The vast majority of inquiries, he said, have come from Maryland.
The furthest one Morriss said he heard about so far was an application from Georgia.
“City officials will accept applications until Tuesday,” the Cumberland Times-News reported.
More information can be found online at: https://www.ci.cumberland.md.us/1787/Choose-Cumberland-Relocation-Program.
“We didn’t need to put out a big marketing plan for this,” Cumberland’s Mayor Morriss said. “It came very naturally.”
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Dwight A. Weingarten is an investigative reporter, covering the Maryland State House and state issues. He can be reached at dweingarten@gannett.com or on Twitter at @DwightWeingart2.
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Publish date : 2024-08-30 07:56:00
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