Max Green’s childhood in Cumberland was filled with constant reminders of those who’d already left. The abandoned Footer’s Dye Works factory. The shuttered storefronts along Baltimore Street. The dozens of vacant Victorian homes downtown.

Green and his friends grew up hearing a steady refrain from their parents and teachers: “There are no jobs here.” After high school, he watched as peers planned their escapes to Baltimore, Washington or Pittsburgh. Green eventually made his move, too, once he’d graduated from a nearby college in 2013. He settled in Baltimore’s Greektown, took a job as a technology project manager for the U.S. Senate and started a family.

“You don’t want to be like everyone else who leaves Cumberland,” Green said, “but sometimes push comes to shove.”

But when Green’s job went fully remote in 2022, returning to Cumberland — once a far-fetched, almost nostalgic, idea — suddenly became a viable option.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed how white-collar industries think about how often, if ever, workers need to be in the office. That, in turn, has boosted the vitality of some long-beleagured towns and communities far from dense urban areas. Cumberland is one of them.

The ‘Queen City’ of Maryland

Long ago, the Western Maryland mountain town was a thriving industrial hub, dubbed Maryland’s “Queen City,” with a population second only to Baltimore’s. Beginning in the 1970s, the town slowly unraveled as cheaper labor and lower production costs lured manufacturing plants away. Today, its population is around 19,000.

“You know, this is Appalachia,” Cumberland Mayor Ray Morriss said. “A lot of people in the state of Maryland don’t really think about it in that way, but having grown up in Eastern Kentucky, I can say that is exactly what it is.”

And in Appalachia, he continued, where you live dictated what you did for work. In Cumberland, that once meant jobs in the mines, glass factories and tire plants. But unlike in bigger cities, when employers began to leave Cumberland, there weren’t developers lining up to build on its hilly land or tech companies looking to set up a headquarters.

Without new opportunities countering the losses, he said, when the last major manufacturer, Kelly-Springfield Tire Co., left Cumberland in 1987, it felt like a death knell.

A little over a generation later, remote work became a new norm that, for many, took location completely out of the equation.

“For COVID, our silver lining was people came out,” Morriss said. “People wanted to get away — whether they were people who had been here before or they were people who just wanted to get out and go someplace.”

A rise in transplants

The pandemic’s shift to remote work brought hundreds of families to Cumberland, drawn by its abundance of outdoor recreation and charming, affordable homes. The influx of new residents coincided with a wave of new local businesses and efforts to revitalize Cumberland’s historic downtown, leaving community leaders hopeful the city can reclaim its prominence.

The National Association of Realtors ranked Cumberland among the fastest-growing housing markets in the country for 2024, with the median home price rising to approximately $140,000, compared to $110,000 in 2019. In Baltimore, the median home price is around $240,000, according to real estate brokerage Redfin.

Nearby Frederick, another charm-filled Western Maryland town, has experienced an even larger post-pandemic boom than Cumberland. Frederick is far closer to Washington and Baltimore and had begun shoring up its historic downtown years ago. Since 2020, its housing prices have surged over 30%.

The changes in Cumberland have also brought new challenges.

The rise in transplants has helped spur a housing crisis in the small town — slashing the available housing stock and driving prices sharply upward. And, in the short term, downtown renovations have strained some local businesses amid disruptive construction, forcing some to turn to crowdfunding to stay afloat.

Local real estate agent Ally Litten said she has noticed more out-of-town interest in Cumberland since 2017, with a significant uptick since the pandemic. Transplant clients, she said, often offer cash after selling their more expensive homes elsewhere. That’s exactly what the Green family did.

After selling their Baltimore rowhome, Green and his wife, Jessie — also a Cumberland native — bought a spacious craftsman fixer-upper just outside downtown. Their new mortgage cost less than their old city taxes, Green said, and their more affordable lifestyle enabled Jessie to stop working full time after they had their second child in April 2023.

Green now works from a home office in a shed he built in the backyard. Most days after work he bikes the Great Allegheny Passage trail with his kids, and he spends the evenings and weekends visiting nearby grandparents and cousins.

The rise in transplants has sparked some skepticism among locals, according to Litten, a Cumberland native herself. They wonder if Cumberland is on the verge of a boom that would push them aside. However, she said, so far the interest has been copacetic, as newcomers tend to favor properties near downtown, while longtime residents generally prefer homes in more rural areas.

Opportunity in Cumberland

Drew Knippenberg spent about a decade traveling the world as a defense contractor before deciding in 2019 to return to his hometown and invest in an abandoned office building downtown.

After making extensive renovations, dealing with a termite infestation and switching up his business plan, Knippenberg opened the restaurant Centre Street Collective in June 2022. It sports black walls covered with murals of Cumberland and glowing neon signs throughout. “This must be the place,” one reads.

The menu of Centre Street Collective features locally sourced ingredients and dishes inspired by Knippenberg’s travels. It has quickly become one of the top dining destinations in Cumberland, according to Tripadvisor and Yelp. Knippenberg said the property also has increased in value in the roughly five years since he purchased it.

“There’s such opportunity in Cumberland, and if I had endless money, there would be so many other buildings I would buy,” Knippenberg said.

Dozens of other new businesses have popped up downtown since the pandemic, including a med spa, an outdoor equipment store and coffee shops, according to Allegany County Chamber of Commerce President Juli McCoy. In 2019, McCoy said, some streets were filled with vacant buildings. Now just a handful of buildings remain empty.

The unexpected post-pandemic boost in downtown residents is coinciding with the fruits of city planning that began a decade ago. Seeking to revitalize the local economy and replace century-old infrastructure, Cumberland leaders made plans in 2014 to renovate the city center. With the state-funded nonprofit Cumberland Economic Development Corp. leading the effort, the city ultimately secured a patchwork of grants to fund the $16.5 million project.

When construction began in April 2023, the nonprofit’s executive director, Matt Miller, said it was a fact-finding mission. The old City Hall burned down in the early 1900s, he explained, and the city lost blueprints for the town’s underground infrastructure, some of which was still in use.

“We didn’t know what we were digging into,” Miller said. “If they dug and hit a main, there were times we literally had to wait to see who complained.”

And it was often local downtown businesses that did. With road closures, water outages and loss of restaurant seating from the construction, some have been struggling, according to McCoy, the Chamber of Commerce head. Several have sought support through crowdfunding to offset their losses from the construction.

In January 2024, after more than two decades in Cumberland, Baltimore Street Grill owners posted on social media asking for financial support due to the construction. The Cumberland Times-News reported that the local community stepped up, with plumbers and bakers waiving costs for the business and locals hiring the restaurant for catering events.

Knippenberg said Centre Street Collective has yet to turn a profit since it opened; he blames that in part on the construction. Yet, as a building owner, he considers the downtown renovation a net positive for his property value and the future of his restaurant.

“The infrastructure absolutely needed to be redone,” Knippenberg said. “It’s just that the project itself is very intrusive to local foot traffic and businesses, but there’s light at the tunnel. We’ll all be very happy when it’s over, to say the least.”

The construction is scheduled to be completed by November, a timeline that local officials hope will help address another pressing concern: Cumberland’s shrinking housing market.

Unlocking Cumberland’s potential

Before the pandemic, real estate agent Litten said, the town’s available housing stock rested around 300 homes at a time. Now, that number has plummeted to 150, driving up prices.

“And the disappointing thing about Cumberland real estate is we just don’t have a lot of new construction and updated homes,” Litten said. “It’s a very old, outdated real estate market.”

Because of its mountainous geography, Cumberland has struggled to attract housing developers for new construction, a common problem for Appalachian towns. But, according to Miller, the downtown renovations will help expand the housing market without requiring new builds.

With the redone water infrastructure, he said, most office buildings will have an up-to-date fire suppression system, enabling them to open their second and third floors for residential apartments in downtown. Many of those floors have sat empty for years.

Few know the challenge of attracting contractors to Cumberland better than Max Green.

After many failed attempts to hire builders for his new home, Green decided to renovate it himself. Word of his skills spread, and quickly he found himself helping neighbors with everything from putting up drywall to installing plumbing.

What began as a personal project soon turned into something more. After $2,000 worth of tools were stolen from Green — an issue he would have taken straight to his old Baltimore neighborhood association — he decided to create the West Side Neighborhood Association in Cumberland. The group now holds monthly meetings, organizes street cleanups and is working to create a community garden.

He also joined the county’s Local Advisory Council for Career and Technical Education, a group that aims to attract more jobs and training opportunities to Cumberland. And he is running for the Allegany County Board of Education, campaigning to expand access to Advanced Placement and early college courses in local schools.

Why take on all these roles?

“I feel like my kids shouldn’t feel like where they live limits the opportunities that they have.” Green said. “I felt that way.”

For Green, it’s not just about living in Cumberland again — it’s about staying for good.

Baltimore Banner data reporter Ramsey Archibald contributed to this story.