Birmingham’s far-flung suburbs add thousands of new residents as city center shrinks

Across the Birmingham metro area, residents are passing up downtown apartments and short city commutes for quieter lives and more affordable homes in far-flung suburbs.

Even the suburbs in Jefferson County, those closest to the core of the Magic City, are shrinking as cities in Shelby County welcome new residents by the thousands.

“When buyers look at location and proximity to the city, they often want to be in Mountain Brook or Vestavia or Homewood,” said Genny Williams, a realtor in the Birmingham metro. “But they just can’t make those numbers work. So they have to go out further.”

In Mountain Brook, the most expensive city in Jefferson County, the median home value is $764,000, according to census data

The most expensive city in Shelby County is Chelsea with a median home value of $294,500.

“The rates have gone up so high they can’t afford it,” Williams said.

While experts cite a variety of explanations for the population shift, Williams offered another, simple answer for why cities closer to Birmingham are shrinking and those in south Shelby County are growing.

“It’s the only place that has land left,” she said.

Peter Jones, a professor of political science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, agreed.

“For some cities, there just wasn’t the housing supply there,” Jones told AL.com. “As you move farther away from Birmingham, those cities have that housing supply, while suburbs like Homewood, Vestavia, those types of cities don’t necessarily have that same housing supply.”

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Rise of the ‘exurbs’

Census data shows that as cities in Shelby County grew an average of about 6% from 2020 to 2023, their counterparts in Jefferson County shrank by an average of roughly 1%.

In fact, Jefferson County is home to nearly half of the shrinking cities in the state. Nine of the 21 large cities across Alabama that saw a drop in population are in Jefferson County.

The five Shelby County cities – Calera, Helena, Pelham, Alabaster and Chelsea – welcomed roughly 5,700 new residents. Jefferson County lost more than 7,000.

Those numbers are from the latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates released in May and only include the 21 cities in the Birmingham metro area with more than 10,000 residents.

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But that trend is not unique to Birmingham. Research by the U.S. Census Bureau found that across the country, distant suburbs are growing more than those closer to city centers.

After the pandemic, suburbs within 10 miles of the central city did not grow at pre-pandemic rates, while those as far as 60 miles from the heart of the metro did.

Those estimates come from Census Bureau release in May, which unofficially defined the areas as “exurbs,” or cities with “a mix of rural and urban character” that sit roughly 20 to 30 miles outside the central city.

Calera, Pelham, Alabaster, Chelsea and Helena are between 20 and 34 miles outside of Birmingham.

“Exurbs have sometimes been among the most rapidly growing communities,” U.S. Census Bureau demographer Luke Rogers, “but this appears to be even more true now than before the pandemic.”

Jones, the UAB professor, also pointed out that the Covid-19 pandemic “really changed the calculus of where to live.”

“Remote work allowed people to move closer to home and also allowed others to move farther away. Several people lost parents or grandparents. We also know that child care became an issue,” Jones told AL.com. “All these things kind of were working, pushing, pulling, changing how we typically understood migration patterns.”

All these factors, Jones said, allowed people the freedom to live where they wanted and could have contributed to the boom in Birmingham’s outer cities.

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But they could also be choosing suburban Birmingham because those cities have invested more in their public amenities, said Megan LaFrambois, a professor in Auburn University’s community planning program.

Take Alabaster and Pelham for example. Both of the Shelby County cities have spent millions on public school renovations in recent years.

And a subdivision in Chelsea, the metro area’s fastest-growing suburb, will soon double to 2,500 homes. Chelsea Park, being developed by Eddleman Properties, Inc., sits just off U.S. Highway 280,

City officials in Chelsea also added a new fire station on the city’s east end and worked with the county to improve intersections and straighten busy roads, including Highways 39 and 47, AL.com reported last year.

“If you have a lot of growth, your infrastructure and your housing and whatnot have to keep up well accommodated,” LaFrambois said. “I think a lot of communities in the south are kind of trying to meet that demand.”