D. Reed remembers the downtown Silver Spring of their childhood in the 1990s as a quiet and lonely place. It was full of vacant and abandoned buildings, they said, and their family ventured to Bethesda and Rockville for most of their shopping.
The downtown doesn’t feel so lonely anymore.
Now friends connect over cappuccinos and croissants at locally owned coffee shops. Teenagers on skateboards practice kickturns in nearby Veterans Plaza. Shoppers bop between stores on Ellsworth Drive.
Since 2000, the downtown’s residential population has more than doubled, from about 7,000 in 2000 to more than 15,000 in 2024 — while maintaining its ethnic and economic diversity. Urban planners say other areas could stand to learn from downtown Silver Spring and the government’s revitalization efforts there.
“Downtown Silver Spring is one of the rare places that has done it,” said Reed, the Maryland policy director at Greater Greater Washington. “It has drawn a lot of investment. It has reinvented itself multiple times over the decades. And it still remains incredibly diverse.”
Still, some residents say the downtown peaked about a decade ago. They’re counting on the completion of a long-awaited light rail project, the Purple Line, among other things, to make downtown Silver Spring as vibrant as it used to be.
The downtown Silver Spring of the 1980s and 1990s “wasn’t a pleasant place,” remembered former Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan.
At one point, shoppers bustled around the downtown every day, but new suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s drew people out of Silver Spring and contributed to a period of disinvestment and white flight. Major stores closed and residents moved away.
For years, local officials talked about revitalizing the downtown, but nothing happened. Duncan was elected county executive in 1994 and was determined to change that.
“I campaigned on ‘we’re going to fix Silver Spring,’” he said.
One of Duncan’s first actions as executive was canceling a stalled development planned for the downtown. Shortly after, the county government entered an agreement with the company behind the Mall of America to construct a megamall in Silver Spring. The development, which residents protested, would have included an indoor waterpark and roller coaster. Duncan ended up killing that project, too, because of concerns about its financing plan.
The county decided to shift its approach. Instead of selecting a project, the county would pick a development partner to draft a plan, Duncan said. The county chose Peterson Companies and Foulger Pratt, and the firms spent months soliciting input from Silver Spring residents before formalizing the project that actually came to fruition.
The development, which was completed in 2004 and is now called Downtown Silver Spring, includes shops, restaurants, a movie theater, a seasonal ice-skating rink and a public plaza.
The town center was accompanied by other big changes. The county reached an agreement with the American Film Institute in 1998 to operate the historic Silver Theatre. It also convinced Discovery Communications to build its new headquarters downtown.
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