For Whites in Prince George's, a Mirror on Race

Abby Hopper at a Prince George's pool with daughters Madeline, left, and Ellie. The Hoppers moved to the county from a white area of Baltimore. (By Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)

According to census figures, the population of the county held fairly steady between 2000 and 2004, with non-Hispanic whites making up about 25 percent of the population and African Americans accounting for about 63 percent. There is no reliable up-to-date data, however, on demographic changes in specific neighborhoods.

But some real estate agents agree with Estepp's assessment and cite a variety of reasons for the change. There's the promise of new entertainment and development hubs such as the National Harbor along the Potomac, scheduled to open in 2008. More prestigious builders are coming to the county. Prince George's is a close-in county with a highly developed road system, with less gridlock than Montgomery County and Northern Virginia.

And "mainly, a half-million-dollar house in Prince George's is almost double the size they could get in Fairfax and Montgomery County," says Greg Bennett, a Prince George's real estate agent.

Bennett, who is black, said crime and poor public schools remain the largest impediment to attracting affluent residents of all races. But whites are "moving into neighborhoods where their black neighbors are very professional, they want the same things in life, they are the same type of people financially."

Mark Dumais, a white physician at Southern Maryland Hospital Center for seven years, lives in Alexandria and is having a home built in Clinton about a mile from the hospital. Dumais, who is single with no kids, says he could buy a million-dollar town home where he lives now, "whereas in Prince George's County, I can get a wooded acre with a much nicer home, far more upgrades and amenities with far less than that price."

Georgetown law professor Sheryll Cashin calls non-gentrifying whites moving into black communities an "interesting wrinkle" on usual integration patterns. In her book "The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream," Cashin writes that in surveys where non-blacks are asked to choose between a range of neighborhood types, the neighborhoods least preferred are those with large numbers of black people. "Prince George's County is a rare context" where whites, typically in the majority, must develop the ability to be comfortable with difference.

State Del. Ross, Abby Hopper's brother, says he's lived in Prince George's "every day of my life."

"The impressive part of our legacy is as a majority African American county, but there's a contingent of over 200,000 white folks still here and who are moving into this county and want to be part of this multicultural experience."

Estepp sees the county as "absolutely the model for this grand American experiment. . . . I hope that's not sounding too idealistic."

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.