Collegedale Mayor Katie Lamb came to Southern Adventist College to teach nursing 44 years ago when the city of Collegedale, true to its name, was a small college town that was home to McKee Baking Co. and only a few thousand year-round residents.
"Four Corners (at the intersection of Ooltewah-Ringgold Road and Apison Pike) was still farmland, and there was hardly any traffic except when the bakery changed shifts," recalled Lamb, who retired as Southern's dean of nursing a decade ago.
But as Southern grew into a full-scale university, McKee Foods became America's biggest privately owned bakery and Hamilton County's population has shifted to the east, Collegedale has emerged as the fastest growing city in the Chattanooga region. Collegedale's population has doubled since 1990 and grew nearly 30 percent from the last official census in 2010 through last year, according to new population estimates released by the U.S. Bureau of Census.
With the opening of nearly 500 more apartments this year and the new four-lane Apison Pike extension to Interstate 75, Collegedale is poised to overtake Red Bank to become Hamilton County's fourth biggest city by the next official census count in 2020.
While Collegedale boasts the fastest population growth rate, its neighboring and bigger municipalities around it also grew faster than the rest of Tennessee in the past five years. The city of Chattanooga, which lost more than 10 percent of its population in the 1980s, rebounded to regain all of that loss and then some and grew 5.3 percent from 2010 to 2015 - easily outpacing Tennessee's overall population gain of 4 percent in the same period.
Even older suburban cities in Hamilton County that had lost population in the 1980s and 1990s, such as East Ridge, Red Bank and Lookout Mountain, Tenn., showed modest gains in the first half of the current decade.
William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C., said increasing numbers of young people are delaying or foregoing marriage and childbirth, and a bigger share of both young people and empty-nesters are deciding to live in the city rather than move to more open spaces in rural America.
Frey is cautious about predicting the end of America's "long-term suburbanization." But Fry has written that the move to cities "could be the new normal."
"Young people are not going to make that plunge to a suburban house because they think there's risk to it," Fry said. "And on top of that, they can't afford the down payment."
Even in places like Collegedale that have long been bedroom communities with predominantly single family homes, the apartment boom is taking hold. In the rolling fields along Little Debbie Parkway, a $19 million, 278-unit luxury apartment complex called Integra Hills opened in 2013. Last year, the 248-unit Village at Apison Pike opened and is already 70 percent leased. Later this year, the similarly sized Hawthorne at the Summit is scheduled to open next door along the recently widened Apison Pike.
Mayor Lamb credits much of the growth to the addition of the Volkswagen assembly plant in Chattanooga and other related automotive and distribution facilities at the Enterprise South Industrial Park only a few miles from Collegedale.
"I think with Volkswagen and all of the other industrial growth that we have seen in this part of the county, a lot of developers and residents are looking for places to live and do business in the eastern part of our county, and they are finding Collegedale to be an ideal, family-oriented town to locate in," she said. "All of this development has caused some growing pains for the city, but I think we've been able to handle that growth well with our police, fire, parks and other services. When we realized Volkwagen was coming, we tried to plan for this growth by looking at what happened in towns like Spartanburg, S.C., when BMW located there. I think that helped prepare us for the changes we are now seeing."