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This story is part of a series on the changing face of Philadelphia as reflected in the new 2010 census figures.
AFTER SANDER Schlichter finished his anesthesiology residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in 2005, he and his partner, Charlie Burrus, moved from their city apartment to Montgomery County. They wanted a yard where their two dogs could roam free. A swimming pool. And a garden.
Plus, "I like to park," said Burrus, 41, who deplores the lack of parking spots in the city. "And I don't like gunshots. And I was getting tired of hearing about people getting mugged."
Tobylynn Lichtenstein moved out of the city to Montgomery County in 2007 so she could be closer to her daughter's private school on the Main Line.
A single mother and interior designer, she used to drive her daughter, Marquis-Elyse, 11, to and from their Queen Village home to the Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr. "By the time she was in second grade, I was exhausted," the mother said.
Her daughter now attends Welsh Valley Middle School in the Lower Merion School District. "Baldwin's a great school" and "Lower Merion is so amazing," the mother said earlier this week.
They are just a few of the white residents who helped fuel an overall decline of the white population in Philadelphia over the past two decades.
The city's white population dropped by nearly a third, 263,254 people, from 1990 to 2010, representing a larger numerical decrease "than the entire population of Buffalo, N.Y.," according to a report released yesterday by the Pew Charitable Trust's Philadelphia Research Initiative.
Northeast Philadelphia, particularly the lower Northeast, saw a significant drop in whites. The Northeast declined from 92 percent white in 1990 to 58.3 percent white in 2010. At the same time, the black, Hispanic and Asian populations grew.
The Pew report was based on census data from 1990 to 2010 compiled by Michelle Schmitt, project coordinator at Temple University's Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project, who examined the data by ZIP codes.
"In 1990, Philadelphia was a city understood largely in terms of white and black," said the report, authored by Larry Eichel, project director of the Philadelphia Research Initiative.
