With residents examining local wares like avant-garde hats and dog clothes, munching on Indian and Mediterranean food and most either toting a puppy, a baby or a beer, one thing became abundantly clear Saturday at the South Silver Spring Block Party: south Silver Spring is not what it used to be.

The neighborhood once associated with industrial warehouses, vacant office buildings and vagrants is now home to new high-rise residential buildings, active streets and young families. It's not the Silver Spring of old and it's not even the new downtown Silver Spring. It's distinctively south Silver Spring, and, for the first time in awhile, that's a good thing.

"This neighborhood, as opposed to the downtown area, is where people who live in Silver Spring and know the area want to come," said David Richards, 29, who lives in the Aurora Condominiums on East West Highway, said from the Hook and Ladder beer garden at the Saturday's third annual block party.

Roughly 1,200 residential units have been recently completed in south Silver Spring, and about 900 more are under construction or will begin occupancy soon, according to data from the Silver Spring Regional Services Center Web site.

Many of the units were renovated from four vacant office buildings, resulting in the Aurora, Eastern Village Co-housing and Gramax Towers, an antiquated office building that was vacant for 15 years before being transformed into affordable housing units in 2002.

Those examples, specifically Gramax Towers, helped jumpstart the area's move from industrial blight, along with a change to Silver Spring's master plan in 2000 that provided more lenient density restrictions in south Silver Spring, said Gary Stith, the former director of the Silver Spring Regional Center. More recently, a zoning text amendment passed in 2007 to increase building heights from 143 feet to 200 feet for developments with ground-floor retail.

And the silver lining of all the vacant buildings and warehouses was that the properties were big enough for larger projects and more comprehensive development, Stith said.

"That's why south Silver Spring has turned around faster than Fenton Village," Stith said, referring to the east Silver Spring neighborhood that has a wide variety of landowners with smaller lots.

Joining the existing high-rise buildings, the recently-opened Veridian Apartments on East West Highway are rapidly filling up, and the neighborhood is awaiting the completion of three residential complexes, the Argent, 1200 East West Highway and the Galaxy.

On Saturday, longtime county residents Councilwoman Nancy Floreen and Impact Silver Spring Executive Director Frankie Blackburn pointed to various points of the skyline and reminisced on how different it once looked. They amicably argued over when exactly the Caldor Department store was transformed to a bustling Discovery Communications office building and when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's offices opened on East West Highway to stimulate local businesses.

"It's a model of how you move out from a dense core" like downtown Silver Spring, "to a neighborhood surrounding it," noted Floreen (D-at large) of Garrett Park.

In 1995 the vacancy rate for office space in all of Silver Spring was 39 percent. About 500,000 square-feet of vacant office space resided in south Silver Spring, which also hosted the crime that often comes with those vacancies, Stith said.

But with new residents come more feet and eyes on the neighborhood's many alleys and side streets, and "when there's people on the streets going places, people feel safer and want to join them," said Kay Weston, who has lived in south Silver Spring since 1980.

While the new residents sparked local business and discouraged crime, most were living in insular high-rises and most were renting. Community involvement didn't come easy, said Evan Glass, president of the South Silver Spring Neighborhood Association.

"Every apartment building is a world unto itself, and you need to establish relationships with them as well," said Glass, 32, who lives in the Aurora. SSSNA, which has a Facebook page and an active blog, encompasses residents west of the Metro/CSX tracks and south of Colesville Road.

But increasing amount of condominiums in the neighborhood has helped, Glass said, because those that own property usually have a greater stake in the community. The association began in 2004 as an e-mail list among residents and only held its first official meeting in 2006, Glass said.

And the nature of the residents – young, liberal-minded parents raising children in a difficult economy and sending them to rapidly crowding public schools – lends some veracity to the neighborhood association's efforts.

"We are sort of hippy parents," said Ginger Baran-Lyons, 26, a Gramax Towers resident who had a 15-month old child strapped tight to her chest and a beer in hand Saturday. "That works better here than it does in places like Bethesda."

Most residents have relished the neighborhood's transformation but it hasn't had all positive effects. The Travelodge and Days Inn hotels at 8040 13th St. have long been ridden with drug use, sexual assault and child prostitution, resulting in 178 arrests stemming from incidents at the hotels between 2005 and May 2008.

Neighborhood staples Mayorga Coffee Factory and Moorenko's Ice Cream both had to apply for county funds in 2007 to make up for losses they said were linked to nearby development. Moorenko's had to close from January to April this year, in part due to a lack of pedestrian access.

"There's definitely a feeling that businesses down here are isolated," said Susan Soorenko, Moorenko's owner, earlier this year.

Both of those problems spawned unique solutions, however.

To combat the hotel crime, SSSNA lobbied the Montgomery County State's Attorney's Office to help them change the management company at the hotels and decrease crime.

To help local businesses, the county Department of Housing and Community Affairs is currently constructing a pedestrian walkway and arterial street between Kennett and East West Highway. That linkage will join the Arts Alley at 8030 Georgia Ave. already in place, which hosts community events and small businesses.

SSSNA has also been involved in the proposed redistricting of Sligo Creek, East Silver Spring and Takoma Park elementary schools, which they say could break up the sense of community that residents are just now finally realizing.

It's a far cry from the days of department stores and deadbeat landowners.

"Now there's people here," Floreen said Saturday as several young children enjoyed some randomly dispersed hula hoops nearby. "Now there's life, now there's youth."