Nightclub playground. Dining destination. Pub-crawl heaven. Local arts hub.

But more people than ever are calling downtown something else: home.

Young professionals renting new apartments at complexes like Greenway at Fisher Park and CityView at Southside.

Owners of stylishly decorated, half-million-dollar condos in the tower at Center Pointe.

The homeless spending days at Center City Park and the Interactive Resource Center, their nights huddled beneath bridges and in tent camps on the outskirts of downtown.

About 1,750 people are now full-time residents of downtown Greensboro, according to estimates from nonprofit Downtown Greensboro Inc. That’s up from about 1,275 just three years ago and on track to top 2,000 as new apartment buildings open in the next year, DGI officials said.

There are now more than 1,500 housing units downtown, according to DGI — that’s more than twice the number that existed eight years ago.

Current, specific demographic data is hard to come by for the center city itself. Count growth studies among the casualties of budget cuts.

The last comprehensive study in 2009 found that the fastest-growing age groups downtown were between 25-34, followed closely by 18-20 and 35-44.

The residents at new apartment complexes still largely follow that trend, though higher-end condos and apartments appear to be pushing the age range higher.

“Downtown is for everyone right now,” said Erin Jones, the leasing manager and a resident at Greenway at Fisher Park. “People are here now, and more people are coming.”

One of a wave of new apartment complexes, Green way has filled all its 196 units in the year since opening.

“We’re having to turn people away,” Jones said. “There’s a waiting list, but nothing’s coming open soon.”

A new phase will add 70 apartments next year — and people already are clamoring for them.

Greenway’s residents are a mix of graduate and Elon law students, professors at local colleges and universities, and young professionals from companies like Lincoln Financial and VF Corp.

The apartments are a stone’s throw from the Smith Street Diner — a near perfect nexus of the old downtown and the new.

Middle-aged lawyers tuck ties into their shirts during the breakfast rush, before heading to the courthouse. But young hipsters with “Where The Wild Things Are” tattoos eat country ham and giant biscuits right beside them.

DGI has long stressed that such businesses as restaurants, bars and theaters are good for downtown — but a large and diverse mix of full-time residents is needed to secure the center city’s future.

As it grows, becoming a home for both young professionals striking out on their own and suburban refugees, downtown is still — as a home — many things to many people.

A young, urban life

Kristen Jeffers moved downtown a little more than a year ago.

She grew up in Greensboro, but lived off High Point Road in the suburbs until attending N.C. State. Like a lot of people her age in the Great Recession, she moved back home with her parents while getting a graduate degree.

After getting a master’s in public administration at UNCG, she began looking for the first apartment she could call her own.

“I wanted to be where I perceived the action to be in Greensboro,” Jeffers said. “I wanted to feel like I was really in the city — to be close enough to walk to work, to be close to my neighbors, to really feel a sense of community.”

Jeffers, 27, works for a local nonprofit organization and runs a blog called The Black Urbanist, where she writes about New Urbanism — design that creates walkable cities, reclaims disused industrial areas, and promotes mixed-use business and residential building.

She said she felt living downtown — and in the revitalized Southside neighborhood in particular — would put her right in the middle of her interests.

She zeroed in on CityView at Southside, south of the railroad tracks on Elm Street.

CityView already has 360 units with only a handful available. Its second phase, GreenLine, opened this year offering apartments that rent for $1,744 to $2,110 a month. A third phase will offer 79 new units next year.

Jeffers chose one of the more modest — and more affordable — one-bedroom units in an older phase. Still, it was exactly what she was looking for.

“I have a window facing the skyline,” Jeffers said. “I can wake up and see the buildings, the architecture, the trains go by — I really feel like I’m in the city.”

On a good day, Jeffers said, she can walk to the office, come back home just as the day’s cooling off, and have dinner with friends and family at Dame’s Chicken & Waffles, a popular new restaurant that opened around the corner from her apartment last year.

CityView also throws mixers and pool parties for residents and sends them information about new downtown restaurants and night life. The complex has a gym and resident clubhouse with a coffee and tea bar, a billiards area and a video game room.

“It really has that urban neighborhood feeling I was looking for,” Jeffers said.

But now and then, reality intrudes on the cool urban fantasy.

Her one bedroom runs just more than $850 a month, including a $45 fee to rent a washer and dryer because they aren’t provided with every apartment, and there’s no shared laundry room. Electricity, water and cable TV aren’t included. Though Wi-Fi is provided, many residents find the speed too slow and pay for their own higher-speed Internet.

For what she is paying, Jeffers could rent a house in one of the historic neighborhoods about a mile from downtown or a larger apartment, with washer and dryer included, just about anywhere in the city.

“The price points for rentals have really been going up because of the demand, I guess,” Jeffers said.

“They’re really not in line with the average in the rest of the city now.”

She has had to make some sacrifices and trade-offs to live downtown on a nonprofit salary — she goes out to eat less, sees fewer movies.

As far as downtown has come ... it doesn’t quite have everything yet.

“To buy groceries, to buy a lot of things at a price I can afford, I really have to leave downtown and drive,” Jeffers said.

Deep Roots is nice, Jeffers said, but it’s too small and too expensive for many people her age to use as their primary grocery store. For a good pharmacy open later than 6 p.m., she also has to leave downtown.

“I’d really like to see some of these things downtown at a reasonable price,” Jeffers said. “There’s a danger that if they don’t, downtown is just going to be a gilded playground for wealthy people. And it can be more than that. It can be a real neighborhood.”

What kind of neighborhood is one of the central questions of downtown’s renaissance.

As new residents move downtown, they’ve begun to complain about noise from bars and clubs and about rowdy teens and young people downtown. Last month, the City Council imposed a temporary teen curfew after a series of small fights during which a gun was fired. The council also passed a stricter noise ordinance.

With those moves and an increased police presence downtown, Jeffers said she is concerned that many young black people — a large part of the downtown nightlife scene on weekends — are beginning to feel unwelcome.

“People are a lot less likely to walk around downtown if they feel like they’re going to get stopped and asked for ID,” she said. “You want downtown to be safe — and I feel like it is safe. You also want it to be for everybody.”

Escaping the suburbs

Theresa Yon and her husband, Glenn Romano, moved downtown in 2009.

They paid $610,000 for their three-bedroom apartment on the 14th floor at Center Pointe.

You can buy a lot of house for that kind of money in Greensboro. Apartments that expensive were nearly unheard of when the tower opened. But they said it was one of the smartest purchases they have ever made.

Yon, 42, and Romano, 51, lived in a large house in Lake Jeanette for eight years. Yon works as a researcher at the educational company Learning Together. Her husband is an electrical engineer. The two are involved with the Greensboro Symphony Guild and the local Republican Party. In 2010, Yon ran unsuccessfully for a N.C. House of Representatives seat.

The couple had the perfect suburban life, but it began to feel a bit like a cage.

“We had 4,000 square feet and a huge yard with 30 rose bushes,” Yon said. “It was just the two of us and our greyhound Katie. It began to feel like a lot of work to keep it all up.”

When her husband’s parents moved from New York to Greensboro, they were attracted to the Center Pointe luxury apartments that developer Roy Carroll was putting together downtown. Yon and Romano took a look and fell in love, too, buying one of the first available condos.

“It was a big change,” Yon said.

“We have 2,500 square feet now. We’re living in less space, with less stuff, but we love it.”

When they moved in, Yon set about making less more.

“I’ve seen a lot of beautiful homes in Greensboro, like in Irving Park, that have a more traditional Southern look,” Yon said. “I didn’t think that would go very well with an apartment downtown.”

Instead, she went with a more urban, minimalist, midcentury modern design scheme. She got a lot of the apartment’s furniture and decorations from such downtown stores as Area, an upscale furniture shop, and Jules Antiques and Fine Art.

Her husband slowly began converting one of the bedrooms into a soundproof home theater.

“Discovering downtown, all the shops and the restaurants, and making that a real part of our lives, that wouldn’t have happened if we kept living in the suburbs,” Yon said. “We would have come downtown every now and then to go to Undercurrent or the Mellow Mushroom, but we wouldn’t have really lived it.”

Yon said there’s a momentum about downtown, a sense that it’s really becoming the center of the city again. A big piece of that puzzle could be making a downtown performing arts center a reality, she said.

“When downtown Durham did that, it just turned everything around,” Yon said. “I feel like more and more people will come downtown, they’ll see how great it is, and we’ll see more people taking a chance and moving down here, too.”

There have been some growing pains in downtown’s resurgence, Yon acknowledged. She was taking video from her balcony the night in June when a gunshot went off near Center City Park. But Yon said she believes downtown will get through it.

“Downtown is safe,” she said. “But if people keep hearing there are fights and gunshots, there will be a perception that it isn’t. People won’t come.”

Yon suggests the city make one of the vacant buildings downtown into a teen center on Friday and Saturday nights, giving bored teens a safe place to gather.

“Every city has its growing pains,” she said. “But downtown has so much to offer. I think people are really beginning to realize it.”

Struggling in the city

Not everyone lives downtown by design.

David Pigue, 25, lives with his mother, Sharon, in a homeless camp near Yanceyville Street. The Interactive Resource Center off East Washington Street is an anchor, offering him a place to do laundry, take a shower, get mail and search for work.

He never planned on ending up here. Not like this. It just happened.

“I was working at a Marshalls in 2011, and I lost my job,” Pigue said.

Pigue has ADD and ADHD — attention deficit disorders that he has struggled with since childhood. He has taken medication for them most of his life, but when his family lost its health insurance and things got tight, he started going without treatment.

“I couldn’t focus,” he said. “I couldn’t follow directions. I got fired.”

Pigue still is struggling with that attention problem today. He speaks slowly, haltingly, sometimes searching for the right word — but not quite able to find it — as he tells his story. He sometimes gets a little confused about the timeline.

His mother also had trouble finding steady employment. Soon after Pigue was fired, they lost their apartment. They lived with a friend for awhile but eventually ended up at Weaver House, a Greensboro Urban Ministry shelter.

His mother got a room for three months through the Salvation Army, but it didn’t have room for him. Pigue began sleeping on Lee Street and learning from other homeless people about a loose network of homeless camps across the city.

After staying at the home of an Interactive Resource Center employee for a while and working odd jobs when he could find them, he was able to get his own tent.

Living in the camps isn’t easy. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter.

“When it’s really freezing, I pile a bunch of blankets on me at night when I sleep,” Pigue said. “Eventually, I just stop noticing the cold.”

It can be dangerous. Last week, he was walking around with a nasty bacterial infection on his arm. He was having trouble keeping it clean.

Pigue used to get medical care through the HealthServe Community Health Clinic on North Eugene Street, a clinic for the poor funded through Guilford County, Cone Health and private donations. The clinic recently announced it would close after the county and Cone Health cut funding for it.

Like a lot of poor people, Pigue ended up at the emergency room at Moses Cone Hospital for his infection. He got care and antibiotics through his Guilford Community Care Network card, a program administered through the Guilford County Department of Public Health.

His orange-colored care card expires at the end of this month. He will need to reapply for another six-month period.

Pigue doesn’t drink or do drugs. He is clean and clean-shaven. Like many homeless people, he carries a cheap, no-contract mobile phone that’s a vital link for those without a home or office where they can receive calls.

He carries most of his few possessions — some books, some clothes — in two bags he slings over his shoulder. Anyone seeing him walk down the street could easily mistake him for a graduate student on his way to class.

More people may now be calling downtown home, but that hasn’t made it the most welcoming place for the homeless. Benches have been removed over concerns the homeless linger there. In the past few years, police have cracked down on loitering, and panhandling laws have become stricter.

But downtown is good to him, Pigue said.

He spends time at the Greensboro Public Library, where he can read, check email and enjoy air conditioning on hot days. He’s part of a creative writing class at the IRC, where he’s made a lot of friends and the staff is helping him try to get back on track.

He recently was offered work. He’ll be helping college students move into their dorm rooms. The job pays $7.75 an hour and will last only until the end of the fall back-to-college rush.

But Pigue couldn’t be happier about it.

“I was real lucky to be offered a job like that,” he said. “Really, I’m very lucky.”