Philadelphia's suburbs used to have the most housing under construction in the region. Now building is mostly happening in the city. The suburban housing crunch is caused by a shortage of land, campaigns to preserve green space, and a powerful antidevelopment sentiment among incumbent homeowners, say suburban builders and county officials. Those housing pressures are keeping more families in Philadelphia longer. Many of the city’s new homes come in the form of rental apartments, which is why rents in Philadelphia’s most desirable neighborhoods are rising less quickly than their suburban counterparts. The city permitted almost as much new housing in 2023 as Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties combined. It’s a paradigm shift from the 1980s and 1990s, when almost all regional housing construction was concentrated in suburban counties as deindustrialization and rising crime sapped the city’s economy and drove away residents. In 1992, just 250 new units of housing received permits in all of Philadelphia, the lowest number on record in federal permitting data stretching back to 1980. That same year, nearly every suburban county was planning at least a thousand new housing units, and some more double that. The suburbs are still in high demand, but developers aren’t building at the same pace. Between 2019 and mid-2023, Philadelphia green-lit well over 35,000 multifamily units, thanks in large part to a speculative rush to lock in tens of thousands of building permits before the city reduced benefits tied to its 10-year tax abatement on new construction in 2021. Over the same period, its four suburban Pennsylvania counties together permitted just 6,500 new multifamily units. Read more here.
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer; 8/8/2023