THE CENTER CITY DISTRICT RECENTLY COMPLETED A COMPREHENSIVE REPORT ON HOUSING TRENDS

The Center City District comprehensive report on Philadelphia’s Greater Center City housing trends found some key trends.

1. Greater Center City (Girard Avenue to Tasker; river to river) and its four adjacent ZIP codes (19130, 19123, 19146, 19147) represent 16.2% of the City’s geography but accounted for 75% of the 5,853 new residential units completed in 2022. Greater Center City alone is 5.8% of the City’s land area and accounted for 48% of new housing units last year. Center City is on a roll. In our last enewsletter we talked about the positive aspects of a city where many residents live where they work. Five thousand additional residential units were under construction at the start of 2023 in Greater Center City.
2. People need housing. The population in the core of Center City increased 54% from 2000 to 2020.  Within extended Center City, the population increased 32% during this same time period.
3. Of the 110,500 housing units in Greater Center City in 2021, 41% were owner-occupied with a higher proportion of homeownership in extended Center City than in Center City proper. At the closing of 2022, there were 13,544 units with active permits in Greater Center City, 48% of the City total. About 5,000 of these are under construction.
4. In the rental market, CoStar, which tracks larger and newer multi-family buildings, the average asking rents for Greater Center City apartments declined 4.3% in 2020, before increasing 8.4% in 2021 and 1.0% in 2022. The number of occupied units declined by 902 in 2020 but swelled to an unprecedented 3,700 in 2022. This occurred even as rents were increasing indicating a sustained demand.
5. Interestingly, Philadelphia has been a national leader for 25 years in converting vacant office and industrial buildings to residential use.