From 2000 to 2021, fewer Philadelphia homes sold for $100,000 or less and more sold for $400,000 or more, adjusting for inflation, according to a report by the Pew Charitable Trusts.Philadelphia has stayed a relatively affordable place to buy a home over the last couple of decades when compared to other large cities. But there’s more nuance to the city’s affordability picture than that.
Over that period, the city’s housing market changed as a result of local and national factors, including Philadelphia’s population growth after decades of shrinkage, theand spurred residential construction, the national housing market crash, and years of low mortgage interest rates that attracted new homebuyers.
From 2000 to 2021, Philadelphia gained 25,000 homeowner households that make more than $100,000 per year. It lost 11,000 homeowner households that make less than $50,000 and lost 13,000 that make between $50,000 and $100,000.The price of a median single-family home sold in 2021 was $208,000. But that’s before accounting for differences between investors and traditional homebuyers.
“Investors are really just spending a lot less when buying a home than traditional homebuyers are,” Howell said. And although investors are not necessarily competing with traditional homebuyers because they tend to buy homes in need of a lot of repairs, that investor activity drives down median prices in a given year. That can make homes overall seem more affordable for traditional buyers than they are, Howell said.
The number of households that owned their homes in 2021 was pretty much the same as the number in 2000 — about 350,000. The city’s Black home-owning population was the second largest with about 129,000 households in 2021. But although Philadelphia added a total of roughly 21,000 Black households between 2000 and 2021, the city had about 1,000 fewer home-owning households in 2021 than it did in 2000. So the Black home-ownership rate dropped 5 percentage points to 50% in 2021.