I almost ignored this one, but I just can’t: the photo is just too, too funny!
Philly transplants have over $150,000 more to spend on homes than locals — and it’s driving up home prices
The migration of home buyers from more expensive cities to Philadelphia helps drive up prices across the market.
by Michaelle Bond | Thursday, August 4, 2022
For-sale sign outside a home in the Frankford section of Philadelphia in December 2021. The average person moving into Philadelphia has more money to spend on a house than a Philadelphian does, according to a Redfin analysis. | Alejandro A Alverez, Philadelphia Inquirer staff photographer. Click to enlarge.
Philadelphia may be an affordable big city compared to others on the East Coast and across the country — a draw for new residents — but that’s little comfort to locals who have watched prices rise.In the first half of 2022, people looking to move into Philadelphia searched for houses with a maximum price of $588,000 on average, according to the online brokerage Redfin’s analysis of searches on its website. Locals capped their searches much lower at $422,000.
As home prices continue to climb, people moving largely from more expensive cities have an advantage with an average of 39% more to spend. That, in turn, helps push up prices across the market.
There’s much more at the original.
I do not normally reproduce photos from The Philadelphia Inquirer, but this one struck me as hysterically funny. A reasonably well-researched article about how prices in Philly are lower than in places like New York City and the left coast, the Inky illustrated it with a photo of a home for sale, in which the property owners had effectively put themselves in jail, installing metal bars and a door on the front porch of their rowhome in the Frankford neighborhood, to keep the bad guys out of their property. I have noted this in some bad Philadelphia areas several times.
From The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 16, 2021. Click to enlarge.
In an article noting that there are 57 city blocks where 10 or more people have been shot since 2015, the Inquirer included a graph showing the Kensington area as the worst, Frankford is also included as a not-so-great place. I do not know if the article author, Michaelle Bond, “an urbanism writer covering how people live in their homes, how the market directs choices, and how policies shape communities,” is the one who selected the photo with the article, but whoever picked it could not have done a much better job of turning off people on the idea of moving to the City of Brotherly Love.
Nice iron-work, but I still would go with something similar on the windows. And, maybe, steel shutters.
There are a lot of Philadelphia homes — and not all in the Badlands — with steel bars on the first floor windows, but the jailed-in porch is a Badlands look on rowhouses which have porches.
I wouldn’t buy that place. You’ll never get a machine gun with an attached shield to properly mount anywhere on that mess, though I suppose you could hang some claymores from it, but those are one-and-dones, so follow-up human wave assaults will probably get through.