Posted Feb 27, 2024, 4:09 PM
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Chris
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Join Date: Aug 2020
Location: Earth
Posts: 2,142
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Center City gets a flood of new apartments, and a population to match
https://www.bizjournals.com/philadel...ng-supply.html
The population of Greater Center City — defined as the area from Girard Avenue to Tasker Street between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers — increased by 26% to 188,741 between 2011 and 2022, according to U.S. Census Bureau data compiled by Center City District. During that same time period, the number of housing units downtown increased by 24%.
In the past four years alone, Greater Center City’s residential population has increased by 3% as development of new housing has accelerated with 7,429 units built since 2021.
Another 7,181 housing units are in the works, according to Center City District, providing room for the downtown population to keep growing. The combination of low interest rates and the scaling back of the city’s 10-year tax abatement for new development at the end of 2021 led to the unprecedented boom in new multifamily projects. The surging supply of apartments puts Philadelphia in uncharted territory and raises the question of how all the new housing in Center City will be filled.
From 2021 to 2023, 53% of people moving into Greater Center City came from elsewhere in Pennsylvania, according to anonymized cell phone data from Placer.ai. The next most common states people relocated from were New York (15%), Florida (8%) and Delaware (6%).
While it’s uncertain if Greater Center City’s population will keep rising to match the next wave of more than 7,000 housing units, the construction slowdown that is expected to follow should give it time to catch up if needed. Developers accelerated existing projects to take advantage of the expiring 10-year tax abatement, leading to the current construction boom, but high interest rates have since forced many new projects to be delayed or abandoned.
“A lot of apartment developers and investors aren’t seeing projects pencil out,” Randall said. “This idea of 7,000 in the pipeline, 7,000 more on the way, that doesn’t mean there’s another 7,000 behind that. There’s going to be a period of 12 to 24 to 36 months I would guess where we’re really going to see the pipeline of projects slow down. I think that just builds in the time for us to play catch-up if in fact we have to.”
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