Media and its neighbors are growing slowly. Experts say that ‘doesn’t mean there isn’t demand in Delco.’

The population in the Media area has been growing slowly, with the borough and its neighbors showing a less-than-1% increase between 2023 and 2024. That’s according to the most recent estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. One outlier, Middletown Township, led the pack with a 2% increase, which experts say might be due to two major housing developments that recently opened.

Middletown Township added 344 residents between July 2023 and July 2024, bringing its population to 17,317, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Nether Providence added 104 residents, bringing it to 14,559. Upper Providence added 73 residents, bringing it to 10,937. Swarthmore gained 37 residents, bringing it to 6,596; Media gained 48 residents, bringing it to 5,938; and Rose Valley added five residents, bringing it to 1,020, census estimates show.

Amid stable population trends in greater Media over the last two decades, Middletown Township’s population uptick may seem out of place. Between 2020 and 2024, the township had a nearly 6% growth rate.

The explanation may lie in two long-planned housing developments recently constructed off U.S. Route 1. The Pond’s Edge community added 197 new townhomes and the Franklin Station development at the old Franklin Mint site added 38 single-family homes and 229 townhomes. Both completed construction in 2024.

“These are relatively large development sites that have been in the development pipeline for over a decade — in some cases, closer to two decades,” said Andrew Svekla, manager of the Office of Smart Growth at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission.

Compared to past eras of growth beginning in the 1980s, when development focused on converting open land into residential and commercial uses, recent growth in the township has hinged more on the reimagination of older sites like the Franklin Mint property and the Promenade at Granite Run, a mixed-use development on the former site of the Granite Run Mall.

“We know that post-COVID, all the Pennsylvania suburbs, including Delco, did get a population boost,” said Kevin Gillen, senior research fellow at Drexel University’s Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation, describing a wave of migration out of the city during and immediately after the pandemic.

Between April 2020 and July 2024, Philly’s Pennsylvania-side suburbs gained 60,632 new residents, and its South Jersey suburbs gained 33,656. In the same time frame, the city lost around 30,000 residents. The post-pandemic decline in Philadelphia finally started to rebound in 2024.

While parts of Delaware County like Middletown, Radnor, and Edgmont saw some post-pandemic growth, gains in the county were far slimmer than in neighboring communities in the Philly region, some of which saw up to 8% population increases between 2020 and 2023.

Delaware County is one of the region’s slower-growing counties, said Greg Diebold, a planning data analyst at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission. However, that “doesn’t mean there isn’t demand in Delco,” Diebold said.

Slow growth can be partially attributed to land-use patterns that have left the county building far fewer new homes than its neighbors. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Delaware County issued 371 new residential building permits in 2022. That compares with 2,149 permits in the same year in Montgomery County, 2,244 in Chester County, and 939 in Bucks County.

“Delco remains very supply constrained,” Gillen said.

The Franklin Mint redevelopment was a rare opportunity to create “compact, mixed-use development in close proximity to transit” in the Philadelphia region, where a lot of the land around historic train stations is occupied or difficult to build on, Svekla said.

Diebold said the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission anticipates there will be more development along U.S. Route 1 as Delaware County continues to grow.

Across the region, the primary concern in the suburbs is housing costs, Gillen said.

According to the Zillow Home Value Index, the average home value in the 19063 zip code, which encompasses Media, Elwyn, Garden City, Glen Riddle, and Rose Valley, was $634,685 as of last month. That’s up 2.5% from the year prior. In Swarthmore, the average home value was $458,367 last month, up 2.7% from the prior year.

In Delaware County at-large, home values remained lower, sitting at $365,007 last month. That’s up 1.8% over one year.

Yet Diebold said he anticipates demand will only increase in and around Media as areas like the Main Line become more and more expensive.

“When housing becomes unaffordable, that’s when you start to lose talent,” Gillen said.

“That’s what’s going to keep out the younger generation that you want to attract.”