Chester County has the most new housing in Philly’s Pennsylvania suburbs

Philadelphia’s suburban counties aren’t building housing like they used to, but a couple do more than the rest.

Chester County permitted more housing units over the last four years than any of Philadelphia’s neighboring counties in Pennsylvania. By June, Chester was ahead of the rest again this year. Montgomery County has second highest number of new houses.

But even in Chester County, housing production is down from its historic highs. In the second half of the 1980s, Chester topped 4,000 new homes permitted a year and went over 3,000 periodically in the 1990s and 2000s. During the recent boom, it never approached those amount.

“A big driver of suburban development is the availability of suitable land,” said Brian O’Leary, Chester County’s planning commissioner. “Is the zoning in place that makes sense for a denser development? Is there access to sewer and water infrastructure in particular? There’s not as much suitable land available as there was in the ‘80s or ‘90s.”

O’Leary also noted that as population has increased, there are more residents to oppose new development. Although he says that the primary motivator is traffic concerns, other big factors are attempts to preserve green space, stop sprawl, and manage stormwater runoff. (One of the biggest costs cited by suburban developers is water quality permits, which can add $10,000 to $20,000 per unit to the price of construction.)

The fight to keep Toll Brothers from developing Westtown’s historic Crebilly Farm into 300 large, high-end single-family homes exemplifies the trend. This 332-acre site was for sale and suitable for housing development, but local residents fought the proposal all the way to the Commonwealth Court in Pittsburgh.

“For me, personally, as much as I respect landowners’ rights, what Toll Brothers wanted to come in and do was just so over the top for an area that was already way oversaturated with housing,” said Mindy Rhodes, an activist who helped organize the opposition. “People in the suburbs are waking up, realizing how much open space is just dwindling before their very eyeballs.”

After years of conflict, the township is moving to buy the land to preserve it as green space.

Rhodes says there’s plenty of new housing going up, and it’s in better places, in her opinion. She sees homes being added to already developed areas like Downingtown and Berwyn as opposed to greenfield sites. There are more townhouse developments that maximize land use and new multifamily sites near regional rail hubs.

“The building that’s going on in Chester County today, I feel like it’s been much more thoughtful in the last decade,” Rhodes said.

O’Leary agreed that few large tracts of developable land like Crebilly Farms are left. That’s why Chester County’s planning commission is contemplating actions like incentivizing affordable housing if developers are given permission to build more densely or encouraging accessory dwelling units — think grandma flats or carriage houses — in large homes or on sprawling single-family lots.

The results of policies to encourage more density can be seen in the mixture of units being produced in Chester County, which has shifted somewhat away from detached single-family homes. In the 2010s, more multifamily and townhouse development was permitted than in the 1980s and 1990s.

That’s why Chester County is one of the only high-income housing markets that saw rent growth below the regional average of 2.6% this year. Every other market with lower rent increases was in the city limits, according to a report from CoStar, where multifamily development has been booming to an even greater extent.

But home ownership is a different question. The median home price in Chester County is over $500,000, the priciest in the region. For single-family homes, the median price is closer to $700,000.

“Chester County is just a very desirable place for people to live,” O’Leary said. “One of the problems is that even if you allow townhouses or apartments or small lots singles, it’s still very expensive.”