Residential sales of $1 million or more in downtown sections of cities have been growing over the last two years, according to the National Association of Realtors. This New York Times article by Robert Strauss takes an inside look at the trend of affluent baby boomer generation homeowners who are leaving their communities in the suburbs and moving to the big city.
One Riverside is one of several high-end Philadelphia condominium projects either recently completed or in progress, something new for the city. A Drexel University professor, Kevin Gillen, produces a city housing report each quarter, and it said that in 2015’s third quarter, there were 34 sales of more than $1 million – there had never been a quarter with more than 24 before.
While $100 million Manhattan condos are the talk of high-end urban real estate, Philadelphia’s experience is being repeated in a quieter way all over the country, according to figures from the National Association of Realtors. Residential sales of $1 million or more in downtown sections of cities have been 2.2 percent of sales since 2013, compared with 1.8 percent in the 2009-12 period.
Richer people are moving to those downtowns, Dr. Gillen said, to judge from population increases there along with the expansion of expensive residential projects.
Most of these new high-end buyers are coming from the suburbs, developers say. This is a group that loves its mansions and large homes but is finally, not so reluctantly, trading them in for high-end city adventure.
“Things just lined up in the last few years,” said Patrick L. Phillips, the global chief executive of the Urban Land Institute, a research organization in Washington. “The peak of the baby boom is right around 60 and these wealthy folks have a lot of embedded equity in their homes. They have the wherewithal to move into something with space in the city.”
And cities have prepared for people with money, at least in their downtowns, Mr. Phillips said. They have concentrated theaters, arenas, upscale shopping and refurbished or new parks and museums there.
“We see it everywhere from San Francisco to what I call the ’villes: Nashville, Louisville, Asheville – smaller cities as well,” Mr. Phillips said. While lower or middle-income suburban families may not be able to purchase something with enough space or close enough to walk to downtown attractions, the wealthier are diving in.
Ricki Kanter and her husband, Joel, both now in their mid-50s, he a venture capitalist and she a lawyer, raised their three children in what she called “a McMansion in McLean,” in the Virginia suburbs of Washington.
“Once I got over the fiction that my children were moving back, it was time for us to go where we loved and spent three nights a week anyway, the city,” Mrs. Kanter said.
