For 600 bucks, you could pay a semester’s tuition at UPenn. At Temple, your bill would run to $260.
In 1950, a new VW Beetle cost $1,280 — which was a lot of dough, given that the city’s median household income was just $2,869 at the time. That’s equivalent to about $37,000 in today’s dollars.
Philadelphia was a very different place three-quarters of a century ago, and not just in the cost of living.
As part of the Pew Charitable Trust’s annual look at the State of the City, the Center City-based research institute — which is itself 75 years old — pulled some striking numbers out of its yearly report to illustrate how much Philly has changed over the years.
Some of the data are familiar, and very bad, like a skyrocketing homicide rate over the decades that reached a record 561 people reported murdered in 2021.
Others are very welcome and perhaps less well-known, including a big increase in homeownership by Black residents and other people of color.
Here’s a look at a few of the ways that the city has evolved over the years.
Fewer Philadelphians overall
The pandemic and switch to remote work seem to have dented the city’s population slightly, but that’s a minor and possibly fleeting dip compared to the big outflow of people in the second half of the 20th century.
Across the country, the growth of suburbs, highway construction and de-industrialization pulled people out of urban centers starting in the 1950s. Philly hit a high of close to 2.1 million residents in 1950 before beginning a slide that really accelerated in the 1970s.
The population bottomed out at 1.52 million in 2000 before beginning a slight climb to 1.58 million in 2020. Philly lost about 22,000 residents from 2021 to 2022 — the biggest single-year decline since 1977 — but the significance of that figure isn’t clear yet, according to Pew project director Katie Martin.
“We just have too few years of data at this point to say that this is a definitive trend,” she told the Inquirer last year, when the data was released.
A transformation in diversity
More than 80% of Philadelphians were white back in 1950, according to U.S. Census data cited by Pew.
How many were members of other racial groups isn’t totally clear, in part because the Census Bureau only had two options in its surveys back then: white and non-white. Census takers also made the choice, rather than the respondent, and may have made mistakes, Pew says.
The bureau has greatly refined its systems since then and allows people to self-identify by race and ethnicity.
About 3 in 10 Philadelphians now identify as non-Hispanic white, while 39% say they’re Black or African American. Another 16% are Hispanic or Latino, 8% Asian, and 5% are in other racial or ethnic groups, per 2022 data.
(For the record, the city’s Black community grew dramatically in the middle of the 20th century, from 12.5% of the population in 1940 to 26.3% in 1960, according to one analysis of historical data.)
Privet, tovarish (Greetings, comrade)
After World War II, hundreds of thousands of Europeans fled the devastated continent and made new homes in the U.S.
By 1950, the largest group of foreign-born Philadelphia residents were from what was then the Soviet Union. They numbered close to 54,000, or a bit less than a quarter of all foreign-born residents.
They were followed by about 49,000 from Italy, 24,000 from Ireland, and large contingents from Poland, Germany, and England and Wales.
Immigrants from Asia and South and Central America weren’t even in the top 10, but that changed over the years.
In 2021 people from China, excluding Hong Kong and Taiwan, headed the list at close to 24,000, or 10% of all foreign-born residents. Next are those from the Dominican Republic at about 20,000, from India at 12,500, and from Vietnam (11,700) and Jamaica (11,000).
The total number of foreign-born residents is nearly the same as in 1950, at around 230,000. But according to Pew, Philadelphia was considered a low-immigration city back then, and now has a fairly high share of foreign-born residents compared to the U.S. overall.
Scholars say people are drawn here because of the availability of jobs, expanded networks of expatriates, local efforts to attract immigrants, and federal policies allowing more immigration, per the Pew report
A big rise in Black homeownership
Given the city’s makeup in 1950, most homeowners were white. Only 8.9% of owner-occupied homes belonged to people of color.
Now, 42% of those homes belong to white residents, 36% to Black Philadelphians, 11% to Hispanic residents, and 8% to Asian residents, per Census data.
The numbers cited by Pew refer to the percent of total owner-occupied homes in the city that are owned by people from each racial group. Another oft-cited measurement looks at how many people within a group own their homes.
Philadelphia has long ranked near the top for the percentage of Black residents who are homeowners. While it’s down from a high of 57% in the 1990s, it still stands at about 47%, one of the highest rates among big U.S. cities.
A city of brainiacs
Another big change occurred in levels of education. Around 75 years ago, the median number of years of schooling was just nine years in Philly, as the Census found when it surveyed people age 25 or older.
Now, only 5% of residents have less than a ninth grade education, per Pew. More than 36% of people 25 and older have bachelor’s degrees — the highest percentage on record and, for the first time, higher than the national rate of 35%.
From cowboy hats to eds and meds
Here are a few more salient figures from the world of 1950:
• The median home value was $7,009 and the gross median rent was $36.42 per month. In 2022, the home value figure was $237,900 and rent number $1,281 per month.
• About 45% of jobs were in the manufacturing sector. That included John B. Stetson, one of the largest makers of cowboy hats, which had more than a million square feet of factory space in North Philly. Stetson closed in 1971, and manufacturing now represents 3% of jobs. The largest sectors are education, medicine, and professional and business services.
• In 1960, the oldest year for which Philadelphia Police Department data is available, there were 150 homicides. The number fell as low as 124 in 1962 before rising sharply in the 1970s. Pew did not provide crime rates, but according to a Billy Penn analysis, there were approximately 7.5 homicides per 100,000 residents in 1960, 35.6 in 2021, and 26.2 in 2023.
