King of Prussia now has more renters than homeowners, joining hundreds of major suburbs nationwide

The traditional vision of a suburb was a place with rows of single-family homes with lawns surrounded by white picket fences owned by the people who live there.

But in hundreds of these communities across the country, renters outnumber homeowners. And King of Prussia, home to about 25,000 people, recently joined their ranks, becoming slightly majority renter.

The Montgomery County community was one of 15 major suburbs in the country’s largest metropolitan areas that became majority renter within a five-year span, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by the national rental home listing platform Point2Homes.

Renters lived in roughly 41% of King of Prussia’s homes in 2018, compared to 52% in 2023, the most recent year Census Bureau data are available. The share of renters in the census-designated place crossed the 50% mark in 2022.

The shift speaks to a larger national trend of growing renter populations.

During the last decade, developers have created new neighborhoods of homes as they’ve built up King of Prussia, the commercial hub of Upper Merion Township.

The township is still majority homeowner. But as in municipalities across the Philadelphia region, the share of owners is shrinking while the renter population grows. In Upper Merion, owners lived in about 57% of its homes in 2023. That’s down from about 66% in 2018.

Since around 2017, Upper Merion has added a little more than 4,000 housing units, which include apartments, condominiums, townhouses, and more recently, single-family homes, said Eric Goldstein, president and CEO of King of Prussia District, a nonprofit business improvement district.

“Most, if not all, of the housing developments that have happened since 2017 have occurred within” King of Prussia, Goldstein said.

He described the development of the census-designated place over the last few years as “very diverse.”

» READ MORE: Once ‘sleepy’ King of Prussia is booming with development

“There’s been quite a bit of housing development,” Goldstein said. “But there’s also been quite a bit of retail, restaurant growth,” as well as growth in the number of industrial and medical properties.

Throughout Upper Merion, “we’ve seen a very healthy mix of rental and home ownership,” he said.

“I do think it’s very important to have that mix, so you appeal to a wide range of income distributions and affordability,” he said.

Point2Homes analyzed data for suburbs with at least 10,000 residents that are within the country’s 20 largest metro areas. Of almost 1,500 of these suburbs, 203 have more renters than homeowners.

Locally, these include Lindenwold and Echelon in Camden County, West Chester and Coatesville in Chester County, Norristown in Montgomery County, and Chester in Delaware County. In these places, between 59% and 67% of homes are occupied by renters.

“There is ongoing demand for rental housing for a lot of reasons,” said Andrew Svekla, manager of the Office of Smart Growth at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission.

One reason is the rising cost of home ownership, including increasing home prices and the high up-front costs of buying.

Societal trends also play a part. People are renting longer as they form new households later in life and delay homebuying. Households have gotten smaller. Some choose to rent for the lifestyle.

The Philadelphia region has a growing population of millionaire renters. And seniors are the fastest-growing population of renters in the area.

Developers have built and planned more rental units because of the demand.

From 1980 until around 2017, municipalities in the Pennsylvania collar counties were approving many times more single-family homes than multifamily homes, which also include for-sale condos, according to an analysis by the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission.

In 2018, a bump in multifamily permits to 2,363 narrowed the approval gap to less than 1,000 homes. Not all of the permitted homes were built, but the approvals set the stage for builders to add more rentals in the following years, which grew renter populations.

“As proponents of smart growth,” Svekla said, “we’re generally coming at this from the idea that we should try to provide a broad range of housing options in form and at price points that allow people of different incomes and household sizes and needs to live in every community.”

The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission advocates for municipalities to build compactly and focus their growth on walkable urban centers with existing infrastructure and public transportation.

“We just think that’s a smart way for our region to grow,” Svekla said.

Having a mix of housing options is important to West Whiteland Township, too, said John Weller, the township’s director of planning and zoning. The Chester County township wants to attract residents with good-paying jobs no matter whether they buy or rent, since the township’s principal revenue stream is the earned income tax.

“Property tax is a big chunk, but earned income tax is a bigger chunk,” Weller said.

West Whiteland is in the middle of updating its comprehensive plan, which municipalities use to design their communities and direct future growth.

The township has had “a tremendous amount of residential development” over the last decade, Weller said. A lot of it has been rental homes. So although the township still has more owners than renters, the share of the population who rents is increasing.

Owners lived in 65% of the township’s homes in 2023, down from 72% in 2018, according to Census Bureau data.

West Whiteland is home to a smaller census-designated place, Exton, which is the site of a lot of the township’s development. Renters lived in about 69% of the housing units in the community of almost 6,000 people in 2023, according to Census Bureau data. That’s up from 60% in 2018.

In March, a developer bought the Exton Square Mall with plans to tear down most of it and build 376 rental apartments and 243 for-sale townhouses.

In a news release, the CEO of Abrams Realty & Development, based in Montgomery County, said its proposed mixed-use town center “is not just a redevelopment; it’s the realization of a true town center, designed to enhance quality of life while delivering economic and social benefits to the community.”