Homecomings, Hot Streaks & Zoning Fights

Hey everybody, Jarrell here — and yeah, I know this one's landing on a Tuesday instead of Monday. Life happens, the news didn't wait for me, so let's get into it anyway. We're covering the week of October 19 through October 25, and there's a lot to unpack: a Philly homecoming home-buying story that'll hit close to home for anybody who's lived in three cities trying to find one that works, a market report showing the city and the suburbs are basically living in two different housing economies right now, the Sixers looking like a problem in their home opener, and a King of Prussia data center fight that just got a lot more complicated. Let's get into it.

🏘️💰✨ Residential – Listings, Moves & Market Trends

🏡🔑✨ After Two Expensive Cities, Philly Finally Made Homeownership Possible

👉🏾 🏠💰 From D.C. to Seattle to East Falls — one buyer's $343K homecoming

Bree Ross tried to buy a house in D.C. and Seattle first. Didn't happen — not on a paralegal's salary in those markets. Then she moved back to Philly in 2025, and within months she owned a three-bedroom rowhouse in East Falls for $343,000.

Her list wasn't complicated: city living, a couple bedrooms, decent kitchen, some outdoor space, central air if she could get it. The one hard no? Lincoln Drive. "It zigzags, and I hate it," she said. She toured close to ten homes between East Falls and Manayunk before falling for a 1945 end-of-row house with a front porch, original wooden staircase, and archways between rooms — plus a shared-wall rarity that comes with being on the end of the block.

The price had already dropped from $360K to $350K, and she offered $343K. Accepted in a day. Inspection turned up knob-and-tube wiring, which got her a $4,000 sellers credit. A Philly first-time homebuyer program locked her into a 5.3% rate, she put down about $17K, and her mortgage runs around $1,800 a month. This is the kind of deal that doesn't happen in the cities she left — and it's exactly why Philly keeps pulling people back.

💰🏡📊 Top 10 Home Sales in Greater Philly

👉🏾 🏘️💵 Two Devon neighbors cross $2M each, and a Delancey Place resale price rises 25%

Four of the top ten sales for the week ending October 23 came out of Chester County, and two of them sat on the same street in Devon. The top spot: a $3.2 million sale on Buttonwood Road in Berwyn. Philly itself landed two homes on the list.

• 2048 Buttonwood Road, Berwyn — $3.2M

• 404 Chester Road, Devon — $2.63M

• 200 Mine Road, Malvern — $2.4M

• 409 Chester Road, Devon — $2.32M

• 2114 Delancey Place, Philadelphia — $2.15M (sold for $1.72M back in January — a 25% jump in under a year)

• 1255 Horseshoe Trail, Phoenixville — $2.05M

• 716 Clovelly Lane, Devon — $2.05M

• 212 Gaskill Street, Philadelphia — $1.8M

• 1012 Bodine Road, Chester Springs — $1.4M

• 112 Ayrshire Drive, Landenberg — $1.3M

The Delancey Place resale price was 25% above its January sale price.

📉🏙️💼 Philadelphia and Delaware County Home Sales Fell 13.8% in September

👉🏾 📊🏚️ City and suburbs are telling two completely different stories right now

Philly and Delaware County saw the largest drop in closed home sales of any market in the country in September — down 13.8% year over year, according to Redfin. Meanwhile, Montgomery, Chester, and Bucks counties barely moved.

Here's the split: the suburban Philly market is one of only five seller's markets left in the country, with 23% fewer sellers than buyers. The city and Delco flipped that — sellers outnumber buyers by 56%. Median suburban prices rose 5.2% to $508,832. In the combined Philadelphia–Delaware County market, the median sale price rose 0.1% to $279,358. Bright MLS data backs it up: Philly closings dropped 10%, Delco dropped 16%, while Chester rose 9% and Montgomery climbed 4%.

Bright MLS chief economist Lisa Sturtevant pinned it on 7.5% mortgage rates pricing out first-time buyers, while wealthier suburban buyers — often paying cash — keep closing deals. Two very different housing markets, 20 minutes apart.

🎨🎉🌟 Lifestyle & Entertainment – Food, Fun, Festivals & Philly Vibes

🎃🎭🍂 91 Fun Things to Do in Philly This Week & Weekend

👉🏾 🍻🎨 Haunted bars, murals, musicals and cider — Philly's going all in before Halloween

The city's throwing everything it's got at Halloween week, and honestly, you don't have time to hit it all. Here's what's worth your weekend:

• Halloween Pop-Up Bars & Decorated Spots — Through Sat, Oct 31. Frankenstein Putt Putt at Libertee Grounds, The Pumpkin Press at Newsroom Philly, and The Enchanted Nightmare at Craftsman Row Saloon all bring the spooky theming citywide.

• Mural Arts Month Finale — All week through Oct 31, capped by a blowout bash at LOVE Park with art-making, a Halloween photo booth and live DJ sets Saturday.

• Museum of the Philadelphian — Fri-Sun through Nov 1, 454 E. Girard Ave. A tongue-in-cheek micro-museum honoring Philly's "bad behavior" as fans — yes, you can grease a pole.

• Southeast Asian Market in FDR Park — Sat & Sun through Nov 1. Closing Out Celebration with live Khmer, Lao and Vietnamese performances, plus a trick-or-treat party Saturday.

• The Addams Family: The Musical — Final week at Walnut Street Theatre, through Sun, Nov 1.

• The Great Gatsby — At the Academy of Music through Nov 1, part of Ensemble Arts Philly's Broadway Series.

• Philly Cider Week — Through Nov 1, with the Cider Stroll taking over The Headhouse Shambles on Sunday.

• Cookbooks & Convos — Through Nov 7, with dinners at Talula's, Room 310 and High Street featuring James Beard Award winners.

Pick your lane — spooky, artsy or boozy — Philly's got all three covered this week.

🏀🔥🏆 The Sixers Only Have One Ball, and Everybody's Getting Turns

👉🏾 🏀📈 A 29-point comeback in the home opener, powered by all four All-Stars

Down 29 points at home and they still won it. That's the headline from Thursday night against Cleveland, and the way the Sixers got there says more about this team than the final score.

Tyrese Maxey kept them afloat early and dropped 32 points. LeBron James ran the offense like a point guard, cutting the turnover count from 15 in the first half to just two in the second. Joel Embiid finally found his mid-range shot after admitting, "It almost feels like I haven't been healthy in so long that I forgot how to play basketball." And when Embiid checked out in the fourth, Jaylen Brown scored 10 straight points to close it.

Embiid summed it up best: "We have a bunch of talented guys, so, 'Tyrese, just go ahead and do your thing.' 'Me, do my thing.' 'JB, do your thing.'" Two games in, this group is figuring out how to share one basketball — and so far, it's working.

🍩🚚🎃 30 Food Trucks Are Closing Out Pumpkinland at Linvilla

👉🏾 🧁🌽 Federal Donuts, Ike's Crabcakes and 28 more trucks hit Media for one last weekend

Linvilla Orchards is sending off the season with a bang. The Fall Food Truck Frenzy hits Saturday, Nov. 7, and Sunday, Nov. 8, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., rain or shine — free admission, free parking.

Thirty trucks are rolling in, including Federal Donuts, Ike's Crabcakes, Humpty Dumplings, Korea Taqueria and House of Cupcakes, with everything from barbecue to funnel cakes to Thai food filling out the lineup. Ship Bottom Brewery's running the beer garden. Pumpkinland, hayrides, apple blasters, mazes, pony rides and the barnyard stay open too, though some activities cost extra.

If you've been putting off a Delco fall day trip, this is the last call before the orchard flips the calendar to winter.

🏢💼🌟 Commercial – Towers, Deals & Transformations

🧱🏗️✨ Permits Land for Narrow Mixed-Use Build on Ridge Avenue

👉🏾 🏘️🧱 A three-story CMX-2.5 project squeezes into a 1,246-square-foot East Falls lot

Construction permits are out for 4131R Ridge Avenue in East Falls, where Keystone Architecture has drawn up a three-story mixed-use building on a sliver of land tucked beside a US Route 1 exit ramp. Construction costs are listed at $461,700.

The plans call for 755 square feet of ground-floor commercial space and two residential units of about 836 square feet apiece above it. A brick exterior with projecting balconies on the second and third floors, a roof topping out around 37.5 feet, and roughly 331 square feet of open space round out the footprint. The site sits within a CMX-2.5 district, right along a corridor already served by SEPTA's Route 61 bus and the Manayunk/Norristown Line at East Falls Station.

It's a small infill project, but it's the kind of narrow-lot density that's becoming a signature move along Ridge Avenue — squeezing housing and storefronts into spaces most developers would skip past.

🏭➡️🏢 A Converted Mill in Manayunk Just Traded for Nearly $10M

👉🏾 🏢💰 The Yarn Factory Lofts sold after a competitive, multi-round bidding process

The Yarn Factory Lofts at 3715 Main St. just changed hands for $9.9 million, with The HOW Group buying the 50-unit building from Urban Conversions. JLL's Tyler Margraf, who arranged the deal, called it "a light value-add, restore-to-core opportunity" for a buyer that already has scale in the Manayunk submarket.

The building's history tracks Manayunk's broader transformation: a working mill dating back to 1884 that stayed in manufacturing use until 2012, then got converted into apartments. Urban Conversions bought it for $1.9 million in 2014; the property has now sold for $9.9 million. Margraf said the seller fielded multiple rounds of competitive offers, though he didn't disclose how many bidders were involved.

Old mill buildings turning into multifamily plays isn't new for Manayunk, but the price jump on this one is a clean data point for how much that submarket has matured.

🗺️💸📋 Pennsylvania Releases Its Draft Opportunity Zones 2.0 Map

👉🏾 📍🏙️ Philly's footprint shrinks, but Southwest Philly and parts of North Philly gain ground

Pennsylvania has until October 28 to submit its nominations for the second round of the federal Opportunity Zone program, and the draft map released this month shows a noticeably smaller Philly footprint than the first version — a shift driven by federal officials steering the new program toward rural areas.

Some of the moves stand out:

• Southwest Philly gained four new contiguous tracts along Woodland Avenue between 46th and 65th streets — the lone city area to expand.

• Fishtown, Kensington and Brewerytown, all included in OZ 1.0, didn't make this draft.

• North Philly's zone shrank to a tighter cluster near Broad Street, Temple's Amtrak station and the university itself — attorney Brad Molotsky noted schools could use OZ designation to get third-party developers to build off-balance-sheet projects for them.

• Upper Darby and Millbourne, excluded entirely from OZ 1.0, are now included near the 69th Street Transportation Center.

• Just two South Philly tracts remain nominated — Gray's Ferry and Point Breeze — down from four.

OZ 2.0 is permanent in the tax code, unlike the time-limited original, which raises the stakes on which tracts make the final cut. "You don't just want to be aspirational," Molotsky said. "You want to create that as a legacy." The report gives October 28 as Pennsylvania’s deadline to submit its nominations.

🚚🏭📦 Industrial – Warehouses, Logistics & Big Boxes

🏢⚖️🚫 King of Prussia Data Center Developers Pull Their Applications — But the Fight's Not Over

👉🏾 🏭⚠️ MLP Ventures withdraws before a zoning hearing, leaving lawsuits as the next battleground

The proposed 4.5 million-square-foot data center campus in King of Prussia just hit another wall. Developers MLP Ventures and Brian O'Neill withdrew their applications before the Upper Merion Zoning Hearing Board this week, canceling a scheduled Wednesday hearing — but opponents are staying cautious, because the real fight has shifted to court.

The project, five data centers spread across sites on Renaissance Boulevard, drew more than 18,000 petition signatures from residents worried about energy use, water consumption, noise, and property values. Upper Merion's Board of Supervisors rejected all five facilities back in August, arguing the developers hadn't addressed environmental and community impacts under a March ordinance tightening data center rules. The Zoning Hearing Board had already signaled it lacked jurisdiction to hear the developers' appeals before this week's withdrawal.

Now MLP Ventures is pursuing separate lawsuits in Montgomery County court, arguing the township's updated zoning shouldn't apply since their applications were filed just before the ordinance passed — they want the project evaluated as a warehouse use under the old rules. The company also has a smaller, 2 million-square-foot data center campus proposed nearby in Plymouth Township, facing its own local opposition.

This has become bigger than one township dispute — it's shaping up as a test case for how Pennsylvania handles data center zoning statewide, especially with Gov. Shapiro's August executive order requiring local approval before state permits move forward. A Quinnipiac poll this month found 64% of Pennsylvania voters think data centers do more harm than good. Whatever happens in Montgomery County court next could set the tone for every township fighting a similar proposal.

That's episode 62. A buyer who finally got a shot at homeownership after two cities said no, a league where the Sixers somehow have four All-Stars and still only one ball, and a King of Prussia fight that's moved from community meetings to courtrooms. The split between city and suburban housing markets is the thread running through almost everything this week — keep an eye on it, because it's not closing anytime soon.