Student housing development has exploded in the West Philadelphia neighborhoods surrounding Penn and Drexel over the last several years, and it doesn't seem to be stopping any time soon. Already, the southern blocks of Mantua are littered with new apartment buildings, and we've covered a couple new projects coming to Haverford Avenue in the last couple months. Closer to Lancaster Avenue, we've seen countless projects on the blocks surrounding 40th & Baring, with more on the horizon. And just yesterday, we told you about a new building on the 4600 block of Baltimore Avenue with retail on the first floor and seven apartments above. If there's anything limiting the new construction of student housing in this area, it's a lack of available properties for developers. Enter the new frontier for student housing development, Southwest Philadelphia.
We're not talking Eastwick here, we mean the northernmost edges of Southwest. Already, we've seen some projects around 47th & Woodland, targeting students at University of the Sciences. And we've also seen the occasional project closer to Baltimore Avenue, like the duplex built over the summer at 50th & Pentridge. Speaking of Pentridge Street, when we passed it the other day we noticed that the 5000 block has experienced major changes of late.
Closer to 51st Street, a two-story building is getting an addition. We imagine it'll be a single-family home that's offered for rent.
You can see in the image above that 5023 Pentridge St. is also under construction. This was a vacant lot, but now developers are building a five-unit building. Again, it's a safe bet that the project will be for student housing.
Across the street at 5018-22 Pentridge St., we see a finished product. This was also a vacant lot, but in the last year plus, developers built a 14-unit building. Oddly, they opted to only go up two stories, we do wonder why they went with that design.
As we said, student housing developers are only limited in West Philadelphia by a lack of available land, and Southwest Philadelphia still has a ton of property that's ripe for redevelopment. We expect we'll be spending more and more time in this part of town, as more developers discover that students are happy to live here.