Timeline: How Philly’s rents have changed from 1968 to today

It can be tough to keep track of Philly’s rental market, with real estate sites that consistently crunch the numbers offering wide-ranging numbers. Take July, for example. Apartment List placed the median rent of a two-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia at $1,160. Adobo said it’s more like $1,565 a month. Axiometrics puts the average rent at $1,498.

No matter what the actual median rent is right now, one thing’s for sure: Renting in Philly doesn’t come cheap these days, with a majority of renters identifying as cost-burdened. And with a majority of new construction in Philly falling on the high end of the market, sky-high rents are becoming the norm.

All this recent talk of rising rents in Philly had us wondering about the state of Philly’s rental market long before real estate sites started tracking it on a monthly basis.

So in earlier this summer, we turned to you, dear Curbed readers, and poised the question: How much was the rent at your first Philly apartment?

Dozens of answers rolled in both in this Open Thread and on Facebook. And we recorded them all here in one handy-dandy timeline, starting from $100 for a University City apartment in 1968(!) to a $1,550 apartment in Washington Square West in 2016.

There’s no science to this compilation of reader’s input, of course, but at the very least the timeline shows how much this city and its neighborhoods have changed. Read ‘em and weep, folks.