The Three-Block School Premium of $100K

I live in 19130, in Fairmount and Spring Garden, the part of Philadelphia that sits about ten minutes east of the art museum and twenty minutes north of City Hall on foot. My address is zoned for Laura Wheeler Waring Elementary, which the district is closing. Waring was a chronically under-enrolled school (enrollment had fallen below 200), and on April 30, 2026 the School District of Philadelphia’s Board adopted its Facilities Master Plan 6-3 to close it and reassign its students to Bache-Martin, which sits about three blocks west. Because of chronic under-enrollment and resourcing at Waring, many people in Fairmount apply through the district's school selection process to enroll at Bache-Martin, which is a decent but not top-tier public school (note that my son will probably be attending there in a few years, so I say this with eyes wide open). That's not a critique, as many Philly public schools are merely ok by state or national standards, as many families have opted for private schools or move the suburbs. But Bache is pretty good, and that's why most parents try to get their kids to go there.

If you're on one side of the street, you're zoned into Waring. If you're on the north side of Fairmount Avenue, you're zoned into Bache. So if you're on the south side, you have to play the lottery to get your kid into a better school. How much does that difference cost? Not in commute time, in dollars: how much does it affect housing prices?

Let's look at school quality vs property values analytically

To analyze this, I pulled every home sale in Philadelphia recorded since January 2023 through May 2026 (about 65,000) and sorted each one by the elementary school its address is zoned for. Then I lined them up by school quality.

The x-axis on the chart is how good the school is as measured by the percentage of students achieving proficient or advanced on Pennsylvania’s state math test. The Philly median is about 13%. About 160 schools are plotted in the above graph, and the y-axis is the median recent home sale price in that area (I use this instead of the OPA property tax assessment values since they are often understated or lagging by decades, due to the political incentives to not raise assessments and property taxes).

The school I'm zoned into, Waring, scores about 15%, meaning only 1 in 7 kids is meeting the state's standards for math proficiency. That means 85% are not. By comparison, over at Bache-Martin, three blocks away, that number is about 30%, so twice as good. And as a percentile of Philly schools, where the median score is about 13, Bache-Martin is actually a top 25% (top quartile) public school in Philly.

The pattern is pretty obvious, better school performance is highly correlated to property value. When you run the formal statistics, the R-squared comes out around 0.5, meaning that taken at face value, school quality determines about half of a house's price. As a fun aside, for my neighborhood specifically, it is actually much cheaper to rent than own, so savvy parents who want to access a top 25% school like Bache should rent, instead of paying the expensive $100,000 premium to live in Bache-Martin's catchment zone.

Economically speaking, every ten points of school score adds about $57,000 to a Philly house's price. That's huge for a city where the typical home sells for about $250,000 (and only about $85,000 in the cheapest zones)

Obviously, home prices reflect a neighborhood's wealth, but it turns out they do NOT explain away the $100,000 premium I would have to pay to live on the other side of the street and be zoned into Bache-Martin

Data wonks will say "well school quality is driven by at-home resources, and correlates with parental wealth." Yes, that's true, I agree. In fact, neighborhood income predicts school math scores well - this is both well studied nationally and true even in my data set for Philly, where income alone explains about 37 percent of the variation in a catchment's math score.

However, the crazy thing is that, even after you strip out the effect of higher income parents on math scores in Philly public schools, you still find that the quality of schools significantly increases home prices. Said another way, while richer people buy nicer houses and invest more in their kid's education, which drives better testing outcomes, there is still a major independent factor of school test performance (as a proxy for school quality) increasing house prices.

I'll say it one more way, just because this is counterintuitive and confusing: rich people buy bigger houses in nicer areas, but they will pay even more, and incrementally so, for a school. My analysis is rough. I did not do a formal hedonic adjustment for housing quality, and my neighborhood control is income, not amenities. Quantitatively, income alone explains about 60 percent of the variation in catchment prices, ahead of the school score’s 51 percent on the same 155 catchments, and once both are in the model the school score’s coefficient drops from $5,700 per point to about $3,000. Half of what looks like a school premium citywide is a wealth premium. The score itself survives (t-statistic of 6.8), but it is carrying half the weight the raw chart implies.

This is both good and bad news for me and others in similar situations who live just barely on the wrong side of the street

As I mentioned above, I'm on the south side of Fairmount so I'm zoned into Waring instead of Bache-Martin. The good news is that, consequently, my house was $100,000 cheaper to buy and so more affordable. That lowers my mortgage by $600/month! The bad news is that my kid is zoned into a lower-performing school (note I am NOT criticizing the teachers or principals at Waring, I know a couple and they're awesome, they are just under-supported due to a variety of macro and socio-economic factors) where only 1 out of 7 kids is hitting the state's math standards.

The bittersweet good news is that, if Waring shuts down per the SDP's plan, I will be zoned into Bache and my house will be worth about $100,000 more. I understand the social impact of school consolidation - existing families will have to go further to get their kids to school, teachers and other staff will need to be re-assigned or some jobs lost, and existing students will need to re-adjust.

For avoidance of doubt, I want to be really, really specific because I touched a lot of sensitive issues in this article: Philly school performance, housing prices, school closures, etc. Honestly, I'm not an expert on any of those. My analysis is just focused on the enormous impact of school catchments on housing prices, and how the simple act of being on the wrong side of the street can add or remove $100,000 from your home's value.

Notes, Sources, and Methodology

Philadelphia Department of Records RTT_SUMMARY, pulled from phl.carto.com on 2026-07-22. Filters: document_type = 'DEED',cash_consideration between $50,000 and $5,000,000,property_count = 1, display_date from 2023-01-01 through 2026-05-30. 65,241 deeds matched; 175 dropped for missing geometry; 65,066 used. Of those, 64,573 land inside one of the 159 scored elementary catchments and are the sales behind every median below. Catchment boundaries are the School District’s elementary boundaries for school year 2024-2025 (160 polygons); each sale is matched by point-in-polygon. The closure dates come from the district’s April 30, 2026 vote and WHYY’s May 7, 2026 list of schools closing in 2027. Rent and home values in the rent-versus-buy aside come from Zillow’s 19130 home value index and Realtor.com’s 19130 market page.

Methodology details. School quality scores come from the SDP School Progress Report (SPREE), school year 2023-2024: PSSA Math, percent proficient or advanced, grades 3-8, all students. The SPREE 2023-2024 school metric scores CSV is the source. The income control uses ACS 5-year ZCTA median household income, weighted by where each catchment’s sales happened.

Limitations. Nothing here controls for housing stock (square footage, year built, bedrooms, condition) or neighborhood amenities, and the income measure is ZIP-level while the two headline catchments share ZIPs, so the income control cannot resolve within-ZIP differences. The R² of 0.529 between school quality and median sale price is the raw, uncontrolled association; with income in the model the score’s coefficient falls from about $5,700 to about $3,000 per point but stays positive. This article reports a descriptive pattern, not a causal estimate.

https://nickjain.com/blog/the-three-block-school-premium-of-100k