The Home Life of Immigrants in Philadelphia and Other U.S. Cities

One in five Philadelphia households had at least one member who was born abroad. These households—around 145,000 of the city’s 695,000 households in 2022—straddle languages, generations, economic strata, legal statuses, and social norms in their homes and the broader communities they share with their U.S.-born counterparts.

In this analysis, part of a series on Philadelphia’s immigrants, The Pew Charitable Trusts explores some key statistics on immigrants’ home life in Philadelphia and comparable cities—such as homeownership, housing affordability, and health care coverage—to provide a better understanding of immigrant households’ characteristics and well-being. Who lives in immigrant-led households? Are their homes affordable or overcrowded? And how do these measures differ across the cities compared in this series—Baltimore; Boston; Denver; Minneapolis; New York; Portland, Oregon; San Jose, California; Seattle; and Washington? Other pieces in this latest installment explore household and neighborhood characteristics within Philadelphia.

Sociologists, economists, and other researchers have found that the neighborhood environment can have an enormous impact on immigrants’ integration and the economic mobility of many groups—including U.S.-born residents. That makes the social connectivity, livability, and safety of neighborhoods important for cities’ long-term development.

A defining characteristic of all households is whether homes are owned or rented, which affects everything from wealth-building to family stability, according to a study by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Foreign-born heads of household (excluding spouses or other relatives) had relatively high homeownership rates in Philadelphia compared with the other cities examined in this piece. That likely was because of Philadelphia’s relative housing affordability, which is also tied to high ownership rates among U.S.-born residents. (See Figure 1.)

Housing affordability and incomes are also defining characteristics. Pew’s research has found that housing in Philadelphia is generally less expensive than in other major cities. But because household incomes are also lower in Philadelphia, the city’s housing cost burdens—defined as costs that exceed 30% of household income—are sometimes higher. That is especially true for households headed by immigrants, both renters and homeowners. The share of cost-burdened immigrant homeowners in Philadelphia was close to the national average and around the midpoint of the comparison cities in the 2018-22 period. (See Figure 2.) Renters, on average, have higher cost burdens than homeowners because their incomes are typically lower, as previous research shows. Research also shows that an influx of immigrants can push up the cost and value of city housing for all residents.

A fundamental and telling factor in the well-being of immigrants—and U.S.-born residents—is health insurance coverage, which affects access to health care. In the 2018-22 period, among the 10 cities examined in this series, Philadelphia had the second-largest share of foreign-born residents without health insurance (19%, or around 45,000 people). Immigrants also made up a large share of all uninsured residents in Philadelphia compared with other cities (39%). (See Figure 3.)

A combination of factors may be driving Philadelphia’s rank, including that a high percentage of immigrant residents work at low-paying jobs that may not provide health insurance. In addition, Pennsylvania is among the U.S. states that limit Medicaid eligibility to residents with permanent legal status, unlike some states that allow coverage regardless of immigration status, according to the National Immigration Law Center’s 2024 state-by-state summary. (Immigrants’ access to health care also can be affected by the availability of translation services, which is discussed in the report on immigrant households.)

One household factor long associated with immigration is overcrowded homes, which federal housing authorities usually define as more than one person per room, on average, although the number may vary in some situations. Rooms may include bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchens but not bathrooms or closets. (See methodology for details.)

Among the comparison cities, Philadelphia had a relatively low percentage of overcrowded households, for reasons that are not entirely clear: Just 7.4% of its immigrant-headed households lived in such conditions in the 2018-22 period. That was below most other cities and the nation overall, although still triple the U.S.-born share. (See Figure 4.)

Housing affordability, household well-being, and overcrowding are just a few of the many complex factors that affect the home life of immigrants and U.S.-born Philadelphians alike. A companion piece in this series looks in greater detail at the composition and conditions of immigrant-led households, and another examines their neighborhoods, communities, and support networks.

Learn more about Philadelphia’s immigrants—including their countries of origin, destinations, and demographics, as well as where they work and run their own businesses—in the rest of our series.

Maridarlyn Gonzalez is a senior associate and Thomas Ginsberg is a senior officer with The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia research and policy initiative.