Cities With the Most Long-time Homeowners

Jaunt through just about any established enclave, and you’ll likely encounter at least a handful of houses inhabited by long-time homeowners. That said, there are certain areas in which more long-timers tend to congregate, and Trulia set out to locate them.

To find these decades-dwelling homeowners, the company analyzed and mapped the median move-in date for residents spanning the nation at the ZIP code level in the largest 100 metros. Unsurprisingly, many places with a multitude of long-timers exhibited a higher-than-average homeownership rate. And that makes sense, as renters typically pick up and move more often.

Echoing that trend, most of the locales with homeowners who’ve stuck in the same spot are far from urban cores, Trulia says.

Some of the findings: The median move-in year in more rural zones is 2004, the oldest in the sample, the company says. By contrast, it’s 2006 in suburban areas and 2007 in urban ones.

As for the “oldest” 10 percent of ZIP codes by metro area, rural ZIPs are overrepresented by 54.7 percent, Trulia reports. Suburban and urban ZIP codes, however, are 35.4 percent and 70.3 percent underrepresented, respectively.  

Numerous metros boasting the biggest concentrations of “long-tenured-resident ZIP codes” have charted sluggish population growth over the past 3.5 decades, with some even losing residents altogether, it found.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of just seven large metros, that has lost population since 1980, contains several of the oldest U.S. ZIP codes. A fair distance from downtown and near the West Bend area, the median move-in year for people in ZIP 15433 was 1984. And get this: 41.4 percent have nested there since 1979 or before.

Generally speaking, though, folks living in Midwest, East, and Northeast metros have stuck at the same address longer than those hailing from metros in the Southeast, Southwest, and West, Trulia reports.

All but one of the metros recording the highest proportion of people who’ve called their current residence home since 1979 or before are in the Midwest and Northeast. Honolulu, Hawaii, is the lone Western metro to land in the top 10, while Pittsburgh leads the pack, with 16.9 percent of people in the metro area living in homes they’ve been in since 1979 or earlier. Rounding out the bottom of the list: Las Vegas, where just 1.5 percent of the population has lived in the same home since 1979 or earlier, Cape Coral and West Palm Beach, Florida; and Phoenix, Arizona.