Home Care In Swarthmore, PA

President Joe Biden is kicking off his national re-election campaign with a visit Friday evening to Strath Haven Middle School.

Strath Haven Middle School in Wallingford is scheduled to have a unique visitor Friday when President Biden visits Strath Haven for a campaign rally fresh from his State of the Union address, writes Julia Terruso for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Biden is expected to hold a rally there in the early evening, kicking off his campaign tour.

His deputy communications manager, Brooke Goren, is an alumna of the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District.

Classes will still be held. The district emailed parents to let them know that unspecified visitors could cause parking and road closures around the school. Some afternoon sports and activities could also be impacted.

This is Biden’s fourth stop in eastern Pennsylvania this year and his first stop at a school. Jill Biden is a lifelong educator from Montgomery County.

The Philadelphia suburbs, including Delaware County, with a large, educated, and increasingly racially and ethnically diverse electorate, have become a key area for Democrats.

The Wallingford-Swarthmore School District is no stranger to political visitors. Former President Barack Obama came to Strath Haven High School as a candidate in the 2008 Democratic primary, talking with students and holding a town hall.

Sen. John Fetterman had a rally at Nether Providence Elementary School during his 2022 campaign.

Find out more about President Biden’s visit in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Full-time students at Swarthmore College will receive free SEPTA passes this semester, as the school becomes the first higher education institution to participate in the transit agency’s Key Advantage program.

“This program will make it easier and less expensive for students to travel to destinations across the region,” SEPTA general manager Leslie S. Richards said in a news release on Wednesday.

Swarthmore’s approximately 1,600 students can use their passes throughout the academic year, with a 240-ride limit a month.

The “UPass” program is open to any school or university in the Philadelphia region that SEPTA serves, said Jennifer Scimone, manager of business development in the financial operations department at SEPTA.

Swarthmore was the first school that indicated an interest in participating in the program.

The agency is in “active discussions” with half a dozen other schools in the city and suburbs, said Scimone. She hopes to have 15 colleges and universities join the program in the first year.

Typically a monthly all-access SEPTA Key card would cost $204 a month, but schools are offered a steep discount through UPass. The agency is able to offer this discount because UPass depends on universities signing up all full-time students, not just those already using SEPTA, said Scimone.

“We’re hoping to gain ridership with this young group of people and establish those patterns while they’re in college,” said Scimone. “Hopefully they’ll continue on in their career in the area, and then they’ll be using SEPTA when they start out in the workforce.”

UPass is an extension of SEPTA’s Key Advantage program, which offers businesses the opportunity to purchase discounted Key cards on behalf of employees. Key Advantage was launched with Penn Medicine, Drexel University, and Wawa in March 2022 and later expanded eligibility to any business in the region.

The program was envisioned as a way to increase ridership, which has been slow to recover since the pandemic, as well as a perk that companies can use to help attract and retain employees.

Increasing ridership on public transit is a key concern for the agency’s leaders. SEPTA is expected to run out of federal pandemic relief in April 2024, and could face a $240 million structural deficit in 2025.

Twenty-two employers have joined the business program since it was launched last year, said Scimone. The transit agency reports that those who have been offered the card are riding SEPTA an average of 13% more than they were before joining the Key Advantage program.

“They’re not just using it to commute to and from work,” she said. The agency has seen an uptick in ridership on weekends and evenings.

In addition to Swarthmore College, the city of Philadelphia will also participate in the Key Advantage program beginning in September. The city will offer zero-fare transportation passes to 22,000 city employees, making it one of the largest employers in the program.

Swarthmore College is expected to tap the $4 trillion municipal bond market for more than $125 million of debt, hoping to lure buyers with its top-tier credit rating.

The Swarthmore Borough Authority will issue tax-exempt bonds in a competitive auction Thursday. The proceeds will fund capital projects on the Pennsylvania campus and will be used to refinance outstanding debt, according to preliminary bond documents. Improvements include the renovation of Martin Hall, an academic building that houses the school’s computer science and media studies departments.

Both Moody’s Investors Service and S&P Global Ratings granted Swarthmore their highest rating of AAA, a rare distinction among colleges. S&P currently designates 29 of about 450 colleges and universities as AAA, the company said. Other educational institutions that boast the rating include the nation’s wealthiest schools like Harvard University, Yale University and the University of Texas.

“We assessed Swarthmore’s enterprise risk profile as extremely strong, characterized by a history of solid demand including very solid selectivity, matriculation and retention rates, and student quality,” S&P Global Ratings credit analyst Phillip Pena wrote in a report.

Swarthmore bucks a broader trend in higher education in which some small-private schools have struggled to retain students amid cheaper public alternatives. Private schools that have strong endowments and prestigious reputations, like Swarthmore, are more insulated from the pressures.

Read More: Colleges Dangle Tuition Deals to Head Off Harsh Economic Reality

“The sector has really turned into the haves and have nots,” said Dora Lee, director of research at Belle Haven Investments. “The pressure in the higher education sector have really hit institutions that have weak enrollment and small endowments hard. But institutions that have that endowment cushion — and have distinguished themselves academically — have had significantly less challenges.”

S&P has a stable outlook on the credit indicating the rating is unlikely to change in the near term. That reflects the company’s expectation that “Swarthmore will maintain steady enrollment and its excellent demand characteristics,” analysts wrote in the report.

Its $2.7 billion endowment and ultra-selective application process set it apart. Last fall, the school accepted roughly 1,000 of its 14,707 applicants — amounting to a roughly 7% acceptance rate.

Representatives for Swarthmore referred questions about the deal to Linda Fan, a partner at the Yuba Group, which serves as the financial advisor on the transaction. Fan said she anticipates that the bonds will price well.

The total cost to attend Swarthmore during the 2022-2023 academic year amounted to $77,354 including tuition, fees, housing and food expenses. That is about 14% increase in the last five years, according to bond documents. Peer institutions such as Yale and Columbia University — who also received AAA ratings from S&P — charged more than $80,000 last year.

Moody’s credit analysts pointed to the school’s “exceptional wealth” relative to its operating expenses, in a June report evaluating the credit.

“The college competes with other highly selective and well-endowed institutions, driving the need for capital investment and a premier student experience,” Moody’s analysts wrote.

And though inflation and interest rates remain high “projects need to get done,” Susan Shaffer, vice president at Moody’s said.

Population: 6,401

Cost of living: 113

Median home price: $237,000

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College perk: Residents have access to all of Swarthmore College’s libraries with a local library card.

When Linton Stables, 67, first moved to the tiny borough of Swarthmore, he was a tad wary. “I’ll be honest: I’m a city person, and this is a suburb,” says Stables, a former New York City architect who retired in 2014. But it didn’t take him long to warm up to this college town. Five years later, he’s president of the Swarthmore Senior Citizen Association and has a half-acre of land to garden. “It’s a bucolic, pretty town,” he says.

It doesn’t hurt that for all of its small-town charm, Swarthmore is a 20-minute train ride to Philadelphia, where you can take in museums, theater and every kind of cuisine. The train goes to Philly’s 30th Street Station, and from there, New York City and Washington, D.C., are less than two hours away by train (in opposite directions).

The town itself is walkable, with plenty of sidewalks and more than two dozen lushly forested trails. “You can’t live anywhere in Swarthmore that’s more than a 10-minute walk to town,” says Carrie Piccard, a local real estate agent since 2003. Add in free public transit for seniors, and “having a car just isn’t a necessity,” says mayor Marty Spiegel.

Swarthmore College, one of the nation’s leading liberal arts colleges, occupies about a third of the town, and with more than 4,000 different kinds of plants stretching across 300 acres, it’s also a designated arboretum. The school has long welcomed town residents by making virtually all of its happenings—concerts, lectures, sporting events and more—open to the public.

Stables says the local retirement community—a mix of longtime residents and recent settlers—is an active one. The seniors’ association has frequent meetups and is a nexus for volunteering. Retirees can spend time helping maintain the campus’s arboretum, working for the library and tutoring at local schools. Plus, the senior association has an Aging-in-Place Committee dedicated to making sure Swarthmore’s seniors have all the resources they need, in addition to advocating for the city’s buildings and downtown to become more accessible.

Because of its small size, the housing market can be tight, but residents say the situation is improving. Housing ranges from spacious, gracious old homes for $500,000 and up to condos and town houses in the $120,000 to $220,000 range. Swarthmore’s city government recently lifted a zoning law that prevented more than a few unrelated people from living together in a family home—originally intended to prevent a dozen students from cramming into a house. “That means more of us can do the Golden Girls thing and live with our friends,” Stables says. Although the town itself lacks major medical facilities, some of the best hospitals in the world, including the four-star Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, are located a half an hour away in Philadelphia.

Pennsylvania is tax-friendly for retirees. Social Security benefits, retirement plan withdrawals and pensions are exempt from taxes.

For population figures, we used the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data. Cost-of-living data comes from the Council for Community and Economic Research (100 represents the national median). Median home prices were provided by Redfin, Zillow and local associations of Realtors.

Guides

This tight-knit community has a personality strongly influenced by the college that changed it in 1864.

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Originally named Westdale for its most famous native, painter Benjamin West, Swarthmore became Swarthmore when Quakers founded Swarthmore College in 1864. The borough — incorporated in 1893 — was fully built out by the 1930s, according to historic-home aficionado Scott Laughlin of BHHS Fox & Roach.

The borough’s social life changed for the better when the Inn at Swarthmore (10 South Chester Road), built by the college, opened across Chester Road from downtown in 2016. The 40-room hotel features the Broad Table Tavern restaurant and a bar that holds the borough’s first liquor license. “The inn has done a great job of bringing the college into the community,” says Becky Hanson, a lifelong Swarthmorean who’s an agent at D. Patrick Welsh Real Estate (16 Park Avenue), founded and owned by her husband.

Many Swarthmore faculty members call Swarthmore home, though rising house prices threaten to drive some of them out of town. The borough definitely has an academic vibe: Streets are named for other colleges and universities, and the Swarthmore Public Library (121 Park Avenue) has the highest per-capita use of any library in Delaware County. In non-pandemic times, residents can also borrow books from Swarthmore College’s libraries for a $20 yearly fee. Swarthmore’s housing stock is rich with a variety of styles.

The town, long a liberal island in a (no longer) conservative county, is also home to the country’s third-oldest co-op grocery store. The Swarthmore Co-Op (341 Dartmouth Avenue), which began as a health-food outlet in Hanson’s grandmother’s basement in 1932, carries a full range of groceries.

$250,000+

204 Michigan Avenue. A classic, well-maintained 1950s split-level with enclosed rear porch and side deck, move-in ready or ready to upgrade — your choice. 3 BR, 1/1 BA, 1,540 sq. ft. RE/MAX Hometown, 610-566-1340.

$500,000+

207 Riverview Road. This renovated twin comes with a two-bedroom apartment over its detached garage, so your tenants can pay your mortgage for you. 4 BR, 2 BA, 1,825 sq. ft. Keller Williams Real Estate, 610-363-4300.

$800,000+

2 North Chester Road. A rare new-construction house next to the Regional Rail station gives you the chance to select fixtures, finishes and fittings. 4 BR, 2/1 BA, 2,750 sq. ft. BHHS Fox & Roach Realtors, 610-431-1100.

Published as “Living in Swarthmore” in the February 2022 issue ofPhiladelphia magazine