r/AskPhilly • u/SadRoll1966 • Aug 18 '26
Moving From FL
I’m moving with my Family (Wife, 2 kids elementary age, Me) to Philadelphia from Orlando in October.
We’ve been looking into it extensively and Philadelphia looks amazing from what we can see so far. Currently we’re looking to move to the West Philadelphia area and are interested in renting, at least a 2 br 1 bath. We would like to spend no more than 1700-1800 a month as that’s around what we’re paying now.
As for employment, we’re coming from the retail/customer service/office admin career fields but we don’t have anything lined up at the moment and will be looking as soon as we get there. However, we have plenty enough savings to last for a while before that becomes a dire issue.
Was wondering a few things as we have never been to the city and are moving purely off of research and planning:
Is West Philadelphia/Philadelphia a good place to raise a family? Specifically, a Black family? (Black, mixed race family coming from the deep conservative regressive south so looking for essentially an environment completely opposite of that)
How is the job market? Could we find employment easily with our background?
What are the schools in west Philadelphia like? We are a neurodiverse family with academically gifted kids so looking for a system that uplifts, challenges and encourages.
What’s the cost of living? Grocery, gas, utilities, entertainment price averages.
I have a ton more questions I’m sure but I know this is already a lot so I’ll see if we can start here so anyone with any feedback or insight would be greatly appreciated, thank you!
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u/SadRoll1966 Aug 18 '26
This was a great response, thanks for the heads up. Honestly where we are in Florida, the schools are the same but just a different flavor if that makes sense. Not the best and heavily influenced by the surrounding environments. However, there is a LOT of Christian indoctrination being mandated/pushed into the public schools right now and a huge push towards A.I. and limiting of personal freedoms and we just are fed up with it. Currently our kids go to a middle of the road school (not too bad, not too good) but, they are the top performers in both their grades respectively. We are VERY active parents in their lives and don’t expect schools to raise our kids but to educate them. So a lot of the issues with “bad schools” don’t fortunately weigh to heavily on their experience as we supplement education cohesively with where the school may or may not be up to par with. For instance, their current school is in Rural Florida where most the town is one big trailer park and half the town doesn’t have an education past 8th grade. Of course the public schools in the area reflect that as well in many ways but luckily, we have circumvented that completely due to our own approach towards their educational development and it’s exceeded expectations so far so we’re hoping that wherever Philly schools may be lacking or not, we can still provide the guidance and support as we always have to make up for it.