Wally Nunn: Delaware County Council encourages economic apartheid
Upper Darby and Radnor sit just a few miles apart in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. One is working-class. The other is one of the wealthiest communities in America. Yet the family in Upper Darby pays roughly twice the effective property-tax rate of their neighbor in Radnor — despite earning less than half as much.
That single fact exposes the quiet cruelty baked into how Pennsylvania funds schools and local government.
Here’s the math:
- Median household income in Upper Darby: ~$69,000
- Median household income in Radnor: ~$159,000
Combined (county + municipal + school) millage rate for 2025:
- Upper Darby: ~43 mills
- Radnor: ~22 mills
A typical Upper Darby home assessed at $165,000 owes about $7,100 a year in property taxes — 4.3 percent of its value. A typical Radnor home assessed at $667,000 owes about $14,800 — 2.2 percent of its value.
That’s double the rate on half the wealth.
For many Upper Darby families earning $50,000 or less, that $7,100 bill consumes fifteen to twenty percent (or more) of their entire income before utilities, insurance, or groceries. In Radnor, the typical homeowner pays under nine percent of household income in property taxes.
And the final insult? Despite shouldering a far heavier burden, Upper Darby School District spent $14,728 per student in 2022. Radnor spent $25,264 — 70 percent more.
The system doesn’t just fail to be progressive. It is aggressively regressive. Lower property values trigger higher effective tax rates, which forces working-class towns to tax their residents harder just to deliver basic services. Wealthier towns tax heavily, hoard commercial ratables, and lavish their schools with resources.
A form of “economic apartheid” is encouraged, and the more successful are rewarded for leaving a working class community. I sold a home in Upper Darby and bought a home in Newtown Square. My new home is worth a multiple of my old home and yet my taxes are 50 percent less. The system is fundamentally flawed.
This isn’t an accident. It’s how Pennsylvania chose to fund local government a century ago, and we’ve never fixed it.
Since Democrats took full control of Delaware County Council in 2020, the county real-estate tax has jumped 55 percent. The county has also borrowed $415 million that taxpayers will repay — with interest — for the next two decades. Those increases land on top of already crushing school and municipal taxes.
Their response, essentially, is “let them eat cake.”
When the one-time federal Covid money and rainy-day funds dry up — as they soon will — the next wave of tax hikes is inevitable. And once again, the heaviest weight will fall on the communities already paying the highest effective rates.
This is not sustainable. Families in Chester, Upper Darby, Yeadon, and Darby Borough are being priced out of the only county they’ve ever called home — not because they overspent, but because the tax code itself is rigged against them.
We keep hearing that “everyone has to pay their fair share.” But the numbers show the working-class share is already twice as large, relative to income and home value, as the share paid in the county’s wealthiest enclaves.
Fairness isn’t complicated. It starts with three steps Delaware County leaders have so far refused to take:
1. Publicly acknowledge the regressive nature of the current system.
2. Stop your reckless spending spree.
3. Lead the fight in Harrisburg for a new school-funding formula that doesn’t punish towns simply because their homes are worth less.
Until that happens, every new tax increase and every new bond issue is another brick in the wall separating Delaware County’s haves from its have-nots.
Working families here aren’t asking for a handout. They’re simply asking for a tax system that doesn’t treat them as second-class citizens in their own county.
It’s time for Delaware County to give them the tax fairness they deserve.
Wally Nunn is the former Chairman of Delaware County Council.
