2025 PACDC Equitable Development Symposium

On November 12th, nearly 200 people attended PACDC’s 2025 Equitable Development Symposium on Investor Ownership of Philadelphia’s Housing. Thank you to our presenters and sponsors, and to all of our members and partners who were able to join us! Below are the slides used and reports referenced during the Symposium.

• Symposium program Slides
• Reinvestment Fund & Rutgers Center on Law, Inequality & Metropolitan Equity (October 2025): Corporate Investors in Single Family Homes in Philadelphia 
• Regional Housing Legal Services (November 2025): Preserving our CommonWealth: A Policy Toolkit to Confront the Financialization of Pennsylvania’s Homes 
• Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia (February 2025): Ownership Profile of Single-Family Residence Properties in Philadelphia: A Focus on Large Corporate Investors 
• The Pew Charitable Trusts, Philadelphia Research & Policy Initiative (July 2024): Investors Buy One-Third of All Single-Family Homes in Philadelphia

Like many cities, Philadelphia has seen an increase in investor purchases of homes. This has been shown to lead to increases in both rental and homeownership housing costs as apartments are rented at the highest rate the market will sustain, and single-family homes are less available for homebuyers. Investor-owned homes have also been correlated with higher rates of blight and code violations which harms both tenants and the broader community.
We focused on what this looks like in Philadelphia, what we can learn from other cities, and what to expect for the future given changes at the federal, state, and local level. We also explored solutions that would increase local control of housing and preserve affordability.