Blog

By David Langlieb We’re now into our third full year of lending at the Philadelphia Accelerator Fund, and we’ve developed a kind of mantra for allocating our limited resources: maximum units of housing at the most economically viable affordability. It’s not catchy,...

By David Langlieb Have the robots taken over yet? Pardon my skepticism, but I turned 40 last year and find myself settling into a curmudgeonly distrust of new technology. I’m not a Luddite, but the truth is I’ve been temperamentally incredulous since second or third...

By David Langlieb Consider the following hypothetical – I own a casino with a custom-made roulette wheel that has 50 pockets on it, numbered 1 through 50. I offer you this opportunity: ‘invest’ a million dollars with me on a single spin, and if the ball lands on any...

By David Langlieb As Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer advises, it is wise to accept the things we cannot change. The rub is that what can’t change is often unclear. At the Philadelphia Accelerator Fund (PAF), we’ve spent many restless hours contemplating Niebuhr’s...

By David Langlieb Here’s a challenge I’d put some money behind: provide me with a compelling, substantive public interest-based reason—for why it takes 1,250 hours of training to become a licensed barber in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Or why a Pennsylvania...

By David Langlieb In 1947, renowned Philadelphia planner Ed Bacon presented a vision for the city's future at the Better Philadelphia Exhibition, an innovative effort to engage the public in the city’s postwar development. Bacon organized the exhibition with...

By David Langlieb At the Philadelphia Accelerator Fund, part of our mission is to encourage homeownership by financing affordable for-sale housing. The American tradition, at least in an aspirational sense, is to promote property ownership as a way for the citizenry...

Eighty-Five Years Later and They Still Don’t Exist By David Langlieb Finance is a peculiar business, and we at the Philadelphia Accelerator Fund do not pretend to understand more than we do. Like most, we were surprised and unnerved by the recent Silicon Valley Bank...

Written by David Langlieb Like most lenders, the Philadelphia Accelerator Fund typically requires that our borrowers personally guarantee our loans. While we don’t look forward to enforcing these personal guarantees and certainly don’t like taking borrowers to court,...

Written by David Langlieb There is an apocryphal story known to students of economics which appeared some years back in the late humorist P.J. O’Rourke’s excellent book Eat the Rich—a natural scientist asks an economist to name a law of economics that is neither...