Blog

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...

Written by David Langlieb At the Philadelphia Accelerator Fund, we are ever-conscious of our mission as an alternative source of capital for small developers looking to scale up and build affordable housing in the city of Philadelphia. Part of this means periodically...

When you are in the business of financing housing construction, generational wealth is foundational to your work whether you recognize it or not. At the Philadelphia Accelerator Fund, we go further - for us, addressing the generational wealth gap for Black and Brown...

Developers have access to power that can have an immense effect on the neighborhoods. All too often their impact is negative, displacing residents, closing community stalwarts, or causing rapid gentrification. It does not have to be this way! Here are a few...

Safe and affordable housing is a right that everyone deserves. It can build generational wealth for both renters and homeowners, allowing renters to save money and giving homeowners the opportunity to profit or pass their home onto family. Throughout the country,...