Philadelphia has a large stock of vacant city-owned lots that could support new affordable housing, but developers are struggling to make that happen in many cases. Some have pinned blame on barriers within the Philadelphia Land Bank.
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Politicization and bureaucratic malaise at the agency that dispenses empty city-owned lots came up repeatedly during Bisnow’s Philadelphia Affordable Housing Summit.
“That back-and-forth doesn’t do anyone any good,” Riverwards Group Managing Partner Mo Rushdy, who also helms the Building Industry Association of Philadelphia, said during the event in the Sofitel at Rittenhouse Square.
Philadelphia is short more than 64,500 affordable units, according to a Housing Initiative at Penn report published earlier this year. Almost one-third of renters and 16% of homeowners in the city are spending more than 50% of their income on housing.
Rushdy and others argued that eliminating lethargy and red tape at the Land Bank could help provide much-needed supply.
Of the roughly 8,000 properties placed under the Land Bank’s purview when it was created in 2013, only about 1,000 had been redeveloped as of April 2025, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
The quasi-governmental agency's board consists of members appointed by the city council and the mayor. The body can approve the disposition of vacant city properties before the projects get sent to council for final approval.
There, elected officials representing the district where a proposal is located can choose whether or not to advance it for a final vote, according to Philly's longstanding unwritten councilmanic prerogative tradition.
But developers have long complained that getting projects approved by the Land Bank’s board is an arduous and expensive process in its own right.
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Rushdy attended what he characterized as a challenging Land Bank board meeting Aug. 12.
Civetta Property Group was seeking approval to build 15 single-family homes on lots across North Philadelphia's 7th Council District, according to the meeting minutes. How Affordable Housing LLC also proposed constructing nine single-family homes on lots around the intersection of 29th Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue.
Rushdy touched base with developers following the meeting and learned that some were fed up and ready to pull out of their proposed Land Bank projects.
“It’s not worth it for me to go through the application process and fight with the community when the city should have been the one that sold that,” he said.
Rushdy said he believes in developers engaging with community members, but affordable housing construction should be an exception.
“In my opinion — and a lot of people don’t like it — it should just go through the process right away,” he said. “We need to just have tunnel vision and get it done.”
Getting parcels out of the Land Bank comes with big predevelopment expenses for investors.
The Philadelphia Accelerator Fund provides funding for minority developers with modest means to create more housing, but the extended entitlement process that often defines Land Bank decision-making burns up a lot of that capital, Executive Director David Langlieb said.
“To speed that process up would be a game-changer for our developers,” he said.
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The current process requires them to have a design in place before they can take control of a property, NewCourtland CEO Joe Duffey said.
He floated a by right overlay for Land Bank properties as a policy that would allow developers with shallower pockets to get involved with fewer upfront expenses.
“You can take that land and come up with your plan later,” Duffey said.
The Land Bank didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
Mayor Cherelle Parker’s HOME Initiative, which seeks to build and rehab 30,000 affordable units across Philadelphia before the end of her term, includes a pilot program meant to get more projects out of the Land Bank.
City council members will identify 1,000 vacant city-owned properties that will be preapproved for development, Philadelphia Chief Housing and Urban Development Officer Angela Brooks said. Projects as large as a triplex can be built on these lots, which all come in at less than 1,500 SF.
This means that developers won’t need to get council approval to build on the lots after they get a green light from the Land Bank board.
“That will test the waters,” Brooks said. “A developer has kind of a known authorization process on the front end.”
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