The Fight for Philly’s Front Doors

Courtney Duchene

21 November, 2025

Charlene Samuels fields the same sets of complaints from Philly residents every day in her role as the constituent services rep for At-large City Councilmember and Minority Leader Kendra Brooks.

Construction has started on a house next door, with no building permit. An apartment has broken air conditioning in the height of summer, or mice crawling around, or leaks in the ceiling. Landlords aren’t completing repairs in a timely manner.

By the time they call her, tenants have already tried reaching out to the property owners — often with contact forms on property-management websites — to no avail. They don’t have a phone number for their landlord and sometimes don’t even know their name.

Often, that’s because, technically, their landlord doesn’t have a name. Using Atlas, the City’s tool for searching property records, licenses and permit history, Samuels more and more often discovers that rental properties in Philadelphia are owned by a corporation or private equity firm, sometimes as far away as California or Connecticut.

“It’s a lot of work trying to track down these landlords,” says Samuels, who won a 2025 Integrity Icon award — which recognizes all-star public servants for their commitment to the citizens of Philadelphia — for her dedication to helping tenants. “You would have to be pretty savvy. Most tenants are not going to go through all of that.”

Philly has long prided itself on being a city of homeowners, outpacing other Northeast peer cities like New York City, Boston, Washington D.C., Pittsburgh, and Baltimore. But between 2006 and 2025, the city’s homeownership rate dwindled from a healthy 58.2 percent to 52 percent of residents, Pew Charitable Trust’s State of the City report.

Investors now buy one in four Philly homes, and then rent them out, according to a new report from the Reinvestment Fund and the Center for Law Inequality and Metropolitan Equity (CLiME), at Rutgers University Law School.

Continue reading this press release from the Philadelphia Citizen in its entirety below:
The Fight for Philly’s Front Doors