Tomorrow!
Financing Philadelphia’s Future, a series of public conversation sessions sponsored by the Philadelphia Public Banking Coalition, will host Tom Sgouros (Brown University) for a discussion on how pension funds can help provide affordable housing.
From the organizers:
On Tuesday, February 25, 2025, from 4:30 to 5:00 PM, pension expert Tom Sgouros will be our guest on “Financing Philadelphia’s Future” (FPF). The general public is invited to participate in this interactive discussion on Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85835928783.
In conversation with FPF host Vanessa Lowe, Sgouros will discuss the November 2024 report “Investing for the Common Good: How Workers’ Pension Funds Can Help Solve the Housing Crisis.”
Sgouros is a co-author/co-editor of this report from the Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund and the Georgetown University Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.
The report describes “how pension fund investments are inadvertently undermining housing stability” by investing in private equity.” Worker’s money is being used in ways that hurt workers rather than help workers.
The report identifies two ways pension funds can correct this situation – [1] collectively, use their market power to raise industry standards and [2] individually, create new financial institutions (such as the Philadelphia Public Financing Authority – PPFA) and invest in local economically targeted investment (ETI) vehicles that promote public benefit, specifically affordable housing (such as has been proposed for the Philadelphia Board of Pensions and Retirement – PBP&R by the PPBC). These approaches have proved successful. Among the examples cited is the 2021 Philadelphia Social Bond to fund the Neighborhood Preservation Initiative (NPI).
Philadelphia needs affordable housing. Mayor Cherelle Parker has made her plan to build, restore, or rehabilitate 30,000 units of housing (“Mission 30,000”) a priority of her second year in office. Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, Chair of the Committee on Housing, Neighborhood Development and the Homeless has introduced bills to advance her Defying Displacement campaign. The PBP&R can help.
Tom Sgouros is a public policy consultant and is a researcher at the Brown University Data Science Institute, where he applies principles of data science to questions of immunology and genetics, but also about pensions and public finance. When he was Senior Policy Advisor to the Rhode Island General Treasurer during 2015-2016, he helped to establish the state’s new infrastructure bank, created ways to invest the state’s cash balance in local small businesses, and worked to improve management of the state’s liabilities. He is the author of the book, “Checking the Banks: The Nuts and Bolts of Banking for People Who Want to Fix It,” and law review articles about banking and abusive lending practices in the municipal bond market.
In 2021, Tom led a working group for NCPERS, the largest US association of public pension plans, to re-think the accounting rules for public pension plans. The resulting report, “The Case for New Pension Accounting Standards,” can be found at https://sgouros.com/finance along with other resources.