READING — One week into 2026, a 125-year-old Poplar Street rowhome collapsed, temporarily displacing four people in a house next door.
The result in the months since: a hole where the home once stood and around $100,000 in emergency demolition costs the city is unlikely to recover anytime soon. The building’s owner has a Staten Island mailing address and owns multiple buildings in the county, including two on the city’s certified list of blighted properties. Officials say the owner is difficult to contact, and Spotlight PA did not receive a response from the person when attempting its own outreach.
Residents regularly remark that out-of-state property owners are the source of the area’s building deterioration, especially after three rowhomes collapsed last year. However, local data show deciphering ownership is much more complicated.
A Spotlight PA analysis of the city’s September 2025 certified blight list of 286 properties found that it can be difficult to identify the person or people who own these buildings, how to contact them, and whether they are local — all factors that can limit the city's efforts to increase the housing stock and tax base.
A variety of individuals and groups can end up on the list of properties certified through the city’s blighted property review committee, including people who live in their homes, landlords, and limited liability companies. An initial review shows the list reflects about 250 independent property owners, most of whom receive their county tax bills at a Pennsylvania address.
About a quarter of the properties on the list receive tax bills directly to the blighted address, even if the owner does not live there. Many of these properties are owned by LLCs named for the address of each individual property, obscuring who actually owns the building and where they live.
Ownership also is regularly transferred between LLCs, which can further conceal how many blighted properties an individual owns and where they are based.
Difficulty tracking ownership is a statewide issue. In Reading, Spotlight PA found one company listed as the owner of five properties in city blight records. However, according to county records, that same company has transferred the properties for $1 each to three separate LLCs. All five property tax records go to the blighted addresses — and none of those addresses match other records for the LLCs’ owner, Spotlight PA found.
Spotlight PA consulted with multiple experts, who each agreed that figuring out who owns the properties — and what they need to develop or offload them — is an important step for the city. The properties can’t be treated the same way because the buildings are deteriorating for unique reasons.
At the city’s April blight certification hearing, in which resident volunteers review properties to potentially be added to the list, the committee heard from a number of owners or their representatives. Situations varied: Some lamented permitting challenges, while others described personal tragedies that impacted their building plans. One LLC owner purchased a property in December and already is well into construction.
The majority of properties discussed at the meeting, however, had no representation present and were immediately declared blighted.
Finding the owner’s address
Lots or homes on the list are certified through the blighted property review committee. Properties end up on the list if they meet at least one condition to be deemed a safety hazard, if they are considered a nuisance to the community, or if they have been vacant and tax-delinquent for at least two years. Seven of the properties certified from 2009 are still on the list.
When the committee declares a property as blighted, the city publicly reports the name of the property’s owner, the owner’s mailing address, and the date the property received the designation.
In theory, the city’s process for determining the mailing address should be relatively simple.
The City of Reading mandates residential property owners, regardless of a building’s status, register with the city annually and within 30 days if their property is sold or transferred. The registration form is comprehensive: It requires the owner’s name, mailing address, contact information, local agent to contact if needed, distinction of whether it’s owner-occupied, and other pertinent information.
Getting residents and owners to complete the registration, however, is the difficult part.
From November 2025 to January of this year, approximately 50% of eligible owners that transferred properties have registered, according to the city. Jack Gombach, the city’s managing director, agreed that regulating buildings and contacting owners would be simpler if people submitted the required information.
“A lot of our work in City Hall would be easier if people did what they were supposed to do,” Gombach said. “And then it's easy to just say, we're going to buckle down on enforcement.”
Instead of using the address listed by the city for its analysis by default, Spotlight PA instead looked at the county’s parcel and tax records. Winnie Branton, a Philadelphia attorney who worked with Reading on its 2019 blight strategy, suggested doing so because owners are most likely to list an address where they actually receive mail, as opposed to addresses they may have on general property registrations.
“It's very hard to track these folks down,” Branton said. Staffing can greatly limit a municipality’s efforts, which is why some communities have found community partners like local universities to focus on contacting owners.
Spotlight PA found that at least 10% of owners had more than one blighted property, though that number is likely higher with investors registering under different LLC names.
LLCs present a challenge
LLCs can be some of the most difficult owners to contact because that business setup inherently lends itself to anonymity.
In Reading, roughly 70 of the about 250 listed blighted property owners are some type of LLC, limited partnership, corporation, or incorporated company, Spotlight PA found. LLCs make up the bulk (more than 80%) of this ownership category.
Jiro Yoshida, a real estate professor at Penn State, said it’s common for investors to set up individual LLCs per project to protect their personal finances and portfolios. Some then create layers of LLCs to keep the initial investors nearly anonymous, he said.
This can allow the people behind LLCs to work around the protections the City of Reading has in place. If a property is declared blighted under one owner, they are not allowed to purchase more until the original problems are fixed. However, if an owner buys an already-blighted property without improving it, they can purchase others. In other words, the same individuals can be behind differing LLCs without the city being able to confirm their identities, effectively working around the intent of the rule.
“The government doesn't really know whether a single person is behind those different transactions, or each LLC is really different, so no one knows that for sure,” Yoshida said. “So that means that regulation doesn't really apply for those individuals.”
David Barr, Reading’s community development director, joined the city’s team last summer and has pushed for a number of changes in his department and to the Reading Redevelopment Authority — including disincentivizing buyers from keeping properties vacant.
“It is difficult because [owners] sometimes change LLCs, and it's hard to keep up with it. And it's a tactic,” Barr said. “It's designed to make it hard. We are recently looking at legal approaches to kind of pierce the veil, if you will, and find out who's actually behind all these different LLCs.”
The problem of blighted and abandoned structures has gained the attention of some state lawmakers, who say there are hundreds of thousands of these properties across Pennsylvania “that drive down home values and hinder community development.” They’ve proposed legislation meant to help identify the people responsible for maintaining these sites.
Investors may hold properties for years
There are many types of buyers, Yoshida said, including flippers and speculators. Flippers may buy a cheap property and quickly renovate it to sell for a higher profit. Speculators, however, may hold on to a property for decades just to wait for the most profitable time to develop it.
In Yoshida’s brief research about the city, he saw that housing demand has increased since 2020, and that unemployment has been low while the population has grown — all factors that would give outside speculators confidence in the potential of Reading’s economy.
As an example of this, he noted a property in State College that was a vacant lot for a decade because investors decided to wait for there to be a market for student housing. They eventually were able to sell it to a larger developer for a much higher price. Speculators also may be acquiring individual lots to sell as a larger single development, Yoshida said.
Code violations, fines, and increasing property taxes can all be deterrents for investors, Yoshida added, but those speculators also most likely bake the expenses into their selling bottom line.
Cities can inspire development, in part, by deciding what kind of projects they would prefer, Yoshida noted. Strict zoning guidelines let developers know what is possible, but the projects may be smaller-scale. Flexible zoning laws, meanwhile, can leave properties vacant for longer, but also create the opportunity for grander projects.
“There's always a tension between the desired use of those properties in real time, versus the most profitable and optimal strategy for investors,” Yoshida said.
Some owners need financial assistance
Not all property owners can be treated the same, said Rita Jefferson, a local analyst with the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. There are many circumstances that lead to blight.
Generational wealth is historically tied to real estate, and many people want to have something to leave behind, she said, even if they can’t take care of it.
Deteriorating properties may belong to an older adult who moved to an assisted living facility, but did not sell their home. Family homes may have emotional connections for heirs who have moved. The title may be tangled.
Other issues can stem from rising costs that make it impossible for owners to catch up on bills, she said. In those situations, cities, nonprofits, and community groups have opportunities to help through grant or leniency programs, as opposed to punitive fines.
Those opportunities rarely extend to landlords with deteriorating buildings, however, as most programs are designed for owner-occupied homes. Barr said the city is trying to encourage landlords to retain a percentage of monthly rent or the value of the property for ongoing repairs and maintenance, but many landlords find it easier to “take all the cash out of the property.”
“They don't paint that windowsill, the windowsill rots, and it becomes a blighted property,” Barr said as an example. “And eventually, in the worst case, falls down.”
Cities have to walk a delicate line between code enforcement and resident assistance for local property owners who cannot afford to repair their homes, Jefferson said.
“It becomes that much more challenging to try to identify exactly what it is and really try to target those owners who are sitting on properties because they're waiting to sell it, versus targeting owners who are saying, ‘I can't afford to do home maintenance because of X, Y, or Z,’” Jefferson said.
Blight list could be a powerful tool, expert says
Heather Scheuring, the city’s blight and transfer officer, largely oversees the list — from introduction, certification, communication with the Reading Redevelopment Authority, and removal. She said manually going through the county parcel records is a time-consuming process that was previously handled through an automatic system.
While out-of-state owners may not be the majority of blighted property holders, she said, they are the most difficult to contact.
“Typically, the people who are going to show up to the hearings and fight for their property are the closer owner,” Scheuring told Spotlight PA, adding that the city tries to give owners the benefit of the doubt when they show initiative.
The list itself is a unique feature that could work in Reading’s favor if accurately used, said Jefferson, the analyst.
“I would be excited if [the city] actually got something going to really hold people's feet to the fire and really say, ‘You're causing us stress as a municipality. You're causing your neighbor stress as part of this larger community, and it would be nice if you could actually do something with this.’”