Pacific Charter School Development was founded in 2004 to accelerate charter school growth by easing the burden of facilities development. We marshal scarce resources, securing needed financing to create academically-friendly campuses. Our team of professionals draws on real estate,
finance, education and school development experience to find, finance, entitle, acquire and either retrofit or build these sites.

Our main goal is to eliminate charter school operators’ need to be involved in facility work so they can focus on teaching children. For this to occur, we serve as a nonprofit developer and benevolent landlord, leasing campuses to high-quality charter schools.

PCSD pursues an effective “fill-in” strategy compared with the massive, slowly developed, district-built options. PCSD’s model is to retrofit existing buildings for use as future schools. We target buildings between 40,000 and 80,000 square feet on two- to five-acre parcels. We also build ground-up on vacant parcels or adjacent to existing structures when opportunites arise.

Our business model uses a combination of philanthropic equity, debt provided by socially-conscious lenders and credit enhancements from federal, state, foundation, and local guarantors. We use this funding to finance the campuses we build at a low cost of capital, passing along the savings to charter schools through below market rents.

Once charter school tenants have reached a state of maturity—defined by metrics involving academic and financial performance and community support—we work with each school’s leadership team to secure long-term, tax-exempt financing so these now more mature organizations can purchase
their campuses from PCSD at cost. In doing so, charter schools acquire real assets and long-term balance sheet stability while PCSD recycles committed equity so each philanthropic dollar generates additional charter school seats many times over.