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- Mar 27, 2014
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It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to convince anyone to put (move?) a private business into an area without the expectation that the business would return a profit. My only objection to such plans is the use of selective federal tax breaks to artificially make that more likely. Crony capitalism is no better simply because of the zip codes involved.
I agree with all that. We'll see how it works out but the fear/risk is developers will build in up and coming neighborhoods, the kind that are regularly "gentrified" now and that didn't need just massive tax breaks to encourage profit-seeking developers to enter into and start buying up and developing property.
When this passed I thought of our own downtown. It's booming now after decades of being a place where you really didn't want to be in after dark. But now that the core downtown is built up, developers are expanding outward to currently pretty depressed areas. That's great and all, but they don't need huge tax breaks to do it. In my own area, the tax breaks might accelerate the process a bit, but doubtful they'll alter the course much.
The hope is developers will go into depressed areas and build affordable housing or put in new business or industry, but if you've got $10 or $100 million, would you risk it in an actually RISKY area, or try like heck to find places you already can predictably make money and just get a big, huge, fat tax break for doing it? The latter of course, and there are no limits and no requirements about where to invest, no allocation process like with some affordable housing programs. Theoretically, everyone could go to NYC in areas there designated for the breaks and every dollar nationwide goes into those little areas, or in similar locations in other big, urban areas that are already designated as hot money locations.