By: Jason Yots
We’ve entered that exciting season that straddles Winter and
Spring: Award Season. Yes, yes, there are the Academy Awards,
and all that sexy red carpet stuff, but more importantly for places like
Buffalo, NY, it’s time for the annual Rehabilitation Tax Credit Awards! Each year, the National Park Service
publishes a titillating report discussing the performance of its rehabilitation
tax credit (RTC) program.[1] And the big winners for 2014 are . . .
Best Supporting
Actor in the Role of Job Creation
We’ve said it before, and we’re saying it again: preservation means jobs. In 2014, the RTC program created nearly
78,000 jobs, or roughly 1.5 times the office worker population in downtown Buffalo.
And these are not
minimum-wage, service-sector jobs: the average annual pay-day on an RTC project
is over $40,000. Bravo RTCs!
Best Director of
Taxpayer Dollars
The RTC leverages private sector investment with taxpayer
dollars. As a result, the program
is relatively efficient in its delivery of a wide array of end-spaces: rental
housing (42% in 2014), offices (18%) and commercial, such as retail,
hospitality, manufacturing, performance, etc. (25%). The RTC program also serves a broad spectrum of users in
nearly every corner of the nation.
For example, among the nearly 20,000 new rental housing units generated
by the RTC program last year, a full third will be available for low- and
moderate-income tenants. This is
great news for both high-rent cities (where affordable housing is vanishing daily)
and poorer regions (where competition for affordable housing subsidies is
fierce). Encore, encore!
Best Choreography
of Economic Development Incentives
As a result of this flexibility, the RTC program can be used
to double-down on other economic development subsidies, such as federal
low-income housing tax credits (4% of RTC projects), state rehabilitation tax
credits (50%), property tax abatements (18%), brownfields tax credits and others. Based on an NPS survey of RTC program
users, 88% of program participants used multiple economic development resources
to achieve economic feasibility.
Raise your glass to a proven budget-gap-filler: the RTC!
Lifetime
Achievement Award for Awesomeness
The Lifetime Achievement Award for Awesomeness goes, again,
to the RTC program! This is
becoming embarrassing! But seriously folks, this program gets economic
development done. Since 1977, it
has:
* Created 2.47 million well-paying jobs
* Generated $73.8 billion in rehabilitation activity across
40,038 projects nationwide
* Helped finance the construction of 255,994 housing units,
of which 137,978 are available to low- and moderate-income renters
* Prompted many of the 1.59 million listings in the National
Register of Historic Places
RTC, you are, in a word, awesome. Keep up the good work!
[1] “Federal Tax
Incentives for Rehabilitating Historic Buildings: Statistical Report and
Analysis for Fiscal Year 2014” (http://www.nps.gov/tps/tax-incentives/taxdocs/tax-incentives-2014statistical.pdf
)
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