So we are just supposed to take Donovan Rypkema’s word about the benefits of the tax credits? This is a man who runs a consulting service for governments and has a vested interest here in that he will be out of a job when people realize how absurd these tax credits are. Also his numbers are just make believe. In fact, in a previous editorial the PD tried to say tax credits and decreasing tax rates would cause a contraction of the economy - go figure.

In addition, this creates a privileged class of people (developers) who are able to plunder the the rest of us. Does this remind you of something - oh yeah - the PD platform. Well, I guess you guys just ignore that inconvenient thing whenever Mayor Slay or Governor Nixon decide they want to try (or perpetuate) some other ridiculous, unprovable idea they might have.

The real way to encourage growth is by providing a safe location with low taxation for all parties, not just a few developer buddies of the Mayor and aldermen of the city.

Economists will tell you the economic activity generated usually doesn’t make up for the lost tax revenue. And most developers, despite their pleas of poverty, don’t need them to make projects happen. The consumer’s don’t get these savings, the developers and contractors gobble them up. It’s a waste of money. Excellent post John Deal, you hit the nail on the head.

Didn’t we do this topic already? I’ve noticed a trend by the nameless editorial board to revisit topics that the commenting public took them to task over the first time. I guess they are trying the old method of repeated indoctrination…

Usually it’s smarter to rely on slogans, suppositions, myths and ideology when weighing the merits of private-public programs instead of considering the program’s ten-year history.

That just makes sense.

It’s a waste of time to actually talk to people involved in these projects — or to people who live near them or who have located their businesses in them or have businesses nearby.

And, whatever you do, DON’T get out and take a look around the neighborhoods and commercial districts where these projects are located.

Because why would anyone want to trust their lying eyes when they have slogans, suppositions, myths, and ideology to fall back on?

The State Rep. needs to know he can also pick up some extra cash for the state by tearing down the Arch and selling the metal to Jack’s Recycling — it must be worth a few bucks. And all the Arch does is stand there.

Then we can bulldoze the town of Savannah, population 4,762, tear up their recently installed “New “Brick”/Concrete Sidewalks around the square, Period Street Lighting and Period Signage” (cf. http://www.savannahmo.net/didyou.html ), I am certain that we can get something for the brick and the “period lighting”.

Perhaps all Gov. Nixon needs to do is to agree with Rep lager and exercise line item veto over the funds Savannah is anticipating to receive to finish their “historical” projects.

“So we are just supposed to take Donovan Rypkema’s word about the benefits of the tax credits?”

No. Absolutely not. Drive to Old North St. Louis — better yet, Lee’s Summit or Lexington — and talk to neighbors about the transformation they have seen. They will tell you of long-vacant buildings that have come back to life, jobs created on projects and in businesses operating in re-opened buildings and how communities that may have died would have been lost.

Talk to the skilled workers in masonry, plaster and carpentry who have been able to find real jobs instead of back-of-a-truck drywall gigs.

Talk to the homeowners who have used these credits to make their own homes beautiful for their children to enjoy.

Few of our tax credits in Missouri are actually available to the regular homeowner. The Quality Jobs, Low Income Housing, Distressed Areas, beef production and other tax credits not receiving such attention are only available to people who are already wealthy. Those credits make the rich even richer.

While the rich can use the Historic Tax Credit, so can you and I. Anyone who spends at least 50% of the purchase price of their home or store can potentially reap back 25% of that cost.

People should not be surprised that nearly half of the tax credits issued in the program go to homeowners making their dreams come true and small business owners (but I guess both parties want small businesses extinct anyway).

I think that Brad Lager and his buddies are aiming at the historic rehab tax credit precisely because it gets used by average Missourians. They don’t crow nearly so loudly about the special-interest welfare that goes to rich developers under other programs.

Rehabbing is greener than anything you can build fresh. Dig very deep, and I’m sure it’s suburbia funding this fight, not the country folks, or the small towns, they understand and mostly respect history. It’s land barons and sprawl masters who are against saving a housing stock that could be rebuilt better, and would last longer, than any more profitable venture in new disposable style construction (also using tax credits, by the way, but those are not proposed to be cut). ANYONE interested in learning how this credit can be used should visit http://www.dnr.mo.gov/shpo/TaxCrdts.htm . It is an economic engine that works, for areas otherwise unable to revive. Capping it on a annual basis will only ensure the Big Boys get served, and the owner occupiers die off. Besides all of that, you must usually invest 5X the amount of the credit, and proveide proof of that investment, prior to submitting an application. This cap would kill the credit, and killing the credit will ensure the rest of St. Louis’ great unrehabbed architecture ends up falling down and in New Orleans.

Well, I’m certainly glad Mr. Deal is concerned about my job security. In times like these I’ll take friends anywhere. But unfortunately I wasn’t smart enough to take advantage of the extraordinary success of the Missouri tax credit program over the last decade. I haven’t made a dime from historic preservation projects in Missouri. As a lifelong Republican I’m not at all opposed to people making money, even those “developers”. But two things should be kept in mind: 1) for every $1 some developer made in these projects, $7 or $8 dollars were made by the plumber, electrician and carpenter. 2) The vast majority of the projects in Missouri that have taken advantage of this credit are relatively small projects — two-thirds of them less than $500,000…hardly the scale that would allow developers to “plunder” the rest of us. In fact one project in seven was less than $100,000. There simply isn’t a better “mom and pop” incentive.

Mr. Deal is correct, most of my clients are public and non-profit entities dealing with economic development (I never share in that “plunder” of the developers). And in 25 years of working in economic development I’ve never seen a more effective state incentive for investment anywhere than the historic rehabilitation tax credit in Missouri.

If I were a Republican member of the Missouri legislature, instead of trying to dump this tax credit, I’d use it to contrast this economic stimulus with the package passed by Congress. “Why is your stimulus package costing the taxpayers over $210,000 per job created, when for ten years here in Missouri we’ve had an effective investment stimulus that cost our taxpayers less than a tenth of that? And our investment is in long term assets, not short term fluff.”

As to the numbers, they are all based on the econometric model created by the US Department of Commerce. So unless those green eye shade PhD’s in the Bureau of Economic Analysis are getting a cut from developers, the numbers probably stand scrutiny.

In spite of my periodic policy disagreements with my party, I’ve remained a Republican for 40 years because I truly believe in being frugal and responsible with the taxpayers’ dollars. In the realm of economic development I don’t know of a more successful example in doing exactly that than the Missouri historic rehabilitation tax credit.

A) You CANNOT accurately attribute all jobs created by economic development projects that have received tax credits solely to the existence of tax credits for those projects B) most, if not all, of these large economic developers would continue with their projects in the absence of tax credits C) if the tax credit is effective and warrants continuation then it will survive the legislative oversight just like all other programs in the Annual Budget are expected to do, therefore those tax credit programs that are effective and not being abused will be continued. So there is ZERO grounds for arguing against restraint and oversight in the tax credit arena. Further, Tim’s post
“Economists will tell you the economic activity generated usually doesn’t make up for the lost tax revenue. And most developers, despite their pleas of poverty, don’t need them to make projects happen. The consumer’s don’t get these savings, the developers and contractors gobble them up. It’s a waste of money.” is on the money.

The only people that restraint may be detrimental to are fat-cat cronies of Mayor Slay. I thank god every day that I don’t live in St. black-hole-of-cash Louis

PD is BS…

Hey! I like that!

Here’s a novel idea. If the Shitty of St. Loser
is so eager to reverse the diaspora of the descendants
of the formerly civil urbane sophisticates
who used to dwell there, how about “taking care
of business” and getting their berg in order–
have good public schools which are state accredited
and don’t need to bribe the student body to appear
in the critical first three weeks of school
with eligibility for a lottery to win a large
television.

That might be a start.

Of course all the money they soak in from the
county on the zoo museum tax financing district
certainly has helped to create attractions
which do possibly attract some who would otherwise
let discretion be the better part of valor…

But wouldn’t it be far better to provide an
attractive place to raise a family than to depend
upon bribes and diversions?

And as some others are, I am not convinced that
all the construction and related activities can
be laid at the feet of this scheme we’re
discussing here either. If you have a dwelling,
believe it not you just might maintain it because
it’s necessary to keep a roof over your head!

Imagine that!

Contractors get hired on jobs like that too.

If you add these tax incentives into it you might
get people doing full-scale renovations rather
than temperate maintenance. What happens then?
Why thanks for asking–let me tell you. You get
areas which appear to those considering buying
or renting there to be far more attractive than
they really are and so you defraud them into
investing in your painted whore.

And remember children, you can paint a whore all
you want, but in the end all she’s ever going
to be is a whore.

And that’s what the Shitty of St. Loser has become.

Yeah, I’ve seen “attractive developments” before.

I finally saw Gaslight Square when I was in
HS. When I’d been in grammar school my parents
and their friends used to occasionally go down
there to take in some off-color comedy acts and
listen to the music of pimps, whores, hypes
and other assorted criminals–”jazz”.

By the time I got there (we collected pennies
in the cafeteria for KDNA, which was sort of like
a ’70s precursor to KDHX, and then borrowed one
of our parents’ car and took the proceeds down
to the station) the area was a disaster-area.
The building I went to visit literally had
part missing–there was a door you were warned
not to open and go out because it opened up on
open space…

What had happened? Innovators had made an “attraction”
with clubs and bistros aimed to appeal to the
artsy-fartsy wannabes who had a false sense of
nostalgia for cities their national leadership had
wisely encouraged them to flee–through subsidies
which were also at the same time major civil-
defense projects and TRUE economic engines.
They got the phony nostalgia driven by campy
jazzy movies and other popular culture right, but
what they hadn’t reckoned with were the Dark
Brotherhood of Destruction and their attendant
predatory criminal tendencies and the close proximity
to that district.

In other words, they hadn’t really done their homework
and hadn’t “taken care of ‘BUSINESS’”.

I’ve done some light construction and demolition. I know what’s safe and what’s not safe in sewer venting
and a variety of other such quality-of-life and health and safety issues. I’ve been in and around and worked on housing stock in that city and newer housing stock, and fixing that old crap up is JUST PLAIN STUPID.

If you’ve actually fixed it up to the point anyone sane would want their children growing up in it, you might as well have razed it and built a modern safe structure which is economical to heat and cool.

Dog only knows what kind of contamination is lurking in the soil around most of those old dwellings. Did you know that it used to be common to sprinkle “paris green” in and around dwellings back when that housing stock was new-to-middle-aged? It was the popular insecticide–anyone could buy it at the dry-goods or hardware store.

It’s arsenic.

What sort of lead contamination occurs in soils around dwellings that old which were formerly caked in paints using lead compounds ( and sometimes worse) for their coloration? I’ve even worked with painting contractors in modern times who didn’t adequately work to control contamination of soil around a dwelling by
such wonderful materials as asbestos or lead-based
paints they were scouring/scraping/washing off the
structure prior to recoating. I can just imagine what was going on with job-sites like that 80 years ago…

And then you want people to move in and grow a vegetable garden in it and eat the vegetables…

Yeah. Right. I’m going to go do that because some jerk-wad figured out a way to shift tax money around to some of his cronies who are contractors specializing in renovations.

Let me get rid of my dwelling which was a woods where people hunted squirrels just prior to our occupying it to go live there–I’m rarin’ to go.

Just paint that whore up–I won’t be able to resist.

Here’s what I’ve got to say to that. St. Louis Center. Mansion House Project. Pruitt-Igoe.

I guess the baseball stadium beer built wasn’t quite historic enough for renovation… Instead the built a new-old pile of bricks. The one they tore down was a modernistic forward-looking structure. What they put up was faux-nostalgic retro-looking. Is there something wrong with this pictrue? Are the social mores going to go backwards as well? I can see the headlines now–slave auctions resume on the old courthouse steps…

Oh yeah, and let us never forget Irene “Didshego WiWi”
Smith and her traveling converted trash-can outhouse road-show. I forget who was working for the school board who cast a voodoo spell on someone they were having a little disagreement with.

What people really want in a place to live is somewhere you can drive on the street and not be fender-to-fender with a population of motorists 50% of whom are not insured at any given time. They want schools to send their kids to which don’t even consider a need to have metal detectors. Not topping the nation in two common types of STD might be nice too.

I’m all for historic preservation. Restore the indian mounds–Cherokee Cave while you’re at it.

Meanwhile, why don’t you see if you can find some
fools in Belgium to sell the rest of it to?

While awaiting the inevitable, at least
try to deal with issues of substance which can
attract the type of people who would sustain
a city through generations of productive occupation
rather than trendy “fluff” which attracts people
who zip around from trend to trend like flies
from one pile of manure to the next freshly laid steaming heap.

Bye for now.

let’s see…

“PD is BS” said:

“A) You CANNOT accurately attribute all jobs created by economic development projects that have received tax credits solely to the existence of tax credits for those projects”

hmmm…

tax credits = incentive for projects that otherwise would not happen = work that otherwise would not exist.

ok so not ALL jobs. maybe 90%? in any case i doubt you have any evidence to support your assertion.

“B) most, if not all, of these large economic developers would continue with their projects in the absence of tax credits”

perhaps you completely missed - or didn’t bother to read - the part about how 2/3 of the tax-credited projects cost less than $500,000, and 1/7 of them less than $100,000? we’re talking about home owners and small businesses. the vast majority of these projects are not those of “large economic developers”.

“SNAFU” said:

nothing intelligent. but i encourage everyone to (attempt) to read through his/her rant. here’s a funny excerpt:

“Here’s a novel idea. If the Shitty of St. Loser
is so eager to reverse the diaspora of the descendants
of the formerly civil urbane sophisticates
who used to dwell there, how about “taking care
of business” and getting their berg in order–
have good public schools which are state accredited
and don’t need to bribe the student body to appear
in the critical first three weeks of school
with eligibility for a lottery to win a large
television.”

i especially like the part about how we should get our berg in order and just HAVE good public schools. duh! its just that simple! just HAVE them! seems to me the tax credit has been “taking care of business” pretty well. it has been the #1 most successful such program in the country and has lead to significant population increases in depopulated neighborhoods. why don’t you go to the old north saint louis (http://www.onsl.org), for example, and ask some of the new residents how “defrauded” they feel. thanks for wasting everyone’s time with 10 pages of substance-less b*tching.