The taking from the poor to give to the rich has been happening for at least 50 years. It is not like stealing but gathering taxes, and rather than using them in areas where they may be most needed, they are used in areas that don’t need redevelopment.
However, LeRoy said, the study mimics the “reverse Robin Hood” effect his researchers have identified in numerous big cities’ use of tax incentives for decades.
“They (the cities) were helping places that needed help the least and taking jobs away from places that needed help the most,” he said. “This study is very consistent with what we’ve found in other places.”
The taking from the poor to give to the rich has been happening for at least 50 years. Bill King has written extensively on the TIRZ.
However, I find several things about this growing reliance on TIRZs to be of concern:
- They have increasingly become a tool to avoid the revenue cap that voters imposed on the City in 2004. Property taxes paid to the TIRZ do not count against that revenue cap.
- There is a lack of transparency with respect to the TIRZs finances. I was able to only find one of the TIRZs that posted its annual audit on-line. There is some summary information about the TIRZs in the City’s audit, but there finances are not consolidated with the City’s. They are truly an “off balance sheet” activity.
- I have found in a number of cases that the neighborhoods around the TIRZs are upset and either oppose their plans or feel they are not prioritizing the right projects. Something is fundamentally wrong when the very neighborhoods the TIRZs are supposed be serving do not support their work.
- But what I find the most troubling about the TIRZs is how far they have strayed from their original purpose. The City’s website says that area covered by a TIRZ must be “a menace to the public health, safety, morals, or welfare in its present condition.” It goes on to describe such conditions as the presence of “substandard or deteriorating structures”, “unsanitary or unsafe conditions”, “conditions that endanger life or property”, etc. I find it hard to square this description with neighborhoods like Uptown, Upper Kirby or Memorial which, combined, collect 40% of the tax increment and have issued over 40% of the total bonds owed by TIRZs.
- I sat down recently with the leadership of the Uptown TIRZ and asked how they justified the expenditure of $120 million in property tax money to build their proposed Bus Rapid Transit project on Post Oak Boulevard – running dedicated bus lanes through one the richest neighborhoods in the City – when so many other neighborhoods were begging for money to build sidewalks, tear down abandoned houses and fix their streets. Their answer was that “we need to feed the beast”, meaning that the investment was necessary because of the tremendous sales and property tax revenue generated by the Uptown area.
- Laying aside for a moment the dispute as to whether BRT lanes will actually alleviate congestion and contribute to the further economic development in the Galleria area, TIRZs were not established to foster and fund more development in areas that are already highly developed. They were established to help neighborhoods and business districts that are depressed.
Like most such issues, much will be written, and the bureaucracies will wait it out and then continue doing what they have always done, screw the working men and women.