tax policy

There is power at the local level. Join us as we build off our latest Under the Lens series to hear about a range of exciting policies and campaigns at […]

In the hunt for ways to fund affordable housing, taxes on controversial activities from gambling to short-term rentals are often appealing. Here’s how that’s been working in four communities.

Chattanooga, Tennessee, aligned its housing tax incentive with the actual cost of charging more affordable rents. Developers are participating.

Taxing land and buildings at different rates can discourage land speculation and encourage housing development.

The tax bill includes a significant expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. However, its other provisions, especially cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, are so harmful that the affordable housing field should not be celebrating.

In 2018, Shelterforce wrote about the Center for Community Progress’s recommendations for tax reform in West Virginia to address vacancy. Guided by CCP’s suggestions, the state auditor’s office has recently passed two laws to change its tax sales process and keep properties in use.

Outdated tax sale rules and predatory investment practices keep Baltimore homes in a revolving door of vacancy. But that could soon change.

Dorothy A. Brown’s The Whiteness of Wealth breaks down the deleterious effect our tax code has had on Black lives. Crown, 2021, 288 pp., $27 (hardcover); $17 (softcover).

The European Union’s rules on subsidies limit bidding wars, and make the level of incentives we have seen for Amazon, Foxconn, and other companies completely impossible.

Because recent advocacy has succeeded in achieving a change in government accounting standards that led many cities and states to disclose the total costs of the tax abatements they provided last year for the very first time, we now are gaining a better sense of just how much these abatements take away from education and other public services.

In Washington state, the dilemma for advocates is how to ask city and county elected officials to significantly increase public resources for housing when their only current choices are regressive tax tools.

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