In reply to Daniel Choma.

Ultimately, TIF is like most tools for development: without clear equity driven guidelines: it can become a puck that developers can use to blackmail the city to give them special treatment.

I fully endorse using TIF in support of covering the development costs of needed amneties in neighborhoods that need amneties or subsidizing lower income housing in a development that would never have had it initially. (like the Ford site in St Paul).

But it’s a tax rebate. There’s only so much you can do to increase parity in wealth distribution by giving a tax rebate to wealthy developers. And a wealthy developers are always gonna get the nice end of that deal, even if the less nice end is a few units of affordable housing which will soon be unaffordable as wages lag behind increases in housing costs.