It isn’t that black and white. I live southeast of downtown. This this type of development occurring along the southern corridors would be fantastic, but I disagree that we have to give away all of the taxes that would be generated in the area for the next 30 years to do it. If this doesn’t go through, someone else will build there eventually. There is not a binary choice between: 1. this proposal or 2. blight. And if Kane isn’t building here, he’ll be building elsewhere in Raleigh. Giving away this money would just be diverting growth that would be happening elsewhere into a specific arrangement where the city doesn’t get to collect the tax revenue that would allow it to support the growth and maintain the infrastructure.
Raleigh is already planning on a $300m-400m budget shortfall this year. It just doesn’t seem smart to spend this money to build this proposal in its current state. I just don’t see why the stadium is necessary, since almost all of the proposed benefits can be had for a comparative pittance. Let Kane build everything except the stadium, kick him a few $m for the greenway improvements and affordable housing and the city would get all of the benefits and almost none of the liability.
Can we just extend the gondola to DoSo? Maybe there’s a triangle from DTR > Dix > DoSo > DTR? Of course this would connect with the Raleigh Artery at Dix.
So why did we ever stop talking about Kane’s “Prime Corridor” stretching from Downtown South through the warehouse district, Glenwood South, up to the Iron District (not Kane), then to North Hills? Sounds like the prefect densifying corridor for a monorail
True, but your example of the failed Randy Parton theater is WAY different than what we are looking at in Raleigh. A 3rd party developer had a personal stake in the theater being developed, found a sucker town among 20 fiscally poor Northeastern NC counties who were “competing” with each other to land a theater to be run and managed by a drunken brother of a country music star. Randy Parton’s sole experience he brought to the table was he sang at his sister Dolly’s amusement park in Pigeon Forge. He’d never developed or run or managed ANYTHING like this before. And I don’t think for a moment the “winning” town of Roanoke Rapids had the sophistication to recognize they were being taken to the cleaners as the approved that white elephant.
Compared to Kane, who has been the King Midas touch of everything in Raleigh he’s done in the past 20 years, and has a track record delivering on promises to develop and improve communities he develops.
So yes, Parton’s theater in BFE, NC is a TIF gone wrong, but that’s not the table that’s set for a TIF in Raleigh for Downtown South
There’s an optics issue in our country with regard to buses vs rail solutions. If we go with bus service, I think that I’d be in support of RLine expansion rather than BRT since this route would have more of a point to point mission. Also, the RLine already serves the convention center. That said, I am not against multiple stops along the route if those stops are paired with more high density development in the corridor.
There are lots and lots and lots of examples of TIF projects being a bad deal for taxpayers, though, and the vast majority of them did not involve Randy Parton in any way.
In Improving Tax Increment Financing (TIF) for Economic Development, University of Illinois at Chicago Professor David Merriman reviews more than 30 studies of TIF over several decades, concluding that “in most cases, TIF has not accomplished the goal of promoting economic development.”
Maybe this time really will be different, but history strongly suggests that the onus is on the people sticking their hands and asking for citizens’ money to prove that their proposal is different from the litany of past TIF boondoggles, not the other way around.
Is the only purpose of a TIF project economic development? I generally like having stadiums and arenas and other public venues because it gives me more things to do and makes my life happier and more interesting. I’m willing to have my tax money invested in things that make my city a better place to live even if it doesn’t fully pay for itself.
For some reason I’m not sure I fully understand, the NC State Graduate Student Association has come out against the Downtown South proposal. I’m struggling to understand why. I live in Rochester Heights, the neighborhood they keep referencing, and they claim a group came round door to door last week and couldn’t find anybody who knew anything about the development. Never saw them. Pretty sure I’m the only grad student who lives in this neighborhood right now. Very odd.
TIFs take the additional tax revenue you’d expect from new economic development, pays it to developers upfront, and expects the actual development to boost up tax revenue and “pay back” what they first got.
So yeah, it’s “economic development” if you reeeeally dumb it down. …but to be more specific, a government issuing a TIF is betting on a project to return the money it threw at them.
In a perfect world, this is just like paying a down payment on something new and cool for a city. But the problem (see @daviddonovan’s post) is that you can easily over-estimate how much tax revenue you’d gain from new developments. And what do you do when you spend too much money? You cut your losses somewhere else -like city services somewhere else in the city.
Do you have a source for this? I’m also a grad student affiliated with State, but I don’t think I ever got a GSA email about this or have seen them post anything of this sort.
That how we got PNC Arena it was because of that NC State needed a new basketball stadium. But the City wasn’t willing to pay with there Dollars it was a stadium for a pro-football team. And Raleigh said you want our funding then we’re gonna make a bid for the Canes to come here. And that how we got the Carolina Hurricanes we need to do that approach right now. That what I’ve been advocating for for years.
We could attract the 2024 Democratic or Republican Convention will be at max hotel there I’ll be concentrated in downtown we’ll have the transit infrastructure. Time for Raleigh to go into bigger and better things!!!
Even putting aside the public financing, I just can’t imagine selling this big dumb site to a team:
“Yeah, I know you want a lot of activity and foot-traffic around, so we’re planning for a people-mover!”
“A people-mover?”
“Yeah, you know, a route that takes people from downtown to the stadium”
“So it’s not downtown”
“Yeah, it is”
“But you need a bus to get there from downtown”
“No, a people-mover” Click
