Throughout the U.S., individual states offer unique tax credits and negotiated incentives to attract or retain business operations. Currently, there are more than 2,400 state and local incentive programs available. There are a variety of ways these...

This content refers to the state low-income housing tax credit programs - not the federal LIHTC program. The following chart is intended for summary purposes only. As state LIHTC programs vary widely, it is recommended that you gather complete...

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC) are two of the most effective anti-poverty tools in the United States, helping to boost household economic security and incentivize work for millions of Americans each year....

The New Markets Tax Credit Program (NMTC Program) helps economically distressed communities attract private investment capital. This federal tax credit helps to fill project financing gaps by enabling investors to make larger investments than would...

This notice provides additional guidance to clarify and amplify the procedures for the allocation of credits under Section 48C of the Internal Revenue Code regarding the qualifying advanced energy project credit program.

This announcement addresses the Federal income tax treatment under the Internal Revenue Code of amounts paid toward the purchase of energy efficient property and improvements under the Department of Energy Home Energy Rebate Programs pursuant to the...

The purpose of this toolkit is to provide an overview of the tools in the development finance toolbox -- such as bonds, tax increment finance, tax credits, and revolving loan funds -- and how they can direct and attract capital to rural businesses...

More than two dozen advocates for low-income housing and community investment are sounding the alarm over the global tax deal agreed to by the U.S. and dozens of other countries. The advocates specifically are worried about proposed rules for a...

States across the country are starting to gather data and use evidence to systematically evaluate tax incentives. To illustrate what sort of evaluations states are conducting, NCSL created a database of state tax incentive evaluations. Evaluations...

Tulsa Remote, one of the nation’s first and largest remote worker relocation initiatives, has brought more than 1,200 remote workers to the city since 2018 by offering a $10,000 grant and additional support services to eligible workers who move to...

Federal, state, and local policies profoundly affect nearly every aspect of American neighborhoods, including their economic vitality, their shape and form, their social fabric, and their forms of self-governance. The conditions facing American...

The Michigan Economic Development Corporation’s (MEDC) focus on direct community investment is unique among its state-level peers. A strategy of MEDC Community Development Incentives (CDI) Programs is to identify and actualize place-based investment...

Many economic development organizations (EDOs) have embraced the mission to support entrepreneurial firms in their communities. EDOs engage in their entrepreneurial ecosystems, in part, by providing resources, sometimes in the form of business...

A Playbook for Scaling Latino-Owned Businesses is designed to support the scaling and continued growth of Latino-owned businesses by offering entrepreneur support organizations, financial institutions, and other stakeholders actions they can take to...

Albuquerque Economic Development has embraced the critical need for developing a strategy not only to drive recovery in the region, but to ensure that it does not again find itself left behind as it was following the Great Recession. The 2021...

The Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness and Smart Incentives have produced a series of reports for the State Economic Development Executives network over the past year providing guidance on critical issues and trade-offs to help state...

Food Forward NYC is the City’s first ever 10-year food policy plan, laying out an ambitious interagency policy framework to reach a more equitable, sustainable, and healthy food system by 2031. The success of this plan depends on the partnership of...

The New Partnership on Infrastructure seeks to advance national policies driven by local innovation, with cities serving as testbeds for experimentation and transferable solutions. This document champions that idea. It is a summation of local...

To address local disparities and help struggling areas thrive, governments at all levels have spent billions of dollars on a range of geographically targeted, or "place-based," economic development programs — mostly in the form of financial...

This policy paper from the U.S. Impact Investing Alliance outlines 12 specific policy recommendations and ideas with the potential to catalyze more impact investments to help address urgent social, economic, and environmental challenges.

This report provides a five-step roadmap towards a more inclusive, dynamic, and productive small-business sector. The report breaks down the five steps into ten major policy recommendations with detailed policy proposals. It was authored by the...

How can economic development organizations modify their incentive programs to help struggling small businesses? To assist in sorting through the options, Smart Incentives has published Guidance on Adjusting Discretionary Incentive Programs to...

CALED knows from its work supporting economic development throughout California that infrastructure financing is a challenge for many rural communities. CALED collaborated with CDFA to develop this guidebook to meet the need for a resource to help...

This report provides financing strategies for the redevelopment of One Monument Square in Troy, NY.

Equitable Food Oriented Development (EFOD) is a framework, and growing movement, to reap the powerful benefits of food projects and enterprises as vehicles for community development and health, while investing deeply in the self-determination and...

In evaluating incentives, everything depends on the details: how much in incentives it takes to truly cause a firm to locate or expand, the multiplier effects, the effects of jobs on employment rates, how jobs affect tax revenue versus public...

This white paper is part of a series examining the potential creation of a food systems asset class which supports the market growth of local and regional food systems. This paper focuses specifically on targeted financing tools that can be used to...

This brief highlights the many ways and scales at which local governments can invest in aggregation, processing, and distribution infrastructure to support local and regional food systems, from commissioning assessment studies and food hub business...

As the investment community in the United States, particularly within the fields of sustainable, responsible, and impact investing, shows an increasing appetite for investing in sustainable agriculture and food systems across asset classes, a subset...

This CRS report briefly describes what census tracts have been designated as an OZ, what types of entities can are eligible as QOFs, the tax benefits of investments in QOFs, and what economic effects can be expected from OZ tax incentives.

During this installment of the CDFA // BNY Mellon Webcast Series, expert speakers from CAI Global, Baltimore Development Corporation, Arlington Economic Development, and VEDP provided an in-depth overview of the approaches being used by cities,...

When paired with energy efficiency measures, cost effective solar energy systems can support state and local program administrators’ goals to reduce low-income household energy burden. Energy burden is the share or percentage of annual household...

This study was published by the Lincoln Institute. The authors examine how to make property-tax incentives for business more effective. They find that governments should not approve every incentive request, target use of incentives, avoid incentive...

Building on earlier research by The Pew Charitable Trusts, this report identifies best practices for effectively evaluating tax incentives. Specifically, Pew recommends that states take three steps: make a plan, measure the impact, and inform policy...

Every year local and state governments in the United States expend tens of billions of dollars on economic development incentives. Under intense pressure to deliver economic opportunity, policymakers utilize incentives to encourage private sector...

This audit, produced by Minnesota State Auditor Rebecca Otto, details the impacts of Tax Increment Financing (TIF) in the State of Minnesota during the 2017 calendar year.

During this installment of the CDFA // BNY Mellon Webcast Series, Nathan Rosenberg with The Broadband Group and Gregory Dunn with Ice Miller LLP presented some of the various financing options & ownership structures available to communities to...

The D.C. Chief Financial Officer's Office is required to review all D.C. tax expenditures (such as abatements, credits, and exemptions) on a five-year cycle. For the FY2017 report fulfilling the requirement, the Office of Revenue Analysis (ORA)...

This report, produced for the Alabama Department of Revenue, analyzes how states use a range of tax and non-tax incentives, both of which have proliferated in the high-stakes bidding war over increasingly-mobile jobs and capital investment.

This paper, produced by the Upjohn Institute, analyzes the intensified use of incentives as local governments compete for new plants and corporate relocations, and as private firms increasingly demand a deal. While incentives promise jobs and tax...

This report, produced by The PEW Charitable Trusts, examines how state governments can find solutions to policies that undermine opportunities for investment and job creation when businesses spend too much time or money on inefficient regulatory...

Ellen Harpel from Smart Incentives provides supplementary information for attendees.

Ellen Harpel from Smart Incentives & Business Development Advisors presents on leveraging tax incentive use in development projects.

Keren Bolter discusses the science behind some of the natural disasters in Florida, then she explores the financing programs and structures for disaster resiliency, partnerships and collaborative efforts to identify financing solutions, and lessons...

This white paper, prepared for Smart Incentives, provides a Descriptive Analysis of U.S. States’ Manufacturing Investment Promotion Programs. It catalogs the varied incentive tools and rationales of individual states toward attracting and...

Sarah Butler from the Commonwealth of Kentucky discusses the latest matters related to economic development in Kentucky, along with a variety of financing programs available from the state. This material explores the economic development finance...

The EPA has designed a document for decision makers to navigate the process of investing in water infrastructure. It will help identify what is needed for financial planning, how to fund and finance a project, and consider which strategic approaches...

This issue of Land Lines from the Lincoln Institute looks at strategies for revitalizing America’s smaller legacy cities, GASB 77 and the cost of property tax incentives for business, the future of U.S. public school revenue from the property tax,...

This paper, produced by the center for Regional Economic Competitiveness, identifies a set of metrics beyond jobs and investment tallies to capture the broader benefits of economic development initiatives.