Inquirer reported<\/a>. Councilmember Nicolas O\u2019Rourke responded by saying he was more focused on ensuring the city gets sufficient revenue.\n<\/p>\nDevelopers in the audience at the Center City District event yesterday said supporters of a new tax abatement and other housing stimulus measures have to do a better job of advertising their long-term benefits.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cThat kind of conversation, holistically, isn\u2019t happening right now,\u201d developer Jeremy Blatstein said. \u201cThe conversation \u2026 is being overtaken by the professional protesters or advocates.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
Robert Zuritsky, president and CEO of Parkway Corp., said he can\u2019t build on parking lots he owns in Center City because of high construction costs. He argued for an expanded tax abatement that includes new, ground-up construction on lots like his, not just conversions. Single-family homes could be excluded to reduce opposition to the measure, he said.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cThe taxes on the land go up if the improvements are made. If the improvements are not made, nothing happens, and the taxes go down. This is a no-brainer, but the messaging has been perverted through the decades, because of, \u2018My neighbor is paying less than I am for a house on my block,\u2019\u201d Zuritsky said.\n<\/p>\n
Panelist Angela Brooks, Parker\u2019s chief housing and urban development officer, said it was important for the development community to advocate and provide information about desired policy changes.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cData does help. Hearing the stories does help,\u201d said Brooks, who noted that she previously worked as a developer herself. \u201cIt does help to hear those stories, and sometimes those aren\u2019t the stories that are on the mic.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
Jon Geeting, director of policy and advocacy at the think tank Build Philly Now, said he has identified at least 19, and as many as 42, office buildings declining in value due to vacancies, and thus candidates for conversion to housing if a new 20-year tax abatement were available.\n<\/p>\n
While the administration has yet to release details of its abatement proposal, Geeting said he has tried to calculate the potential tax impact if those projects advanced with abatements.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cIf those [values] keep declining, converting to residential could end up bringing us more tax revenue during the abated period,\u201d he said. \u201cSo the question might not be, \u2018How much money are we losing?\u2019 It might be, \u2018How much could we stand to gain from doing this?\u2019\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Parker administration is crafting a bill to authorize the new abatement in Philadelphia, but the proposal faces…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":302501,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70,2312,25554],"class_list":["post-302500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-planphilly","tag-tax-abatement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302500\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}