What if we invested in families instead?

An interesting thought experiment is to imagine what alternative investments could be made with the federal budget in place of some of the current choices.

Using the Moody’s Analytics Housing Gap Data, we arrive at creating a goal of creating 13,500 new units and preservation of 16,500 more.

Newly released data on home appraisal practices is a step forward in the fight against racially biased appraisals. There’s still a long way to go.

Unfortunately, home appraisal bias has become a leading fair housing issue in recent years, both across the nation and in Philadelphia. These racial disparities in home appraisals then contribute to broader disparities we see in generational wealth between Black and white families.

Racial bias in the appraisal industry — an industry that is dominated by white people — is an understudied contributor to historical and ongoing segregation and wealth disparities in Philadelphia and across the United States.

If one of the key reasons that we incur these tax expenditures in the form of the real estate tax abatement is to stimulate real estate markets that are not performing well, then there is no good reason to abate these properties because the market in this area is already performing well.

The discourse around proposed changes to the federal tax system, especially between talk show pundits and economists and politicians—each with their own allegiances—is devoid of some simple, transparent facts