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CRA, development, downtown, funding, infrastructure, investment, private, projects, public, TIF
Community Redevelopment Areas, CRA’s for short (and sometimes interchanged with the term Community Devleopment District-CDD), are a special government framework set up to support development of a community. A quick look at a dictionary states that a CRA is “a dependent special district in which any future increases in property values are set aside to support economic development projects within that district.”
A set of qualifiers dictates what areas can be designated a CRA. Substandard or inadequate structures, shortage of affordable housing, inadequate infrastructure, insufficient roadways and inadequate parking are all factors in deciding to award a CRA designation.
It seems, from the outside, that a CRA district may be one in which not many individuals would want to purposely live or work in- but that is not necessarily the case. In Tampa, for example, our growing downtown and some of the surrounding neighborhoods have CRA designations. This allows for the leveraging of public funds, specifically Tax Incremental Funds (TIF), to promote private-sector activity in the targeted area. CRA’s, then, are a specifically focused financing tool for redevelopment.
Private sector development has too often been relied upon to be the sole driving force of redevelopment. A holistic approach towards renewal is a better bet, as unrestrained market-led development may have detrimental consequences for the economic fabric of our cities and quality of life for residents.Property-led development is highly dependent on the public sector and the process of property-led development has the capacity to undermine a range of local and community-wide interests in areas affected by redevelopment schemes, by way of prioritizing short-term development goals over long-term sustainability.
CRA districts are great at mediating short-term goals with long-term needs for a community. That’s why so many of them are successful. Many times a developer can find favor with local government to assist with costs associated with construction. The partial waiving of fees, assessments and taxes that come with new construction can lead to an overburdened system that lacks the funding to increase capacity for sewer, water, public utilities and general neighborhood aesthetic concerns. Community Redevelopment Agencies, who oversee each CRA district, are authorized to take the earned TIF monies and distribute them to special projects within the district to ease the burden of new development on systems that are shared by all. This creates an environment that is friendly to private-sector business but also respects the public’s rights to safe, reliable and sustainable neighborhood facilities and utilities. In this way CRA’s impact real estate by finding solutions to issues that can either hinder public support of private development initiatives or that prevent future private development due to a taxed public utilities system where no additional projects can come online without major upfront investment by the developer to roads, utilities and the like.
If you live in Tampa, FL you can go here to find out if you live in a CRA district. I encourage those that do to start attending there local committee meetings that are held each month. These special committee meetings advise our City Council members, who are also our CRA representatives, on how to progress with projects and funding requests.