How to Stop TIFs and Megaprojects: Stories from the Field

When you walk out of your front door and, say, walk to go shopping, do you see things that trouble you? Or is everything fine—in good order—and meeting your needs? In city neighborhoods, local economic policy and city planning are central to these outcomes, but are often opaque to everyday people. We as residents have the right to know who plans what for whom, and who profits from those plans?

In an ideal world, the public would have the right to determine our own future—the people plan the development and improvement of our own communities rather than wealthy outsiders. Unfortunately, far too often, elites—our local oligarchs, if you will—use fancy tools of municipal finance like tax increment financing to expense development costs onto taxpayers, even as they profit.

What Is Tax Increment Financing?

A dominant funding tool that powers much of local economic development planning and construction is the practice known as tax increment financing (TIF). As NPQ has covered, the way tax increment financing works is that the city borrows by issuing municipal bonds against the assumed benefits of future development within a specially demarcated geographic area, known as a TIF district.

Too often, elites…use fancy tools of municipal finance like tax increment financing to expense development costs onto taxpayers, even as they profit.When property values rise for a specified period of time, which in my state of Illinois can be as long as 23 years, the city or school district does not get the revenue coming from the increased value of the property. Instead, the money goes to pay back the bondholders and generate profit—often considerable profit—for real estate developers.

NPQ has looked at TIFs in the past with some skepticism. My own work via The TIF Illumination Project since 2013 has spawned over 245 public meetings and has convinced me that TIFs corrupt the planning process, gifting billions of public dollars to wealthy, mostly White developers to subsidize private megaprojects of dubious public benefit.

Through creative, resourceful efforts, grassroots activists in Detroit and Philadelphia demonstrate these assertions, revealing the details of massive public subsidies for private megaprojects using TIF as the main conveyance for those subsidies. They are saying “NO!” to their mayors and city councils and editorial boards—who are often eager to advance these top-down privately owned projects.

The Struggle to Preserve Public Assets in Detroit

The Detroit People’s Platform (DPP) is a robust grassroots organization that “is building a Detroit where race and the priorities of majority Black Detroit are centered.” DPP publishes a physical newspaper and is active on social media. Here are two images from their work explaining TIFs as a form of “tax capture.”

Advocates identified over $2 billion in TIF subsidies for private projects in Detroit—an amount that is more than 70 percent of the city’s annual budget of $2.77 billion. Detroiters did not widely know these numbers before, and their repetition over the past three years has changed the conversation on community development in Detroit.

The research compiled by DPP and its allies was folded into community meetings and candidate forums for the 2021 municipal elections. All candidates were asked to respond to two questions:

1. Do you support the use of tax captures and TIFs as an economic development strategy here in Detroit?
2. What alternative strategies for economic development would you advocate in place of these tax captures and TIF districts?

Theo Pride is a community organizer at DPP and coordinated the organization’s TIF research and civic engagement. Right now, Detroit is in the middle of a massive megaproject undertaking called District Detroit, which is supported by almost $800 million in public subsidies. One of the main drivers is Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores. According to Forbes, Gores is worth some $9.4 billion.

Pride told NPQ that the candidate forums and other public education work that DPP did around TIFs have rippled across the city: “We have educated and illuminated folks, and we have really driven home how big business is profiting from all this and how it impacts them.”

TIFs [tax increment financing] corrupt the planning process, gifting billions of public dollars to wealthy, mostly White developers.

A few years ago, DPP stood alone in its critique of the city’s economic development agency, the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation. But now, many groups seek to rein the agency in. Pride and DPP are part of a citywide coalition, Detroiters for Tax Justice, formed in April 2023 with the mission of “preserving public assets for a better Detroit.”

The struggle against District Detroit and related projects is ongoing. To date, the group has held eight public teach-ins, usually at local churches. The most recent one was hosted in March 2025.

Philadelphia Chinatown Residents Organize Against Stadium Subsidies

Deborah Wei is a founding member of Asian Americans United, which was formed in 1985. She is also among the leaders of the No Arena Philly campaign.

When NPQ spoke with her, Wei recalled a long list of attacks and encroachments on Chinatown by developers and the City of Philadelphia, block by block. Her organization has been in the middle of these fights since its founding.

In their most recent struggle, the Philadelphia 76ers sought to build a new $1.3 billion stadium in the city’s historic Chinatown. Among the leaders of the effort was team co-owner David Blitzer, who is a member of the Management and Operating committees of the Blackstone Group—the famed financial firm, which has more than $1 trillion in assets under management.

As Wei detailed, “The mayor and billionaires have proposed an arena in the heart of our city. It’s an increasingly bad deal, even based on their own admission. The deal sides with billionaires like Josh Harris and David Adelman (sports team owners and investors involved in the 76ers deal) who have already proven they don’t care about our city or our people.”

Wei spent three years building a coalition of community groups and pods of volunteers to take on research and analysis of the people and organizations pushing the project, direct action organizing, media relations, and messaging.

As it turned out, Mayor Cherelle Parker and the majority of the 17-member City Council were solidly behind the project, receiving substantial campaign contributions from the real estate and construction sectors. The media ecosystem was, like many places, heavily influenced by big advertisers and big business allies of the project.

At one point, the mayor (who is a Black woman) held a press conference announcing support from Black business leaders and clergy. Wei commented with some sadness that this is a standard tactic for the powers that be, to exploit real tensions that exist between the Black and Asian communities.

The No Arena team concluded that their best chances of winning was to delay the project as long as possible—to swamp all public meetings with protesters and speakers, often extending the length of such meetings into multiple days. They worked the state legislature and eventually got pledges from state representatives and even Governor Josh Shapiro not to back any state subsidies for the arena.

But this analysis and their forceful tactics revealed a key difference of this fight from previous fights.

“In the old days,” she said, “we could delay or defeat a project by using the regulations and show that a project violated zoning or other planning procedures.” But now, Wei added, the presence of hedge fund money has presented the organizers “with a very different terrain.”

Using Blitzer’s role at Blackstone and the firm’s high international profile to their advantage, Wei called on Leilani Farha, the former special rapporteur on the right to housing for the United Nations, based in London. Farha is the global director for The Shift, a human rights organization that seeks to “end homelessness, unaffordability, and evictions globally.” Wei explained the situation to Farha’s team, who sent an investigator to Philadelphia to do firsthand reporting. The result was a 13-page report, which was sent to the principals of the arena deal.

The report—dated August 10, 2023—starts, “We wish to express our serious concern regarding the proposed development of a new Philadelphia 76ers basketball arena in Philadelphia’s Fashion District, and in particular the impact that this may have on the city’s Chinatown and its community” (boldface in original).

And it concludes with a warning that this project will violate provisions of United Nations human rights agreements signed by the United States.

They also sent a follow-up letter in December to Mayor Parker and the members of the City Council, which read in part:

Based on the information we have received, it is our view that despite their clear interest in the development plans, the Chinatown community have not been meaningfully engaged in the decision-making and planning regarding 76 Place. As a result, your continued support for the arena is inconsistent with your human rights obligations and responsibilities towards the Chinatown community.

Despite the extraordinary odds against them, the No Arena coalition won.

As WHYY of Philadelphia reported on January 13, “In a stunning turn of events, the Philadelphia 76ers will remain at the sports complex in South Philadelphia instead of building a new basketball arena in Center City, according to multiple City Hall sources. The decision is rooted in a deal struck with Comcast Spectacor, and comes more than two years after the team proposed the new arena.”

Why the turnaround? It’s hard to read the minds of corporate developers, but one factor, according to Larry Platt of the Philadelphia Citizen, was increased cost estimates. Turns out that the stadium was likely to cost a few hundred million more than $1.3 billion. And because of the No Arena team’s advocacy, Governor Shapiro had already pledged that the state would not step in to fill that financing gap. Community organizing, it turns out, paid off.

What Now?

In the Chinatown neighborhood in Philadelphia, Wei notes that the coalition is engaged in ongoing public work. This includes convening neighborhood residents in community design sessions to dream and plan for the site, which remains in the hands of the developers. They hope to launch a dedicated community planning website soon. They’re also conducting one-on-one sessions across the coalition to take the temperature of participants as to what ought to be done next.

Of course, the struggles of communities like these are not unique to Detroit and Philadelphia. These are just two places of many seeking to wrest control from developers in favor of ordinary citizens. One question to ponder is how to build stronger movement infrastructure so that local movements can better learn from and support each other and so that the norm of community development can be what it should be: in the hands of community residents themselves.