Among the campaign pitches from the quartet of candidates running for the vacant Toledo City Council District 6 seat, an idea from Jim Nowak stood out as intriguing.
Mr. Nowak, an estate planning and probate attorney, has suggested Toledo start offering tax breaks to people willing to live in Toledo’s neighborhoods between the central business district and the city’s outer boundaries.
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To get people to move into the city, Mr. Nowak suggests Toledo waive their 0.75 percent income tax.
A tax break just for living in the city? Something like that just might work.
Toledo’s population has been in decline for so long that hardly anyone can remember when there was not a steady drain of people from the city.
Census figures released last May show Toledo will soon dip to a population of just 250,000 — the smallest the city has been since 1920.
And while many residents leave Toledo for big cities on the coasts, or regions with nicer weather and more jobs, an awful lot do not go far when they move out of the city. They migrate to Toledo’s suburbs.
Toledo’s business, civic, and elected leaders all know they need to reverse the population drain. Toledo needs better streets, better job opportunities, better parks and recreation, and much better schools. But does Toledo also need a sweetener to make buying a home and raising a family in the city more appealing?
Property tax deals for developers building new residential units in the city make those homes more affordable. The bargain prices of many Lucas County Land Bank properties are enticing and help rehab the city’s older and often neglected housing stock.
But what if people moving to Toledo could qualify for a personal tax break, or even get a cash-upfront stipend to lure them in? Other older industrial cities have used these kinds of incentives with success.
Beginning in 2010, Detroit offered incentives for people to move to the Midtown neighborhood, which is now so popular that incentives are certainly not necessary. About a third of the participants in the Live Midtown program that offered money to subsidize rent or the purchase of homes and condos came to the neighborhood from Detroit suburbs. Another third were from other parts of the city and the remaining third came from elsewhere.
In Maryland, the Buying Into Baltimore program offers a $5,000 incentive to use toward the purchase of a home anywhere in the city.
The details of an incentive package like this need careful consideration, but as a general idea, this could help Toledo attract the residents it needs to grow and redevelop.
Perhaps the city could partner with some of its largest employers to put together combination incentive deals that might offer tax breaks and corporate signing bonuses for new workers who live in the city. Maybe, as Mr. Nowak suggested, Toledo could begin by offering the deals to its public employees — cops and teachers, notably — to make it more appealing for those employees to live in the city they serve.
Getting people to buy in to Toledo’s revitalization is going to require getting people to buy in Toledo.
First Published April 29, 2018, 9:15 p.m.
