The Historical Roots of Tax Increment Financing, or How Real Estate Consultants Kept Urban Renewal Alive

Scholars often explain the rise of tax increment financing (TIF) as a natural progression toward localized revenue sources born of devolution, increased interlocal competition for business investment, and fiscal constraint. Although such factors provide important context, our genealogy of TIF in the state of Illinois reveals that critical actors—private real estate consultants—actively promoted the adoption and subsequent promotion of TIF as an economic development tool. Through interviews and a review of primary documents, we uncover a network of private consultants who had prior experience shepherding federal urban renewal dollars to cities and who later mobilized concerns around the 1970s deindustrialization crisis to steer the use of property tax incentives from job creation/retention to real estate development.