
Pinellas seeks input for spending $813 million in storm recovery funds
Why it matters: The county, which shouldered back-to-back hurricanes last year, is now getting the largest federal payout in the state, which can help rebuild homes and businesses and repair damaged infrastructure.
Zoom in: The money comes from a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grant to support long-term recovery from Hurricane Idalia in 2023, and hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024.
The grant will serve residents in all cities countywide, except for St. Petersburg, which received its own allocation, per a press release.
It can be used toward repairing damaged buildings, upgrading infrastructure to boost storm resilience and providing worker assistance.
Driving the news: Pinellas has launched an online survey and will host public meetings in April and May to help shape its spending plan — a requirement from HUD.

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Forbes
2 days ago
- Forbes
Property Tax Reductions Can Yield Affordable Multifamily Housing
Reducing or eliminating property tax for projects that include some affordable housing set asides has become a common practice in the United States. The policies and programs are based on the correct assumption that when costs to produce housing go up, so do prices and rents. Property tax is not a trivial element of the costs of producing and operating housing. Building housing increases the value of property, and that increase in value results in higher taxes and operating costs, often dampening incentives to make improvements. Tax abatement and exemption programs to reverse this effect and create incentives take different forms. This brief survey is based on an analysis done by the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) of tax abatement and exemption programs for housing across the country. Property Tax Reductions for Non-Profit Affordable Housing Some states, including Alabama, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and South Carolina, have abatement programs that have tax abatements for non-profits that provide affordable housing at varying income levels. Alabama exempts projects that meet the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Section 202 requirements, and house senior citizens. Arizona offers a property tax exemption for non-profit organizations that have housing under a restrictive covenant, something typical of Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) projects. In Texas, property tax exemptions are available for Public Facility Corporations, non-profit entities created by local government. Property Tax Reductions for Mixed-Income or Workforce Housing A classic example of these sorts of programs is Seattle's Multifamily Tax Exemption (MFTE) program which provides an exemption on improvements to property if the improvement is housing with a set aside of 20% of the units at up to 80% of Area Median Income with a 12 year affordability requirement. The program has produced thousands of affordable units over its decades of operation. Washington DC has a geographic, formula driven abatement that grants a tax abatement equal to 75% of the improved value of the property provided that the development sets aside 5% of the units for low-income households and 10% up to 60% of AMI. The tax abatement lasts for 10 years but the affordability requirement lasts for 20. Other jurisdictions like Tillamook, Oregon and Montgomery, County in Maryland offer similar exchanges of set aside units for an exemption. Historic Rehabilitation & Redevelopment Property Tax Reductions Some jurisdictions offer exemptions for development projects that rehabilitate older, existing buildings. These include Georgia which provides an 8-year abatement, Philadelphia, with a 10-year abatement, Norfolk, Virginia with a 14-year abatement, and New York City with an abatement that can be as long as 34 years. These programs require improvements to properties that either currently provide housing or include some housing component, but none of them appear to have any affordability requirement. The MBA seems to have included them because they are exemption programs that create housing. I'm including them here because these sorts of exemption programs arguably create or preserve housing supply which arguably contributes to affordability. We'll return to this discussion later. Transit-Oriented PropertyTax Reductions Putting more housing near transit, especially light rail stations, is a priority for jurisdictions that have invested in more rail infrastructure. Oregon's Multiple Unit Housing Property Tax Exemption (MUPTE) program offers 10-year exemptions for projects that are adjacent to light rail or transit and include some level of affordability. What each of these approaches has in common is a recognition that the increases in value created by new development create tax consequences that can disincentivize making the improvements in the first place. The concept behind property tax abatement for affordable housing is that reductions in taxes should result in some community benefit, whether in the form of rent restricted housing or more housing of any level of rent. Usually, jurisdictions have to balance the loss of tax revenue with the quantitative benefits of the improvements either in more affordable housing, increased future tax income, or both. Next, we'll take a closer look at a couple of abatement programs, how they work, and whether they've succeeded.

4 days ago
Trump's long history of bashing jobs report numbers dates back to 2016: Analysis
President Donald Trump's history of criticizing the Bureau of Labor Statistics' jobs report has surfaced in the wake of his decision to fire commissioner Erika McEntarfer on Friday. Trump's public frustrations with the economics and statistics agency appear to date back to his 2016 presidential campaign. "Don't believe those phony numbers," then-candidate Trump said in his New Hampshire victory speech during his first campaign for the White House. Last August, Trump claimed without evidence that former President Joe Biden's administration was "caught fraudulently manipulating" job statistics, when the agency publicly disclosed that the economy created fewer than 818,000 jobs between April of 2023 and March of 2024 than initial estimates suggested. "There's never been any revision like this," Trump said at a campaign rally in North Carolina on Aug. 21, 2024. "They wanted it to come out after the election, but somehow it got leaked," he claimed at the time. Trump did not provide evidence that the information publicly disclosed by the agency was leaked. Then-Labor Secretary Julie Su in November 2024 defended the figures, and also suggested the numbers were impacted by Hurricane Helene's impact on the southeastern United States, and labor strikes. "The labor market remains very strong, and this shows what happens when you have a president and a vice president who are fighting for workers every single day," Su said at the time. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) uses several surveys for estimating employment levels in the U.S. and revisions are common. Every monthly Jobs Report has a blurb at the end that updates the figures from the previous two months based on new data. The revision that Trump was referencing was made public on Aug. 21, and updated with final figures in February 2025, according to the BLS website. The same downward revisions also took place during Trump's first term, under then-BLS commissioner William W. Beach. The agency determined 518,000 fewer jobs were created in March 2019 than it had initially reported. Alternatively, Trump had no complaints about the jobs report produced under McEntarfer -- a Biden appointee -- right before the 2024 election, which showed the U.S. gained 12,000 jobs in October. The then-candidate referenced the low numbers while criticizing the Biden-Harris administration at a rally in Milwaukee. "They did 12,000 jobs," Trump said to boos at the rally on Nov. 1. "It's hundreds of thousands of jobs less than it should be," he added. Trump was also quick to embrace the jobs reports as president -- when they were favorable. In March 2017 -- when the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the economy added 235,000 jobs the prior month -- then-Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Trump had full faith in the positive report, despite calling it "phony" in the past. "I talked to the president prior to this and he said to quote him very clearly: 'They may have been phony in the past, but it's very real now,'" Spicer said to reporters at the time. Trump's decision to fire McEntarfer on Friday came after the report found the U.S. had added 73,000 jobs in July, according to data from the BLS. The figure marked a slowdown from 147,000 jobs added in the previous month. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2%, keeping it at near-historic lows, according to the report. The report provided new estimates for two previous months, significantly dropping the government's estimate of jobs added in May and June. The fresh data indicated a notable slowdown in hiring as Trump's tariffs took hold over recent months. Trump criticized McEntarfer over the revisions, saying without evidence that the revisions suggested jobs statistics had been "manipulated." ABC News has reached out to McEntarfer for a comment. The Trump administration described the downward revisions as an unwelcome sign for the U.S. economy but did not dispute the data. "Obviously, they're not what we want to see," Stephen Miran, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said on Friday morning. Asked by reporters as he departed the White House on Friday about the reason for McEntarfer's firing, Trump said he believes the economy is doing well and claimed the latest jobs numbers were "phony." "I believe the numbers were phony just like they were before the election, and there were other times," Trump said, pointing to a previous revision in the jobs numbers last year that he claimed, without evidence, was an attempt to benefit Democrats heading into the election. He said this despite using the numbers as a talking point in his campaign.


The Hill
4 days ago
- The Hill
Congress must hold cities accountable for holding back first-time home buyers
The market for first-time home buyers in America is dismal. Since 2021, the annual income needed to qualify for a mortgage has increased by 60 percent, driving the median age of a first-time home buyer to 38 years old — a record high. One reason young Americans are struggling to buy their first homes is that we aren't building enough of them. In May, new home construction rates in the U.S. fell to their lowest level since the pandemic. On an annual basis, new home construction is down nearly 5 percent. The U.S. needs to increase its housing supply to put the American dream of homeownership back in reach for average families. Congress, however, has a knack for taking complex problems and making them worse by forcing a one-size-fits-all solution on communities that we haven't set foot in. The housing problem must be solved at the local level, and this starts by removing nonsensical regulations. Today, costs associated with homebuilding regulations make up 25 percent of the sticker price for a new single-family home and 40 percent of the cost of a new apartment complex. These regulations also prolong the building process. Nowhere is this problem clearer than in Los Angeles. When wildfires ripped through Los Angeles in January, officials estimated that it would take upwards of 18 months to clean up the 2.5 million tons of debris left behind. The Trump however, worked with state and local officials to complete the clean-up in just six months — a tremendous accomplishment. During those same six months, however, Los Angeles County officials approved only 90 of the more than 1,200 building permit applications it received in the wake of the fires. In other words, it's easier to clean up 2.5 million tons of wildfire wreckage than it is to clear Los Angeles' building-permit red tape. And Los Angeles wonders why families are fleeing. Congress shouldn't force one-size-fits-all building codes on every community, but the federal government has an obligation to avoid wasting taxpayer dollars on cities that sacrifice the American Dream at the altar of overregulation. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and I introduced the Build Now Act to incentivize new home construction by tying each city's funding through the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Community Development Block Grant Program to their rate of homebuilding. Here's how it will work: Cities that fail to increase their rate of homebuilding faster than the national median rate would lose 10 percent of their Community Development Block Grant funding. HUD would then reallocate those funds to cities that exceeded the national median rate of home building. Cities with the most growth will receive the biggest pieces of that pie. America's metropolitan areas will have two years to start building homes before HUD crunches the numbers to determine whether they will receive the carrot or the stick from the Community Development Block Grant Program. Cities that have homeownership costs under control, such as those where the median home price is below the national median, won't see any changes to their Community Development Block Grant funding. Nor would any city that issued an emergency disaster declaration in the last year. The rest of our major cities, however, will need to start allowing builders to build. The solution to America's housing crisis isn't going to come out of Washington. A strategy that works in Baton Rouge may not work in Boston. But too many cities are regulating away the possibility of homeownership, and Congress is done throwing good money after bad policies. The U.S. is the freest, most prosperous nation in the world. Buying your first home shouldn't feel like a pipe dream. It's time to start rewarding the cities that are working hard to make homeownership a reality for American families — and stripping funding from those that don't.