IB-2004-R (August 2004)
Author: The Center for the American Dream

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To promote DRCOG’s vision of a more compact urban area, RTD has plans to build transit-oriented developments— high-density housing combined with retail shops and offi ces—near most of the FasTracks train stations. But the market for such developments is limited. So Denver, Lakewood, and other cities plan to subsidize them using hundreds of millions of dollars of tax-increment fi nancing. In other words, any new property or sales taxes generated by the developments will be used to subsidize the developments. This means other taxpayers will have to pay for schools, fi re, police, and other costs imposed by those developments.