Op-Ed: Russ Carnahan Introduces Bill to Extend Tax Incentive

Russ Carnahan has introduced a bill in the Missouri legeslature to extend tax benefits to Missouri homeowners. Bill would benefit older houses.

I grew up in historic Lafayette square in St. Louis, Missouri. Lafayette Square is one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city. It predates the Civil War period in St. Louis. The house that I grew up in was very old also, and we believed it was haunted. There was a man named Charles Brown who was buried in our back yard. We discovered his tombstone one day while playing back there. We had a lot of fun around Halloween. Our house wasn't in that bad a shape considering how old it was, but some other even older houses weren't so fortunate. A lot of them were crumbling, a few of them had been condemned by the city, and every once in a while, one of their old brick walls would collapse. We didn't own the house. It, and quite a few of the surrounding houses, were owned by the notorious lawyer Sarkis Webbe, one of the folks that the Darst-Webbe housing projects were named after. Darst was just a couple of blocks from our house and I'm sure that its reputation kept the property values in the neighborhood low. But Sarkis wasn't exactly what you would call a slum landlord. He rented a lot of his property out to his Lebanese relatives, so he kept them in pretty good shape. As a matter of fact, we were the only family in the block that wasn't Syrian or Lebanese. They finally tore the nefarious Darst-Webbe housing projects down and started rebuilding the neighborhood. Before that, some brave urban homesteaders had moved into the neighborhood and slowly started rehabbing the historic buildings. You could buy some of the condemned ones from the city with a promise of spending at least $100,000 on rehabbing it, but there weren't many tax incentives back then. According to the St. Louis Daily News, Congressman Russ Carnahan (MO-3) has introduced the Historic Homeowners' Revitalization Act of 2009. The bipartisan legislation, which uses the proven Missouri historic homeowner tax credit as a model, would extend a tax credit for homeowners who rehabilitate their historic homes, projects that have proven to create thousands of jobs. The Historic Homeowners' Revitalization Act gives homeowners access to the same kind of tax credits currently available to commercial developers through the national Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit, that program that has helped preserve commercial buildings while creating 67,000 jobs for Missourians.