There have been many aspects to the geographically uneven “entrepreneurial turn” performed by some U.S cities from the late 1980s onwards. One has been the growth in use in more speculative and risky financial instruments. This has allowed U.S. cities to make up the shortfalls created by reductions in federal and state expenditure, on the one hand, and, on the hand, given them some discretion over how they generate revenues. In particular, U.S. cities that appear to have suffered most from the economic, environmental and social, not to say, racial consequences of deindustrialization, such as those in the U.S Midwest, have experimented with the use of Tax Increment Financing. It is claimed this they have done in an effort to reindustrialize their economies. Not that long ago a relatively under-used financial instrument, this short paper uses early, explorative findings from Cincinnati to consider the consequences of the use of TIF, as those who govern the city seek both to anticipate and to actualize a version of the future through land value capture.
Financing “rightsizing”: experiments in reindustrializing the city