Every reason
this won't work.
And what I
say back.

"You don't actually have the authority to do this."

Corporation Counsel, and anyone who has read the statute

The whole design rests on a reading of IC 6-1.1-12.1-3(e), which opens its list of normally excluded facilities, residential among them, with an exception for redevelopment or rehabilitation in a county containing a consolidated city. On its face that gives Marion County broader residential authority than the statewide rule. But nobody has validated it, and the statute was written around individual statements of benefits and project-by-project MDC findings, not around a published map that tells a buyer what benefit comes with a house.

I am not asking anyone to draft an ordinance. I am asking for one memo answering one question:

Can the MDC pre-designate geographic areas with objective residential abatement schedules and standardized findings, so a qualifying one-to-four unit project receives the prescribed deduction without an individual economic-development negotiation for every house?

If the answer is yes, this moves locally. If it is no, it needs a narrow amendment and a Statehouse partner. Either way the answer costs nothing but staff time, and until we have it in writing, every other argument on this page is premature.

"The circuit breaker means the homeowner never sees the savings."

Anyone who understands Indiana property tax better than I do

Half right, and it was the objection I was most worried about. Indiana caps homestead tax at one percent of gross assessed value, so a home's bill is already far below what the rate implies. On a $325,000 new home in Warren Township, the abatement's face value is $7,534 a year, but the capped bill without any abatement is only $2,950. The most the abatement can save is that capped bill.

So the modeled saving is $2,885 a year, about 40 percent of face value, and roughly $24,500 over ten years as the homestead deductions phase per SEA 1. The circuit breaker takes most of the paper benefit and leaves a real one. The calculator shows the arithmetic and lets anyone change the inputs. What I still owe: DLGF or the Auditor confirming the order of deductions. Until then it is a model, and the page says so wherever a number appears.

"It's a builder subsidy dressed up as a homeowner program."

The reliable critique of every abatement, and not a stupid one

The design difference is where the benefit sits and who can see it. Indiana Code says the amount and period of the deduction are unaffected by a change in ownership, so the clock does not restart at closing. The buyer holds the remaining years, and the abatement appears as a deduction on their own parcel record, the same way a homestead deduction does. Hamilton County records already display exactly this for Cincinnati properties, with the abated value and the term stated in the auditor's notes.

The limit: a builder who knows the buyer gets ten years of abated taxes will price some of that into the house. That is real, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The counter is that this is true of every location-based amenity, and that the alternative, no abatement, does not produce a cheaper house. It produces no house.

"You're taking money from schools."

Township and school district officials, IPS advocates

The abatement applies to value that does not currently exist. A vacant lot assessed at $30,000 keeps paying on $30,000; the $300,000 house built on it is the part temporarily sheltered. No taxing unit loses revenue it is collecting today.

Cincinnati's own analysis of its 2023 reforms projected that reducing abatements in its strongest-market neighborhoods would increase school revenue while preserving stronger incentives in weaker ones. That is the tiering doing its job, and it is why the Strong Market tier gets nothing automatic.

The honest qualifier: this holds only where the construction genuinely would not have happened without the incentive. In a strong market it would have. That is the entire argument for not offering it there.

"Cincinnati's version collapsed. Why copy a program that isn't working?"

Anyone who reads the dashboard, which is exactly what I did

Volume fell by roughly three quarters after the redesign. I found that, not an opponent, and it is the strongest argument in this series for keeping the Indianapolis version simple. Cincinnati layered on six scoring indicators, three tiers, separate renovation schedules and five bonus categories. Somewhere in there the program got too complicated to use, too restrictive to qualify for, or too slow to administer.

What I do not know is which. That is a research gap, and it is worth a phone call to Cincinnati's development staff before we finalize anything. Take the concept, not the bureaucracy.

"You'll draw the map to favor your friends."

Every colleague whose district is not in a Reinvestment zone

Every scoring input in the prototype map comes from outside the City-County Building: household income, vacant housing units and new construction from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, and mortgage activity and financed-purchase values from federal disclosure data via the CFPB. When the Assessor's assessed-value history replaces the last proxy, that one input will be local, and it is published and auditable.

The methodology is published with the map. The scoring rule is one sentence: a point for each indicator on the strong side of the county median. If the rule is fixed in advance and the inputs are federal, the map is a computation rather than a negotiation.

The remaining exposure is the thresholds. Zero or one point is Reinvestment, two or three is Growth, four or five is Strong Market. Those were set to match the schedule, not tuned to any district, and they would be calibrated with DMD in public before adoption.

"Abating a lot the city already sold at a discount is a double subsidy."

Fiscal hawks, and a fair reading of the Vacant to Vibrant pipeline

Vacant to Vibrant is the natural pilot precisely because its requirements already match: buyers must rehab or build new, must occupy as a primary residence for at least two years, and every sale closes through a title company with a project agreement attached to the deed. The eligibility test and the closing mechanism already exist.

That overlap is also what makes the double-subsidy objection land. The response is that the land discount addresses acquisition and the abatement addresses the ongoing carrying cost of the improvement: two different barriers, two different points in time. But I want DMD to confirm the two programs stack cleanly rather than asserting it myself, and I want the affordability thresholds reconciled. The 2023 launch used 80 percent of area median income; current materials cite a different figure for a family of four.

"Ohio gets fifteen years. Ours is weaker, so why bother?"

Developers comparing markets

True on the term. Indiana generally caps ordinary abatement schedules at ten years, and no local decision changes that.

Two responses. First, a flat 100 percent for ten years is worth more in practice than a longer phase-down that nobody can explain at a closing table, and it is far easier for a builder to put on a yard sign. Second, if we are going to spend a Statehouse ask, the term is the wrong thing to spend it on. The better ask is that the remaining deduction transfer with the parcel without requiring a subsequent owner to reapply: administrative, narrow, and hard to argue against.