The Federal Historic Preservation Tax Incentives Program generated $5.8 billion in private investment for historic preservation and community revitalization projects in the last year, creating 106,846 jobs, according to a new report from the National Park Service, which administers the program.

The annual report, “Federal Tax Incentives for Rehabilitating Historic Buildings,” covers the 2017 fiscal year and outlines the wide range of benefits and positive returns of this important program, which provides a 20 percent federal tax credit to property owners who undertake a major economic redevelopment project in a historic building while maintaining its character.

According to the National Park Service, the Historic Tax Credit “generates much needed jobs and economic activity, enhances property values in older communities, creates affordable housing and augments revenue for Federal, state and local governments, leveraging many times its cost in private expenditures on historic preservation.” “This widely-recognized program has been instrumental in preserving the historic buildings and places that give our cities, towns, Main Streets, and rural areas their special character and has attracted new private investment to communities small and large throughout the nation,” states the report.

Enhanced Capital regularly partners with developers to finance these culturally significant and economically impactful projects. From the New Orleans Culinary and Hospitality Institute, a historic five-story building transformed into a world-class culinary institute in New Orleans’ Warehouse District, to the long-awaited redevelopment of a 1940s Sears, Roebuck & Company store, bringing an economic revival to the distressed town of Greenville in the Mississippi Delta, to the restoration of the Divine Loraine Hotel, providing apartments in one of Philadelphia’s most historic buildings – Enhanced Capital is proud to have a long record of investing in historic preservation. In all, Enhanced Capital has participated in 101 federal and state Historic Tax Credit projects, bringing more than $1.3 billion in private capital investment to historic rehabilitation.

Across the United States in 2017, historic rehabilitation projects were both big and small, urban and rural, commercial and residential. They included the revitalization and redevelopment of two asylums, a log cabin, a trolley barn, a World War II-era barracks and a Civilian Conservation Corps camp. In all, the federal program generated outstanding returns in 2017, including $5.8 billion in private investment in historic preservation and nearly 107,000 jobs – usually local, and often more highly skilled and higher paying than jobs in new construction. The Historic Tax Credit program was established in 1976. Since then, it has supported 48,328 projects, generated an estimated $89.97 billion in historic rehabilitation investment and produced 278,270 rehabilitated housing units, 289,933 new units of housing and 160,058 low- and moderate-income housing units, along with 2.54 million jobs.

To read the full 2017 report, please click here.