Free Flinch Factor, The by Michael Kahn

confidential.”
    Bobby smiled, his eyes red. “I’ll do it for Nick. He took care of me. It’s the least I can do.”

Chapter Eleven
    The Frankenstein case started off as the Finkelstein case. In the court’s files, it remains Muriel Finkelstein, et al. v. City of Cloverdale and Ruby Productions, LLC. In my files, however, it has long since morphed into a monster. More specifically, a TIF monster.
    The acronym stands for “tax increment financing.” It also stands as proof of the law of unintended consequences. TIF statutes were enacted around the country with the best of intentions. Their creators saw them as a way to provide financial incentives to encourage private developers to revive blighted portions of our inner cities. In a qualified blight area, public tax dollars can be used to reimburse a whole range of costs that a developer would ordinarily have to absorb, such as the costs of acquiring and demolishing existing structures, the fees of various professions (architects, engineers, lawyers), and the construction costs for public works on the redeveloped property, such as sewers and streets. The vision of the TIF creators was that these financial incentives would lure developers into the slums.
    Instead, clever developers and their lawyers figured out how to exploit the rules by tapping into public funds and the power of eminent domain to construct shopping malls, fancy housing projects and other profitable developments in locations that no lawmaker could have imagined would qualify for TIF funds.
    Developers seduce town officials with visions of higher property values (and thus higher tax revenues) while intimidating them with the threat of taking their project to the adjacent town if denied the TIF they want. In metropolitan St. Louis, for example, the inner city slums fester while developers use TIFs to expand already profitable upscale suburban shopping malls into an even larger, more profitable, and more upscale malls and to level entire middle-class neighborhoods in order to replace them with big-box retailer strip malls.
    Although TIFs have become, quite literally, money in the bank for developers, for the metropolitan areas and their citizens they have become a textbook example of the zero sum game in which one suburb’s gain is exactly balanced by the losses of others.
    No one has proved more adept at exploiting TIF laws than Ken Rubenstein, dubbed by The Riverfront Times as the Baron of Blight. His specialty is the gated residential community. Through his development company, Ruby Productions, he has used TIFs to level neighborhoods throughout suburban St. Louis and replace them with enclaves of McMansions for the nouveau riche.
    My Frankenstein case is aimed at his latest TIF, which in turn is aimed at Brittany Woods. I became involved, as usual with my lost causes, through my mother. Her dear friend Muriel Finkelstein lives in Brittany Woods, a subdivision of 200 modest one-story homes dating back to the late 1940s. Muriel and her late husband Saul bought their home in the 1950s and raised their four children there. Saul owned a small shoe store in the University City Loop. Muriel and Saul were typical Brittany Woods residents of that era—middle-class Jews of modest means. Now the neighborhood is mostly Black families and elderly Jewish couples whose children have long since moved away.
    Although the values of the individual homes in Brittany Woods—three-bedroom ranches built on slabs—have not kept pace with inflation, the untapped value of the underlying real estate has grown steadily, principally because the subdivision is located in the suburb of Cloverdale, which happens to be within one of the best public school systems in Missouri. No one grasped that inherent value better than the Baron of Blight, who somehow convinced the local officials to declare Brittany Woods blighted and to grant his company the power of eminent domain to acquire the entire