Re:  Rybak's comment he would like to get real estate (housing) tax incentives restored that had been taken away in the 1980s, specifically 1986. 
 
      The new mayor is on the right trail, if those tax incentives were restored you would have big turn around in private investment in real estate of all kinds.  
       Before '86 we had Z&S properties.,  Zollie Barratz got his high income friends to invest in three story walkups (in 1970s);  gave them mortgages for collateral and thousands of new housing units came into being in Minneapolis area, with no public investment at all. 
      That besides the building boom in the 1980s, all cities in the country got big new sky lines.
      Then abruptly in 1986 Congress passed the tax bill and the whole thing was Deed in leu of foreclosure; Trammel Crow, and etc.
      That was when Washington was full of old time Democrats who complained about tax breaks for the rich.  The result was that the investor market for real estate was illiminated, cutting the market value of commercial real estate by about 40%.  
      The banks, loaded up with commercial mortgages,  took a hit of 40% on those assets, which, when the regulators came around, overseeing asset credibility, lots of banks got closed at huge expense to FDIC insurance fund -and putting such fund 20 billion in the red!! 
      You darn near had a 1930s type economic disaster in the country. 
      Then for years after, members of House and Senate, i.e. Majority Leader Mitchel -when pointed out to them the collosal errors of the tax bill, they said they weren't going to give back tax breaks to the rich.  
      Little old humble JEJ wrote that maybe it was that in back room they decided to 86 the Japanese who were then buying up America.   They did stop the Japanese and threw the economy of that country also into series a of decade long economic disasters.        
      It would be a Hurculean task for anyone to get the Congress to reverse the '86 tax bill, but such -or just reversing part of it- certainly would change the housing environment.    
 
         James E Jacobsen
         Whittier  (so called)
 

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