TAD for Dummies – Part 3: Race, Gentrification, and Who a TAD Really Serves

Part 3: Race, Gentrification, and Who a TAD Really Serves

A plain-English guide for Columbus, Georgia residents

The Question People Are Actually Asking

When people ask whether there is a racial component to Columbus’s TAD system, they are asking something real and specific: Are these districts helping everyone equally? And could they actually make things worse for communities of color?

The honest answer is: it depends entirely on how the tool is used — and history gives us good reasons to ask the question carefully.

Part I: You Can’t Understand the Question Without the History

The Liberty District — the 6th Avenue corridor that anchors one of Columbus’s TADs — is not just another struggling neighborhood. It has a specific history that shapes everything about this conversation.

A Brief History of the Liberty District

The area now called the Liberty Heritage Historic District was first settled in the 1830s and 1840s by freedmen — free Black residents — before the Civil War. After emancipation, it became the primary community for Columbus’s Black population during the Jim Crow era, when segregation barred African Americans from white-owned businesses and public spaces downtown.

By the early 20th century it was a thriving commercial and cultural corridor. The first Black-owned bank in Columbus, Laborer’s Savings and Loan, opened there in 1917. The Liberty Theatre — the first Black theater in Columbus — opened in 1924 and became the cultural heart of the community.

The decline came not from any single event but from a confluence of forces: desegregation opened up areas previously off-limits to Black residents and businesses, suburban expansion drew people outward, and decades of under-investment followed. By the time Columbus established the Liberty District TAD, the corridor had experienced roughly 50 years of economic contraction — not because of anything the community did wrong, but because of how American cities developed around race.

This context is not incidental. It explains why the disinvestment exists that the TAD is trying to correct — and it raises the stakes for getting the correction right.

Part II: Race-Neutral Rules in an Unequal World

Columbus’s TAD system is designed to be race-neutral. The formula, the guardrails, the “but for” test — none of them mention race. And yet race shows up clearly in the outcomes.

Consider what we know from this series: the Uptown TAD has generated roughly $2.5 million in fund balances. The Liberty District TAD — covering a historically Black commercial corridor — sits at around $700,000. Both TADs follow the same rules. The gap reflects something the rules don’t address: the private investment market does not value all neighborhoods equally, and those valuations have a racial history behind them.

This is not a conspiracy. No one is deliberately shortchanging the Liberty District. But race-neutral rules applied to racially unequal conditions tend to produce unequal results. That pattern is well-documented nationally: researchers studying similar TIF districts in Chicago found that districts in predominantly Black, lower-income South Side neighborhoods generated a fraction of the revenue produced by a single downtown district — even when the districts had been running for longer.

💡 The Practical Imbalance

Developers applying for TAD funds in Uptown typically arrive with polished financial projections, experienced attorneys, and track records. Community development organizations working in the Liberty District — often doing affordable housing and historic preservation on tighter margins — may lack those same resources, which can create an uneven playing field in the application process even when the rules treat everyone identically.

Part III: Could the TAD Actually Make Things Worse? The Gentrification Risk

Here is where the stakes get very high. Imagine Columbus decided to supercharge the Liberty District TAD by pursuing the kind of development strategy that has worked so well in Uptown: luxury townhouses, boutique shopping, high-end hotels designed to draw outside visitors. The TAD fund would explode. Millions in new increment revenue. Bond payoffs accelerated. A revitalized district on every city slide deck.

But for the people who actually live and work there now, it could be a disaster. This is the gentrification risk — and a TAD can accelerate it powerfully.

How the Domino Effect Works

The mechanism is straightforward, and it starts with how property taxes work:

  1. New luxury development raises surrounding land values. When a high-end hotel or luxury apartment complex opens in the Liberty District, every neighboring property gets reassessed upward. That’s how the tax system works — it values your land based on what’s around it, not just on what you’ve done with it.
  2. The TAD captures the new taxes from the new buildings. But longtime homeowners — many on fixed incomes — and small legacy business owners also see their own tax bills rise. The TAD doesn’t protect them from that.
  3. Owners who can’t afford the higher bills sell. A family that has owned a home in the Liberty District for 40 years, on a fixed retirement income, may simply be unable to absorb a significant property tax increase. The same goes for the owner of a small barbershop or beauty salon that has served the neighborhood for decades.
  4. Renters face a different but equally real pressure. Renters don’t receive any of the wealth-building benefit when property values rise — they just face higher rents when landlords reprice to match the market. Since a large share of lower-income residents in historically disinvested neighborhoods are renters, they can be displaced with no financial cushion at all.

The Cultural Loss

The economic displacement is only half the problem. The Liberty District’s deepest asset is not its real estate — it is its history. The Liberty Theatre. The legacy of Black-owned businesses that kept the community intact through decades when the rest of the city had largely turned away. The churches and civic institutions that have been anchors since Reconstruction.

If the TAD is used to fill the district with boutique shops targeting higher-income visitors, those legacy institutions don’t automatically survive. The neighborhood looks revitalized on the outside while the community it was built around has been scattered. The history becomes a marketing theme rather than a living reality.

The Public Subsidy Problem

There is also a fairness question that critics of TAD-driven gentrification raise consistently: when a city uses public tax dollars — collected from everyone — to fund infrastructure improvements that primarily benefit outside developers and higher-income newcomers, it is making a choice about who public resources serve. If the community being displaced is a historically marginalized one, that choice carries particular moral weight.

Part IV: The Catch-22 Columbus Has to Reckon With

This is not a problem with an easy answer, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. City leaders and community advocates in Columbus face a genuine dilemma that goes like this:

If you avoid luxury development… If you pursue luxury development…
The Liberty District TAD fund stays small — around its current $700,000 balance. Infrastructure improvements are limited. Vacant lots stay empty. Basic neighborhood amenities that residents have wanted for years — a full-service grocery store, modern community spaces, reliable sidewalks — remain out of reach. The community is preserved but still underserved. The TAD fund grows dramatically. The city can point to a visible transformation. But property values rise, tax bills climb, rents spike, and the people who preserved the Liberty District through 50 years of neglect find themselves unable to afford to stay in it. The neighborhood is revitalized for someone else.

Neither option is good. The real question is whether Columbus can find — and fund — a third path.

Part V: A TAD Does Not Have to Cause This — Here’s What Can Be Done

The TAD itself is a neutral financial tool. The harm or the benefit comes from the choices built into how it is deployed. Because the Columbus Consolidated Government writes the rules for each individual TAD, it has the authority to build anti-displacement protections directly into a district’s charter. Several tools are available:

Protection What It Means Status in Columbus
Affordable Housing Mandates Require any residential development using TAD funds to set aside 20–30% of units as affordable or workforce housing. Developers who won’t agree don’t get the public money. The Elliott’s Walk project (Part 1) used TAD funds for affordable housing, showing this is possible. Not currently required by default.
Legacy Business Grants Dedicate a share of the TAD fund to help long-standing neighborhood businesses — the barbershop, the beauty supply store, the family restaurant — upgrade their buildings so they can survive in a rising-cost environment without being bought out. Not currently a standard Columbus TAD feature. Would require specific inclusion in a district’s redevelopment plan.
Senior Property Tax Relief Pairing TAD activity with expanded protections for elderly, longtime homeowners so that rising neighborhood values don’t force them out of homes they’ve lived in for decades. Muscogee County already offers homestead exemptions and tax deferral for residents 62+ (with income limits). Targeted TAD-district enhancements could go further.
Community-Controlled Equity Criteria Requiring that projects in the Liberty District meet specific equity benchmarks — local hiring, minority business contracting, community input — as a condition of receiving TAD funds, not just as a preference. The standard Columbus TAD guidelines do not currently require equity benchmarks as a funding condition.

The Bottom Line: The Tool Is Neutral. The Choices Are Not.

A TAD is a math formula. It doesn’t know — or care — who lives in the district it covers. It will faithfully generate increment revenue whether the development inside it enriches the existing community or displaces it. The racial and equity outcomes of any given TAD are determined entirely by the human decisions made before and after the formula runs: which area gets a TAD, what kinds of projects are funded, what conditions are attached, and whose voice is in the room when those decisions are made.

The Liberty District TAD was created with a community-protective intent — and the work happening there, including Elliott’s Walk’s 229 affordable homes, reflects that. But intent is not the same as guarantee. A future administration with different priorities could use the same tool in the same district to produce very different outcomes.

The question worth asking in Columbus — and in any city with a TAD — is not just “Is this district growing?” but “Growing for whom?”