Philadelphia, PA – Reinvestment Fund received a $50 million New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) allocation award as part of the 20th round of awards announced by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s CDFI Fund.
This NMTC award will build on Reinvestment Fund’s mission to create opportunity for underserved people and places by bringing the capital, analytics, and expertise necessary to build strong, healthy, and more equitable communities. It will also expand our impact into distressed communities nationwide, by supporting investments that reduce racial inequities, support broader community revitalization and provide essential community services. Reinvestment Fund has been a recipient of NMTC allocations since 2003, investing over $657 million in 77 transformative projects across the country.
This award will prioritize critical projects in distressed low-income communities (LICs), nationwide, including in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, where historical disinvestment, redlining, and other structural inequities have left lasting economic challenges.
“This funding will enable us to support projects that create equitable access to a wide range of vital community services – healthcare; cradle-to-career education, including early education, workforce development and social services; to reduce critical barriers to employment and economic self-sufficiency,” said Reema Fakih, Managing Director of National Lending at Reinvestment Fund. “These efforts are pivotal to creating lasting change and dismantling the systemic barriers that have long stood in the way of progress for communities of color.”
Supporting High-Impact Projects
Reinvestment Fund’s NMTC strategy focuses on three core priorities: community revitalization, racial equity, and access to vital services. These investments will catalyze transformational projects in underserved communities, including developments that serve as community anchors, create affordable housing, and restore underutilized assets.
An example of Reinvestment Fund’s past efforts is the redevelopment of P.S. 103 in the Upton neighborhood West Baltimore, which revitalized the former school of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Reinvestment Fund’s and other financing partners provided $9.75 million in NMTC funding to transform the historic, derelict site into a vibrant community and cultural hub, known as the Justice Thurgood Marshall Amenity Center. The center which is scheduled to open its doors in fall 2024, will provide job training arts education and community resources to local residents while serving as a symbol of revitalization and a driver of economic growth in the cultural center of the city’s Black community.
“The Justice Thurgood Marshall Amenity Center at P.S. 103 is a powerful example of how NMTC investments can drive community-led economic revitalization while honoring the legacy of a civil rights hero and the community’s vision to transform a historically significant building into a vital neighborhood anchor,” said Yolanda Moore, Director of NMTC at Reinvestment Fund.
Scaling Our Efforts
With the $50 million allocation, Reinvestment Fund is poised to continue expanding its impact, focusing on investments that provide lasting benefits to low-income individuals and communities. NMTC brings a valuable resource for organizations and projects that cannot typically secure traditional financing due to thin margins or insufficient collateral.
“NMTC financing has been an invaluable tool in enabling us to invest in large, complex projects that bring real value to underserved communities,” said President and CEO Don Hinkle-Brown. “This award allows us to scale our efforts and reach deeper into distressed communities that have been systematically left behind.”
Media Contact: media@reinvestment.com
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About Reinvestment Fund:
Reinvestment Fund is a mission-driven financial institution committed to making communities work for all people. We bring financial and analytical tools to partnerships that work to ensure that people in communities across the country have the opportunities they strive for: affordable places to live, access to nutritious food and health care, schools where their children can flourish, and strong, local businesses that support jobs. We use data to understand markets and how transactions can have the most powerful impact, which has consistently earned us the top Aeris rating of AAA for financial strength and four stars for impact management. Our asset and risk management systems have also earned us an AA- rating from S&P. Since our inception in 1985, Reinvestment Fund has provided over $3.2 billion in financing to strengthen neighborhoods, scale social enterprises, and build resilient communities.
The Renters’ Access Act (RAA) articulated what the City of Philadelphia defines as uniform tenant screening criteria, creates a right to dispute a landlord’s decision to decline an application from a prospective tenant, and right to a next available unit should the dispute produce evidence that the prospective tenant was a qualified applicant.