What Can Government Do to Help the Commercial Real Estate Industry in the Near Term

Ted Zangari was interviewed for the magazine’s March 2017 Roundtable column.  This month’s question was “What can government do to help the commercial real estate industry in the near term?” Zangari responded, “At the federal level, Congress should: (1) exclude real estate investments from any changes in the tax treatment of carried interest; (2) halt any attempts to eliminate the Section 1031 deferral of taxes on like-kind exchanges or the mortgage interest deduction; (3) enact the Marketplace Fairness Act that would enable state governments to collect sales and use taxes from e-commerce companies with no physical presence in their state; and (4) in the anticipated public infrastructure spending plan, expand the notion of “public infrastructure” to include workforce housing, structured parking and brownfield cleanup at transit-friendly nodes across America.

In Trenton, the state Legislature should: (1) expand the Licensed Site Remediation Professional program, where feasible, to other DEP functions and permit other state agencies as well as municipalities to likewise outsource appropriate inspection and permitting functions to licensed professionals; (2) break the protected egg of home rule and allow large-scale development projects to be reviewed by a regional land use board comprised of representatives of the various towns that would be impacted by and benefit from the proposed project; (3) reform municipal land use laws to reflect modern society, such as parking requirements in the wake of ride-sharing services, and to encourage smart growth development through bonus densities and more workable transfer development rights; and (4) begin to scale back business incentive award amounts in submarkets where commercial occupancy rates have substantially recovered.”