Twinning NMTCs with HTCs Helps Produce Peabody Opera House Project

Ever since I began working in the field of historic preservation in the 1970s as grants manager and state and federal tax coordinator for the Oregon State Historic Preservation Office, historic preservation projects have always had funding gaps that needed to be filled. In the past, these gaps were filled by various methods, whether it was in the form of federal tax incentive programs, grants, low interest loans, property tax relief or a combination of incentives. More recently three other sources of funding have become popular, including brownfields tax credits, state historic tax credits — which often mirror and in many cases can be used with the 20 percent federal preservation tax credit — and the topic of this article: the new markets tax credit (NMTC). The use of NMTCs with historic tax credits (HTCs) is commonly referred to as “twinning.”