Urban Employment Opportunities Development Act of 1967
- When Kennedy introduced the bill he said its purpose was stimulating new jobs and income. The tax incentives would not require new federal spending, but encourage private enterprise to create jobs in economically depressed areas.
He conducted "extensive consultation" with representatives from labor, academia, government, business and the urban poor. The bill attracted bipartisan support but failed to make it out of the Senate Finance Committee. - Kennedy's bill included federal tax credits, job training programs and accelerated depreciation schedules to encourage businesses to locate in impoverished areas of cities. Qualifying businesses in designated areas would receive the tax incentives for 10 years. Receiving a certificate of eligibility required being a commercial or industrial business with at least 50, full-time employees in an impoverished area. Retail stores and those relocated from other areas did not qualify.
Businesses with 25 employees could qualify for the incentives if they worked on Indian reservations and/or in qualified urban areas of fewer than 50,000 people. The legislation required that two-thirds of the employees were previously unemployed or six-month residents of the enterprise zone. - Specific incentives in the bill included a 10 percent tax credit for a business' personal property expenses, seven percent credit on property expenses, and a 25 percent deduction for some employees' salaries if hired due to the legislation.
- The bill's origin was Kennedy's February 4, 1966 visit to the central Brooklyn slum of Bedford-Stuyvesant, which included a meeting with community activists. Afterward, he thought this was an appropriate area to use an unformulated urban renewal program.
- In 1966, Kennedy proposed community development corporations, a precursor to the enterprise zone concept. Area residents would own and control them, using both area residents and resources plus outside public and private capital. The first two were Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corp. and D & S, or Distribution and Services, established in December 1966. Kennedy also had come to realize that tax incentives plus low-cost loans were necessary to make economic redevelopment attractive to private enterprise. In 1967, Kennedy gave more than 20 speeches to bankers and businessmen explaining why the Bedford-Stuyvesant experiment had to expand to other ghettos.
