No federal money can go to a project that doesn't pay at this deliberately inflated scale. Many states have little Davis-Bacon laws, with similar provisions and effects. Both developers and banks naturally are wary of taking on a property where they may be liable for pollution discovered in the future but caused by owners decades before. Banks can't take environmental improvements as collateral. Thus the amount of equity financing required for a given project increases.
Local policies complicate the clearing of titles on abandoned inner-city properties.
Developers seeking to acquire these properties are required to pay back taxes, sometimes dating back a quarter of a century or more. A sustained round of prosperity, such as the United States is currently enjoying, is making hundreds of thousands of home-loan applicants look better than government regulation ever could. Organized labor has always resisted repeal of the various Davis-Bacon laws. Even if they continue to do so, creative thinkers can engineer exemptions for the development of properties in low-income areas. The CRA in its current form may have helped to galvanize lenders unaware of or uninterested in inner-city development two decades ago.