Site Visit Tour in Miami Showcases How CDFIs Leverage New Markets Tax Credits (NMTCs) for Community Investment
Susie Han, OFN Vice President, Regulatory Affairs
Self-Help, Florida Community Loan Fund, and staff members from federal policymakers join us on tour of Ronald McDonald Charities House of South Florida and Overtown Youth Center Miami
Read time: 6 minutes
On February 17, as part OFN’s Southeast Regional Meeting, we organized a tour with members Self-Help and Florida Community Loan Fund (FCLF) to showcase NMTC-financed projects to policymakers in Miami. Joining us on the tour were staff members from the offices of Senator Ashley Moody (R-FL), Representative Maria Salazar (R-FL-27), Representative Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL-26), and the City of Miami’s Human Services Department.
We first headed to the current Ronald McDonald House Charities of South Florida (RMHC) facility which provides lodging and a sense of home for 30 families and children traveling for medical care. In an area where there are no other affordable lodging options around Jackson Memorial Hospital, RMCH explained that they are full almost every night of the year, and limited space constrained their ability to accommodate all families on a wait list. Annually, they have had to turn away 125 families who either end up canceling or postponing their child’s life-saving treatment, or face a desperate search for other accommodations.
We then walked to the construction site of the new RMCH facility just a few steps away—a seven foot-story house with 54 bedrooms with an expected total financing cost of $33 million. Using NMTC financing, Self-Help provided critical gap funding and helped attract additional private investment needed to move the project forward. By leveraging NMTC, Self-Help enabled the development of a facility that will provide essential housing and support services for families with hospitalized children, while also advancing broader community development goals in a low-income area. This flexible, patient capital helped bridge the final financing gap and allowed construction to begin in September 2025.
For our second leg of the tour, we stopped at Overtown Youth Center Miami (OYC Miami), a nonprofit dedicated to providing college and career-readiness services for children and young adults, as well as providing families with stability services. In April 2024, OYC Miami celebrated the grand opening of a transformative 62,620-square-foot community resource center in Overtown, tripling its capacity to serve an estimated 5,000 youth and families annually. The $22 million project was made possible in part through financing from FCLF.
Through its NMTC financing, FCLF provided flexible, below-market capital that strengthened the project’s overall capital stack and enabled construction to move forward in 2020, despite the challenges of financing large-scale community facilities in historically underinvested neighborhoods. This catalytic investment helped make feasible a project that delivers significant community benefit, but would have been difficult to finance through conventional sources alone.
OYC Miami’s new facility includes an economic empowerment training area, STEM lab, multimedia and technology lab, family resource center, classrooms, and a health and wellness gymnasium. In addition to expanding access to educational and family support services, the project generated 91 temporary construction jobs and supported 85 permanent positions.
Together, these site visits demonstrated to participating federal and local policymakers the importance of the CDFI Fund’s programs like NMTC and the critical role that CDFIs play in leveraging public investments to unlock private capital, advance community-led development, and support critical infrastructure that strengthens economic opportunity in low-income communities.
About the NMTC
The NMTC Program attracts private investment to economically distressed communities by providing investors with a federal tax credit equal to 39 percent of their equity investment, claimed over seven years. The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s CDFI Fund allocates this authority to Community Development Entities (CDEs), which use the capital to provide flexible, below-market financing for projects in low-income communities. Since inception, NMTC has awarded $71 billion in allocation authority, leveraging more than $8 in private investment for every $1 of federal support and supporting the creation or retention of more than 938,000 jobs nationwide. Congress made the program permanent in 2025, providing long-term certainty expected to drive nearly $100 billion in additional investment over the next decade.
CDFIs are central to this success—receiving 45% of allocation authority in the FY 2024/2025 round, including 61 OFN members that collectively received $4.3 billion to help finance hospitals, small businesses, domestic manufacturing, and other job-creating projects in rural and urban communities alike.
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