The Investment Decision in the Central City: A Consideration of a Property Tax Abatement Law

This article addresses an indirect policy approach to handling gray areas in large central cities where dilapidated and deteriorated housing go unresolved. Rather than focusing on abandonment and rebuilding, the article looks to fostering renewal of existing structures through property tax abatement programs. Using Pittsburgh as a model and experience to outline the framework for such a program, the article attempts to enhance ones understanding of the economic impacts that a property tax can have on the condition of city housing. The article concludes that for any city to embark on a tax abatement policy, it must understand the conditions necessary for success

Kruskal coordinates as canonical variables for Schwarzschild black holes

We derive a transformation from the usual ADM metric-extrinsic curvature variables on the phase space of Schwarzschild black holes, to new canonical variables which have the interpretation of Kruskal coordinates. We explicitly show that this transformation is non-singular, even at the horizon. The constraints of the theory simplify in terms of the new canonical variables and are equivalent to the vanishing of the canonical momenta. Our work is based on earlier seminal work by Kuchar in which he reconstructed curvature coordinates and a mass function from spherically symmetric canonical data. The key feature in our construction of a nonsingular canonical transformation to Kruskal variables, is the scaling of the curvature coordinate variables by the mass function rather than by the mass at left spatial infinity.Comment: 18 pages, no figure