Historic projects hinge on intricate numbers game.

Chris Rogers needs only to look out his office window to find inspiration.

Rogers, an attorney with Columbia law firm Rogers Lewis, is also a member of a local limited liability company that scouts the Midlands and beyond for promising development projects, particularly ones that can benefit from federal and state historic tax credit incentives.

"There's a building that I like over here on the other side of Assembly Street," Rogers said from a 12th-floor conference room at his firm's Bank of America downtown office building. While he doesn't know if the white, three-story building that used to house a real estate brokerage would be eligible for tax credits, "I see it every day, and I'm like, 'We could really do something with that building.' "

A turn to the north produces similar thoughts as Rogers's gaze falls upon the former Stone Manufacturing building at 3452 N. Main St.

"It's just sitting there empty," he said. "It's a big, empty building that is sort of a blight on the surrounding community. If you can take that building and put something nice in it and put it back to use, it just turns the whole community around."

Rogers knows of what he speaks. Rogers Lewis Jackson Mann & Quinn LLC has been behind some of Columbia's most noteworthy transformations involving historic tax credits, including Hotel Trundle, a boutique hotel born out of three empty properties at the corner of Taylor and Sumter streets that opened last April, and the Hunter-Gatherer at the Hangar, the second location of a popular downtown brewery that landed last January at the Curtiss-Wright Hangar adjacent to the Jim Hamilton-L.B. Owens Airport.

"A lot of what we do is bring the right people together," Rogers said. "We look for things that nobody else is doing. We don't try to compete with clients, but we do have a lot of developers who come to us and say, 'I'd like to do this building. How can you help us make this happen? We understand there are credits.' That's the way it usually starts."

The tax credits range from federal incentives to the Bailey Bill, a tax abatement measure enacted in South Carolina in 1992. The bill allows local governments to lock in a tax assessment based on rehabilitated property's fair market value prior to renovation for no more than 20 years. South Carolina also offers tax incentives through the Abandoned Buildings Renovation Act, legislation passed in 2013 that allows developers of eligible properties to receive a tax credit equal to 25%...

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