Philadelphia floated a $300 million dollar bond to pay for NTI, convinced that the benefit of blight removal in the form of new real-estate values and tax revenues would outweigh the costs of the bond. Although no one actually did the comparison, belief among planners and the media is that the benefits of the program were marginal at best. Research I conducted in West Philly, however, showed that the real-estate benefits of the Penn Alexander School outweighed the costs by a factor of 3 to 1.