The urban financial industry is expected to continue to be a primary target of terrorism. Critical policy analyses call for reevaluations of knowledge via direct linkages with served communities. We use interview and survey data from 79 financial executives in New York after 9/11 to study place-based subsidy policies. We demonstrate that place is an important, and often overlooked, geographical concept for understanding how financial decision makers should respond to terrorism. We show that an analysis of local context must be included when crafting effective policies, and we argue that microscales are as important to urban resiliency as the citywide and regional scales.