This article introduces a quasi-experimental research design known as regression discontinuity (RD) to the planning community. The RD design assigns program participants to a treatment or a control group based on certain cutoff criteria. We argue that the RD design can be especially useful in evaluating targeted place-based programs. The article describes how RD works and compares it with other commonly used evaluation techniques. We also present an example to illustrate its use. The article concludes with a discussion of how some existing place-based programs, with minor modification, could be evaluated by the RD design.