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Opportunity Zones (OZs) hold the promise of driving investment across American geographies, increasing affordable housing, fostering experiments in the future of capitalism and the future of work, and serving as a catalyst for American invention and rejuvenation. The legislation encourages people subject to capital gains to invest in low-income neighborhoods in return for significant tax relief. The scope of the initiative is enormous — there are 8,700 opportunity zones in all 50 states representing 31M people and with potential investments in the 200 hundred-billion-dollar range. The great question is; will the program simply increase returns on real estate (and further gentrification) or is this a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape our cities and invest in new models of equitable development.
This issue of the newsletter explores how Opportunity Zones can be used as a force for change.
FEATURED ARTICLE
9 Things We Learned at the Stanford Opportunity Zone Investment Summit
Accelerator for America, Economic Innovation Group, The Governance Project and Drexel's Nowak Metro Finance Lab held the first national Opportunity Zone Investor Summit on March 18 at Stanford University in Palo Alto. With a mission to demonstrate working models for designing, financing and delivering inclusive growth; all while creating new models for building wealth in disadvantaged communities. The convening of city and community leaders, NGOs, foundations and investors aimed to accelerate the creation of best practices and models by highlighting innovative and impactful Opportunity Zone communities, funds and projects.
FEATURED INTERVIEWS
Opportunity Zone Interviews: Videos with Mayor Eric Garcetti and Bruce Katz
While attending the Opportunity Zone Investor Summit Peter Hirshberg, Cofounder & Chairman of Maker City ®, had the occasion to interview Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and Director of the Nowak Metro Finance Lab Bruce Katz on this historic occasion, which brought together Mayors from around the United States (by our count there were 20+ different cities and towns represented), with investors, ecosystem builders, and data partners.
We went to York, PA to attend Blueprint York, a conference hosted be VentureBeat, intended to bring together Silicon Valley type investors with ecosystem builders intent on creating new forms of economic opportunity in York.
This was a follow on to the highly successful conference held in Reno in 2018.
The York, PA event had all the ingredients one might want in a conference. A welcoming local community which understood what it is good at, speakers that came from all over the country to share new models of economic development and workforce development, a low-cost of entry in the conference itself, and a strong point of view.
