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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

Anyone interested in the actual map, it can be found here:

https://cimsprodprep.cdfifund.gov/CIMS4/apps/pn-nmtc/index.a...

The purpose of the QOZ is to encourage investment in those areas, and it does this by favorable tax conditions.

Some of these areas are surprising, at least around me I see areas designated that aren't much different from the surrounding areas. And there are rural ones, too.

Looking at some of the ones above in street view, I can see why they're classified as they are, and I could certainly see a start-up choosing to place an office in one of those locations. Some are transit-close, even.

View on HN

It’s about who owned the land in 2017 and who was governor. Some states were less corrupt than others, but as a general rule OZs were and are mostly political grift with a few legit trades thrown in for cover.

The reason that HUGE tracts of OZs make no sense is that the “for development of blighted areas” thing is very thinly veiled bullshit.

The eligibility criteria:

The Opportunity Zone Selection Process

As prescribed by law, governors nominated which census tracts should be designated as Opportunity Zones by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. To be eligible for designation, a census tract must:

- Have a poverty rate of at least 20 percent; or

- Have a median income below 80 percent of that in the State or metropolitan area, or for rural census tracts, 80 percent of that in the entire State; or

- Be contiguous with a census tract meeting one of the above conditions and have a median income less than 125 percent of the qualifying contiguous census tract. [0]

[0] https://www.rd.usda.gov/sites/default/files/ImpactofOpportun...

I see the idea behind it, but I feel the end result will just be gentrification - which may not be a bad thing in the long run.

> I feel the end result will just be gentrification

It is literally a tax break for gentrifying. "Build in this poor area and you don't pay taxes".

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