But last year, when Angeline Johnson arrived in Wichita, Kansas, as a FUSE executive fellow tasked by the City Manager’s Office with encouraging equitable investment in Opportunity Zones (OZs), she discovered that some residents in northeast Wichita had mobilized to share concerns about their OZ designation.
“There was a legitimate fear of gentrification and displacement,” Johnson said.
The value of OZs to underserved communities has come under scrutiny. Attempting to track the program’s community impact, the Urban Institute released an early assessment recently that identified several issues. The most glaring, said Jorge González, a research analyst in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute, is that the federal government offers no guidelines on which projects receive the incentive, apart from the exclusion of a few “sin” businesses (such as liquor stores and facilities used for gambling), while limited oversight and little tran