I had an interesting discussion this week about Opportunity Zones and the challenges many communities have simply due to the compressed timing the legislation imposes. There are so many places where a given community hasn’t really thought about what they want and are just getting started, where the local skill and capacity is limited, technical assistance is needed, investors are reluctant to take a risk and there are few shovel ready projects that have already made it through community engagement.

Flying under the radar in the 2017 tax reform package was a sleeper provision that authorized the designation of “opportunity zones” and the creation of “opportunity funds.”