HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016413.jpg

From: Morris, Paul V Sent: 1/15/2019 4:44:33 PM To: jeffrey E. [jeevacation@gmail.com] Subject: Opportunity Zones Attachments: image001.jpg; image002.jpg; image003.jpg; image004.jpg Importance: — High Hope all well, are you doing anything around these or clients? In a former warehouse on a dimly lit street in the South Bronx, developers sipping Puerto Rican moonshine listened as a local official urged them to capture a new U.S. tax break by rebuilding the decaying neighborhood. In Alabama, a young lawyer quit his job after seeing the same tax break’s potential to help one of the nation’s poorest states. He now spends his days driving his Hyundai from town to town, slideshow at the ready, hoping to connect investors with communities. And on a conference call with potential clients, a prominent hedge fund executive pitched investments in a boutique hotel in Oakland, which he described as San Francisco’s Brooklyn. The project is eligible for the same tax break, designed to help the poor. Betting on Opportunity Zones Sales of development sites are surging in areas eligible for tax breaks Source: Real Capital Analytics Fervor about opportunity zones is heating up across the U.S. For a limited time, investors who develop real estate or fund businesses in these areas are able to defer capital gains on profits earned elsewhere and completely eliminate them on new investments in 8,700 low- income census tracts. The goal is to reinvigorate these areas. But the question is whether the 2017 tax law will, as U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin predicts, pump $100 billion into places that need it most, or if investors will play it safe by funding projects in a few zones already on the upswing. QuicktakeWill ‘Opportunity Zones’ Help the Rich, the Poor or Both? There’s no lack of optimism among officials in shrinking Rust Belt towns, wind-swept Western landscapes and hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, who hope to jump-start local economies. The incentives are so flexible they could be used for everything from affordable housing to solar farms. Yet on the investor side, much of the attention is fixed on how to turn a profit in already thriving areas. They include neighborhoods surrounding Manhattan, Atlantic beach towns drawing vacation-home developers, bedroom communities near Silicon Valley and anomalies like Portland, Oregon, where the entire downtown was deemed eligible for the breaks. “The phrase I keep thinking of is ‘gold rush,’ ” said Michael Lortz, an accountant who works with developers in Portland. “There’s a lot of money from out of town that’s coming here.” HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016413