The Long Odds of Getting Opportunity Zone Capital to Opportunity Zone Businesses.

Della Clark has been working against long odds for basically her entire life. For the past three decades, she’s been president and CEO of The Enterprise Center, a nonprofit that supports small and mid-sized businesses in low-income communities throughout the Philadelphia region — a region where, despite 41 percent of the population being black, only 2.5 percent of businesses are black-owned.

Opportunity Zones, the new federal tax break for investing in areas defined as economically distressed, have been billed as a way to shorten the odds for businesses in low-income communities. When the U.S. Treasury confirmed the map of 8,762 census tracts designated as Opportunity Zones last year, Clark found many of her organizations’ clients in the Philly region were already located in those tracts. But it was far from certain that the new investors drawn by the Opportunity Zone designation would care about any of the thousands of small and mid-sized business owners who have walked through The Enterprise Center’s doors in West Philadelphia over the past 30 years.

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by OSCAR PERRY ABELLO

JUNE 25, 2019



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