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In roughly a month, governors across the country choose the next opportunity zones they want to potentially receive investment incentives. But nearly eight years after the program launched, it’s still not fully clear how the first wave of zones are performing — or whether many received investment at all.
Opportunity zones are designated census tracts meant to spur economic development in distressed communities through tax incentives. Yet there is no publicly available federal database tracking which zones actually received investment, how much capital flowed in or what projects were funded.
The IRS tracks this data, but taxpayer data is private, said Brett Theodos, director of the Center for Local Finance and Growth at the Urban Land Institute. He said some $140 billion worth of investment has gone through the program.
“It’s very hard to know where projects have gone, who’s been using them and what they’ve been used for,” Theodos said.
Just one state, Ohio, collects and publicizes tract-level data.
So far, the results have been highly variable. Just a third of the designated zones received financing from developers and investors, with much of that capital flowing into market-rate multifamily housing and commercial projects and into large cities like Cleveland and Columbus, according to research by Theodos and his colleagues.
Using Ohio’s data, the researchers also built a national model estimating which zones are most likely to attract investment. Their findings suggest roughly 60 percent of zones nationwide are unlikely to receive meaningful OZ funding.
“This is not a ‘Field of Dreams,’ ‘if you build it, they will come’ sort of thing,” he said. “Just because you’re a zone, doesn’t mean you get investment.”
The renewed focus on the program comes as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, permanently folded opportunity zones into the tax code. Many first-round zones will lose their designations, and governors will begin nominating replacement tracts on July 1 for a new investment period running from 2027 through 2036.
While investment data remains opaque, housing market data offers a glimpse into how some zones are faring.
Research firm Attom analyzed median home values in opportunity zones that had enough data to measure in the first quarter — at least five home sales. In the first quarter, median home prices rose year over year in nearly 45 percent of the tracts studied by Attom, slightly below the 47 percent share of non-zone tracts that posted gains.
“That’s a good sign, since these areas, which have historically been under-invested in, can be bellwethers for changes in the broader housing market’s trajectory,” said Attom’s CEO Rob Barber, in Attom’s report.
Still, opportunity zones remain disproportionately low-value housing markets. Four out of five zones had median home prices below the national median of $360,000 in the first quarter of the year, according to Attom.
At the same time, a growing number of zones saw home prices fall back to post-recession lows.
In the first quarter, 21 of the more than 3,200 census tracts recorded their lowest median home values since the Great Recession, according to a TRD Data analysis of Attom data. That’s more than double from a year earlier and the highest total since the first quarter of 2022.
However, the share of zones at their bottom in the first quarter of 2026 was quite low: just 0.6 percent, which was double the share of the year prior, per TRD Data’s analysis. Still, those shares are far from those of the first quarters of 2018 and 2019, when the share of OZs at their bottom were nearly 14 percent and 8 percent, respectively.