Healey Administration Proposes Pared-Down Slate of Opportunity Zones

Massachusetts is proposing 34 fewer neighborhoods in a second iteration of the federal Opportunity Zone program that gives investors tax benefits in return for their involvement, reported the Boston Business Journal. The Healey administration is submitting 104 zones, with tighter federal restrictions on the zones eliminating about 25% of the zones that qualified when the program was new.

Left out in the Boston area are Cambridge’s Alewife neighborhood, Somerville’s Assembly Square, Malden Center and part of Medford, the Business Journal reported. Among the zones that made the cut for the program’s second iteration are a Dorchester zone including the planned six-million-square-foot Dorchester Bay City development, a riverfront corridor in Fall River slated for development after a highway was demolished, and a site including Joint Base Cape Cod, around which major new housing and other developments are being studied.

New federal restrictions limit would-be residents’ household earnings to 70% of the area median income, eliminate contiguous tracts and require poverty rates of at least 20%. Once approved by the U.S. Treasury Department, the Massachusetts zones will remain in place until 2036.

Rendering of Dorchester Bay City courtesy of Stantec.