Opportunity Zones (OZs) encourage long-term investments in low-income census tracts selected by the governors of each state. Of the 320 Opportunity Zone census tracts in Ohio, 64 (20%) are located in Cuyahoga County, with 48 in the City of Cleveland and 16 in the surrounding suburbs.
The partners in the Opportunity CLE collaborative are the City of Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, Greater Cleveland Partnership, Cleveland Development Advisors, the Fund for Our Economic Future and the Cuyahoga Land Bank. The group enjoys the support of The Cleveland Foundation, The George Gund Foundation and many other entities and individuals. See a full list of project partners HERE.
The OZ program allows investors to defer any tax owed on capital gains by investing the realized gains in zones, with greater incentives the longer the investment is held. Opportunity CLE recently developed an investment prospectus and launched a digital portal and website to match up developers and business owners in designated Cuyahoga County OZs seeking additional equity with prospective investors. It offers developers and business owners the ability to promote their OZ projects on a global scale, while investors can view a growing number of county projects.
There are thousands of designated Opportunity Zones across the country that were created as part of the federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Opportunity Zones are census tracts that have federally designated poverty rates of at least 20 percent. Tracts adjacent to qualifying zones can also be designated Opportunity Zones. In Cuyahoga County, 140,051 residents live within Opportunity Zones. Opportunity CLE has grouped Cuyahoga County’s 64 zones into 11 districts.
- W. 25th-MetroHealth Corridor
- Health-Tech Corridor
- Opportunity Corridor
- Glenville-Rockefeller Park Innovation District
- Euclid/Collinwood Industrial Corridor
- Downtown Cleveland
- Outer Belt Development District
- Aerozone Innovation Hub (Adjacent to or near NASA Glenn Research Center)
- Cuyahoga County Airport District
- Transportation Boulevard Development District
- Caledonia Park District
“Opportunity Zone investments in these designated areas may provide crucial funding that could mean the difference between a project going forward or not,” says Gus Frangos, President and General Counsel for the Cuyahoga Land Bank. “It’s private money that’s either going to be invested here or somewhere else in the U.S. We’d be losing important investments in our community if we didn’t vie for the investments.”
Read more about Opportunity CLE HERE.