Oregon's 86 Opportunity Zones Include 'High Rent' Districts in Portland

Oregon has designated dozens of areas around the state as Opportunity Zones, where investors can receive federal tax breaks for funding real-estate projects or new businesses.

The Opportunity Zone program, created by the 2017 tax reform bill, aims to facilitate private investment in areas with high poverty rates. States could nominate a quarter of their eligible census tracts; in Oregon, that worked out to 86 of 342 qualifying low-income areas.

Thirty-one of the new zones are in the Portland area, including "some of Portland's highest-rent neighborhoods," according to reporter John Tierney. Downtown Portland, for example, has a poverty rate of 48 percent despite its high-value real estate. Gresham, Clackamas, and each of the state's nine federally-recognized tribes also received designations. View a map of Oregon's eligible and designated zones on KGW8.

Oregon is one of a handful of states to take up the program, and the potential impacts of the program are still being debated.