California Opportunity Zones

Within the past two years, a new piece of legislation has been rolled out with the goal to increase investment in areas all over the U.S. that are faced with hardships such as low economic growth, high unemployment, and many other debilitating social issues. The legislation granted state govenors the ability to choose a portion of the census tracts in their state as "Opportunity Zones", where any investments in these tracts would receive tax breaks and other monetary incentives.

The app below was designed as a part of a much larger project, where myself and other data scientists have worked to develop data surfing tools that may ultimately help investors with their investment decisions if they are interested in creating or joining an Opportunity Fund. The goal of this app is to help interested parties learn more about the state they wish to invest in through various demographic summaries, and also provide a sense of what kinds of issues or challenges the opportunty zones in that state face.

Because this app represents part of ongoing work, the app only presents data for California. As can be seen, California has many different Opportunity Zones with different states of economic activity. What is most striking, is that compared to the differences between OZ's and non-designated tracts, California has a much higher percentage of individuals who identify as Hispanic or Latino in the opportunity zones compared to non-designated tracts. Investors should keep this in mind, and adapt their investments to best suit not only the economic needs of an Opportunity Zone, but also the cultural values of those who live in the Opportunity Zones.

Note: Currently I am unable to subscribe to anything but shiny.io's free account. Therefore, you may experience disconnections to the server, especially if more than a few others are also playing in the app.