Can Opportunity Zones Reverse Neighborhood Disinvestment? (with Jimmy Atkinson)

Building Better Cities · Sep 2, 2026 · 35m · transcript

Neighborhoods have experienced dramatically different economic trajectories. Decades of redlining, discrimination, and disinvestment has shaped where capital flows — and once those patterns were established, they became self-reinforcing.

In 2016, bipartisan lawmakers envisioned a new tool that would interrupt that cycle: Opportunity Zones. The idea was to make it more attractive for private investors to put long-term capital into economically distressed communities — and to reward investors for staying invested rather than simply flipping assets.

In this episode of Building Better Cities…