What might new Trump-sponsored opportunity zones mean for SLC? Have you seen North Temple and the Granary lately?

Amid the hefty tax breaks in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, there’s a second life for development-spurring “opportunity zones.”

If you want some up-close-and-personal examples of how Utah’s capital is still absorbing the first round of these federal tax zones, look at the rapid growth along North Temple. Or in the Granary District.

Since about 2018, these federally designated areas have brought major tax incentives for big-pocket private investors in real estate and other commercial projects across the country and the Beehive State, pumping millions upon millions of dollars into what has largely been urban development.

Along the North Temple corridor tying downtown to the international airport, there’s been a rush of land purchases and mid-rise apartment construction projects, with more underway, fueled by these tax incentives.

And in the Granary, full block-size residential neighborhoods called the Post District and The Silos have sprouted quickly westward into once-industrial areas — also financed with help from these zones, fashioned with the stated aim of lifting people in economically struggling census tracts.

The tax breaks have fostered key residential projects such as the Paperbox Lofts and theYARD, as well as one-of-a-kind adaptive reuses of historic buildings in the city, such as the Asher Adams hotel grafted onto downtown’s Union Pacific Depot, and INDUSTRY, a sprawling coworking space created from an old foundry southwest of downtown.

Evidence suggests that here and across the U.S. these massive tax breaks in capital gains for long-term investors have helped create jobs and housing, though they’ve also carried assertions in some Utah quarters they’re helping to gentrify west-side neighborhoods.

And not everyone is convinced the zones help build affordable housing.

“We’ve had our doubts about it,” said Steve Erickson, a longtime Utah housing advocate, “but we just don’t have any good reporting on it.”

Housing is ‘a really good thing’

There were 8,764 opportunity zones created across the U.S. in 2017. Utah has 46 of them, thanks to recommendations at the time by then-Gov. Gary Herbert.

There are smaller zones designated from low-income census tracts in many of the state’s cities — including much of Salt Lake City’s downtown, the Fairpark and Glendale neighborhoods, and most of the Northwest Quadrant — as well as sprawling zones across many rural counties.

This was originally a bipartisan idea in Trump’s first raft of tax cuts, aimed in this case at lifting areas of the country that were disadvantaged on income and employment rates, based on census numbers.

Investors leaving their money in a qualified opportunity zone fund for up to 10 years could delay certain taxes and avoid capital gains altogether in other cases.

Initial research shows that nationally, the results have been immense — with nearly $100 billion invested since 2019 in specially created opportunity funds that funnel cash into these zones. Reliable state-level estimates are scarce, but Utah’s investment has likely been in the hundreds of millions.

Most of the resulting development, though, has been felt in metropolitan areas, nationally and in the Beehive State. Rural hinterlands, not so much. Several regional planners in rural portions of Utah contacted by The Salt Lake Tribune said the zones seem to have minimal effects.

Even in U.S. cities, according to University of Utah finance professor and researcher Andra Ghent, “it’s not clear that we’ve seen a lot of reduction in poverty for the people who live in those zones.”

“That’s not to say that it won’t,” Ghent said. “It’s just that the evidence isn’t clear that that’s happening right now.”

Ghent, who holds the Ivory-Boyer Chair in Real Estate at the U.’s David Eccles School of Business, said one study comparing opportunity zones with similar low-income census tracts without that label show the zones have boosted employment. Workers don’t always live in the tracts where their new job is located, however, meaning that their new employment doesn’t always lift poverty rates in that area.

Studies show opportunity zones — at least in metropolitan areas — tend to increase the housing supply, Ghent said.

“That’s a really good thing,” she said, “because in low-income communities, the majority of residents are renters, and they’re typically what we call cost-burdened renters, meaning they’re spending more than 30% of their income on rent. So more housing supply is great for them. That’s a really big plus.”

The city’s latest housing data shows hundreds of units have gone in along North Temple and in the Granary in years since cash incentives in the zones began to flow.

‘You see less minorities now’

On North Temple, the zones have combined with city incentives encouraging denser, transit-oriented development to create a neighborhood in major flux. Ongoing work on a spate of apartment projects along the street’s TRAX Green Line is now supercharged by the prospect of Larry H. Miller Co.’s Power District project in Fairpark.

Booming development is already changing the character of the area, residents and business owners say. While some of the new apartments are affordable, others will rent at market rates or higher — and that, residents add, is pushing up property values.

Some worry the new apartment development isn’t meeting the existing community’s needs. Fairpark Community Council Chair Jeffery Olson said developers have been building too many small apartments and neglecting family-size spaces.

“We’re not getting things to build community,” Olson said. ”We aren’t getting many things that people can buy. We aren’t getting larger [apartments] where a family could actually live.”

He and others worry that lacking options for those who may want to put down roots in the neighborhood will result in an area that’s forever in transition and bereft of authentic character.

Jorge Fierro, who runs the popular Mexican food business Rico Brand in the North Temple neighborhood, said he has already noticed changes in who lives in some of the new residential buildings.

“You see less minorities now,” Fierro said. “I’m not saying that that’s bad. It’s what the younger generations and the yuppies can afford. Some of my people can’t.”

Andrew Wittenberg, spokesperson for Mayor Erin Mendenhall, said that “hundreds of units in the North Temple corridor have happened with greater speed and more large-scale development, in part, thanks to opportunity zones.”

The outcome was similar, Wittenberg said, for the Granary District, “an area which struggled to attract major investments until the creation of OZs.”

Yet an unintended consequence of the zones, Wittenberg added, has been to concentrate affordable housing in historically low-income areas, “which is antithetical to the geographic equity approach we’ve taken as the city.”

The North Temple corridor — where fenced vacant lots and wooden building frames punctuate the streetscape — is now a focus of police patrols as part of an enforcement blitz on vagrancy and heightened drug activity under Mendenhall’s public safety plan that was announced in January.

Wittenberg said the mayor was “optimistic about future public safety efforts along the North Temple corridor,” pointing to the recent creation of the Urban Services Division with a dedicated North Temple Clean City team, which the city plans to ramp up in September.

A big neighborhood, all in one go

In the Granary, the Post District between 500 South and 600 South from 300 West to 400 West was among the first opportunity zone projects in the U.S. “of any scale or size,” said developer Brandon Blaser, founder and president of Salt Lake City-based Blaser Ventures.

It also amounted to building a full neighborhood nearly all at once, replacing 13.1 contiguous acres of unsightly concrete and abandoned industrial structures with a large new mixed-use area boasting 580 new dwellings and a host of offices and restaurants, many of them located in renovated historic buildings.

The federal tax incentives, Blaser said, have “made a significant difference.” He said the work might have otherwise been done gradually over a decade.

Blaser and development partners are now building a similar mixed-use project called The Silos a block to the west. That’ll have a sizable park, boutique hotel, offices, shops, restaurants and hundreds of apartments.

Of nearly 65 acres he owns across the Granary District’s opportunity zones, Blaser said development is hurtling ahead on half or more of the land — with a total of more than 1,000 affordable residential units in the works.

Blaser said he and partners are working an opportunity zone project in South Salt Lake between State and Main streets, with nearly 500 affordable housing units and 25,000 square feet of commercial space along the S-Line streetcar.

“All this development would not have happened at this level, scale, quality and timing, without opportunity zones,” he said. By his estimate, the Post District has added 600 jobs along with a host of new residents, where there was only empty blight before. And The Silos, he noted, will bring even more.

New zones to come

With some major tweaks under Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the arrangement for opportunity zones has now been made permanent — in a way.

Starting next year, the existing zones will sunset and officials working for Utah Gov. Spencer Cox will get to redraw and enshrine a new set of zone borders — and the tax breaks that come with them — effective through 2036.

Just where those new zones could be located is still coming into focus. New rules for creating them lower the income standards for qualifying census tracts to 70% of statewide median income, down from 80%. They add incentives for additional capital gains breaks for investors putting their money into zones in rural areas.

The new rules now say governors can no longer designate census tracts that border low-income tracts, as was allowed in the first go-round.

That could mean, for example, that portions of the Granary District will no longer qualify. But new zones could be created covering, say, Salt Lake City’s Ballpark neighborhood, which qualifies as an impoverished census tract, as well as other portions of downtown.

A spokesperson for Cox’s Office of Economic Opportunity said the agency is looking forward to “revisiting and renewing” the zones with an emphasis on rural communities to “identify which areas could receive capital investment to benefit their specific economic development needs.”

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