← Research POLICY REPORT · 2025

The Impact of Opportunity Zones on Housing Supply

Benjamin Glasner, Adam Ozimek, John Lettieri

Economic Innovation Group

Summary

Using HUD administrative data on address vacancies, this study measures how Opportunity Zone designation affected new housing construction between 2019 and early 2025. Designated tracts saw new housing construction rise by 70 percent relative to comparable nondesignated tracts, adding more than 416,000 net new residential addresses. About 97 of every 100 new addresses represented genuine additional supply rather than displacement from nearby areas.

A plain-language summary written for this site, not the authors' published abstract. See the published version for the original.

Coverage and interviews

• Opportunity Zones: New and Improved? Multi-Housing News · August 2025
• Apartment Development in Opportunity Zones May Matter for Inflation MSCI · July 2025

All media and coverage

Cite this

Benjamin Glasner, Adam Ozimek, and John Lettieri. 2025. “The Impact of Opportunity Zones on Housing Supply.” Economic Innovation Group. https://eig.org/opportunity-zones-housing-supply/.

BibTeX

@techreport{glasner_2025_oz_housing_supply,
  title = {The Impact of {Opportunity Zones} on Housing Supply},
  author = {Glasner, Benjamin and Ozimek, Adam and Lettieri, John},
  institution = {Economic Innovation Group},
  year = {2025},
  month = mar,
}