The United States faces a deep and persistent housing shortage, particularly in low-income communities that struggle to attract new investment. Meanwhile, federal policymakers have long searched for cost-efficient ways of boosting housing supply at a meaningful scale.
Opportunity Zones (OZs) were designed to change that dynamic by channeling private capital into designated distressed areas through a market-driven, flexible incentive structure. Since implementation, OZs have spurred more than $100 billion in investment to date across thousands of communities. But what has that meant for housing?
A new working paper from EIG provides the first quantitative evidence that OZs have significantly increased housing supply in designated communities. By making novel use of HUD data sourced from U.S. Postal Service address counts, the study finds that the OZ incentive increased new housing construction by 70 percent in these areas, generating more than 416,000 new residential addresses between 2019 and the first quarter of 2025. The authors also find that the new development and investment did not merely shift from nearby neighborhoods: For every 100 new residential addresses caused by the OZ incentive, roughly 97 represents net new supply that would not have been built in the absence of OZs.
Updated February, 2026
