A provision in the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, authored by Rep. Ro Khanna, would direct Opportunity Zone resources toward converting vacant office and commercial buildings into housing. It would give HUD authority to give extra weight to grant applications for projects inside qualified Opportunity Zones and authorize a blighted-building-to-housing conversion pilot under the federal HOME program to help close the gap between conversion costs and finished-home values. Advocates in San Francisco, where roughly 30 million square feet of downtown office space sits underused, see the tools as a way to make stalled conversions pencil out. The July 1 governor nomination window will determine which tracts, and which conversion projects, can tap the funding.
Original reporting by Marcus Delgado for Opportunity Zone Invest, an independent OZ 2.0 research site. Facts are drawn from the primary sources cited above per our editorial standards. Nothing here is tax, legal, or investment advice.
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