Seaside gets its first Opportunity Zone as Astoria’s is renewed
The Promenade in Seaside. Photo: Visitor7, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Seaside has never had a federal Opportunity Zone. Starting Jan. 1, it will, and Astoria’s existing zone around Uppertown and Tongue Point has been renewed for another decade.
Business Oregon picked both Clatsop County tracts in the first round of designations under the program’s permanent new version, often called Opportunity Zones 2.0, The Astorian reported. The zones take effect Jan. 1, 2027, after federal certification, and run through 2036.
It was a competitive round. Business Oregon received 106 nominations from local governments and had 58 census tracts it could designate statewide. The state said it chose based on how well each tract fit local economic plans and how strong a case the community made.
“Securing a new Opportunity Zone in Seaside while maintaining the designation in Astoria is a significant opportunity for Clatsop County,” county commission chair Mark Kujala said.
What a zone actually does
An Opportunity Zone does not bring in any money by itself. It is a tax break for investors. People who sell stock, real estate or another asset at a profit can put those capital gains into a Qualified Opportunity Fund, which then invests in businesses or property inside a designated tract. In return, the investor can defer the tax on the gain and, if they stay in long enough, pay less of it.
Seaside Finance Director Zach Fleck walked through an example for The Astorian. Say an investor sells stock for a $1 million gain and puts that $1 million into an eligible project in Seaside or Astoria. They can put off paying capital gains tax for up to five years. If they hold the investment that full five years, the taxable amount drops by 10% for urban projects. Because Seaside and Astoria are classified as rural under the new rules, the reduction is 30%.
That rural bonus is one of the biggest differences in the new version. Congress rewrote the program in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025. The rewrite made it permanent, with states redrawing their zones every 10 years, and tightened eligibility. A tract now qualifies with a poverty rate of at least 20% or a median family income at or below 70% of the state benchmark, down from 80% under the 2018 rules, according to Clatsop County Community Development Director Gail Henrikson.
Astoria gets a longer runway
Astoria’s zone dates to the first round in 2018 and was set to expire at the end of 2028. Developers weighing projects in Uppertown or around Tongue Point now have a clear window through 2036 rather than a two-year one. For Seaside, the designation is new, which means QOF-backed projects inside the tract become possible for the first time.
Henrikson was careful about expectations. Cities don’t run the zones, she said, but they can market them, pair projects with local incentives and speed up permitting. “The cities can do as much or as little as they have the capacity to complete,” she said.
Will it change anything on the ground?
That’s the open question. Nationally, research on the first round found that much of the Opportunity Zone money went to real estate in tracts that were already gaining value, while many rural zones drew little or nothing. The 2.0 rules try to steer more money toward rural places with the bigger tax break, and the North Coast’s housing shortage gives investors an obvious target.
Seaside’s need is not hard to describe. Like the rest of the county, it has a tight year-round rental market, a workforce that often can’t afford to live where it works, and a tourism economy that swings hard between summer and winter. Projects that mix housing with ground-floor commercial space are the kind of deal Opportunity Zone funds have tended to back elsewhere. Astoria’s Uppertown tract, meanwhile, includes the Tongue Point area, where the waterfront and the former naval station have long been seen as underused.
Whether funds show up in Seaside or Astoria will likely depend on whether local projects are ready when investors come looking. With the program now permanent and the next redesignation a decade away, the county has time to make that pitch.
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