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USA Industrial Opportunity Zones

County business counts and tract workplace jobs identify where industrial activity may support Opportunity Zone investment.

Industrial capacity by tract

Opportunity Zones use census tracts, while the strongest business counts are reported by county. This study keeps county business totals as observed data and uses tract manufacturing jobs to estimate how those businesses are distributed within each county.

Data and methods

Sources used in the analysis:

  • SUSB 2015-2022. County business counts by NAICS and enterprise size inside the usa_industrial_activity pack. Manufacturing SMEs are defined as firms with fewer than 500 employees in NAICS 31-33.
  • LODES 2022. Tract workplace jobs inside the usa_industrial_activity pack, used as the downscaling weight surface, with CNS05 manufacturing jobs as the primary allocator.
  • USA Opportunity Zones. Tract-level OZ 1.0 and OZ 2.0 eligibility flags aligned to the same tract hierarchy.

Methodology follows a simple observed-plus-estimated rule. County SUSB totals remain the anchor truth. Within each county, manufacturing SMEs are distributed across tracts in proportion to tract manufacturing jobs. That creates tract-level estimated SME counts that can be intersected with OZ 1.0 and OZ 2.0 tracts without pretending the original business counts were directly observed at tract scale. The result is a tract-level industrial fit surface where business presence, manufacturing labor, and OZ geography are already aligned enough to justify deeper follow-up.

Findings

The estimates separate tracts with stronger signs of manufacturing activity from places that look promising only at county scale. They help narrow follow-up work on OZ 1.0 growth and OZ 2.0 candidates. The tract business counts remain estimates, not observed firm locations.