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Posted inLocal News

San Rafael weighs new Opportunity Zone for Canal district amid displacement concerns

by Ruth Dusseault, Bay City News July 7, 2026July 8, 2026

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FILE: Flood waters inundate Yacht Club Drive in San Rafael's Canal district after winter storms coincided with a king tide on Friday, Jan. 2, 2025. The low-lying Canal neighborhood is among hundreds of economically disadvantaged Census tracts statewide that could qualify for special development tax incentives under an Opportunity Zone designation. The label could encourage outside investment in improvement projects that might otherwise be deemed too risky. (John Rising via Bay City News)

SAN RAFAEL IS SEEKING a federal tax incentive known as an Opportunity Zone, this time deliberately, knowing it could become a double-edged sword.

Housing and business projects in economically distressed communities, like the Canal district of San Rafael, are considered riskier investments. An Opportunity Zone makes it easier for businesses and developers to find investors through a Qualified Opportunity Fund, an investment vehicle that pools money from investors to fund businesses and real estate in low-income communities.

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Tagged: affordable housing, Canal Alliance, Canal district, disadvantaged communities, economic development, Eli Hill, gentrification, housing, land use, Marin County, Omar Carrera, One Big Beautiful Bill, Opportunity Zones, real estate, redevelopment, San Rafael, sea level rise, tax incentives, Trump administration, U.S. Department of the Treasury

Ruth Dusseault, Bay City News

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.

More by Ruth Dusseault, Bay City News
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