Here are snapshots of what’s happening across America:

Bronx Boost
Port Morris Distillery, which makes a high-alcohol rum called pitorro, was the perfect spot for an opportunity zone pitch. It’s on a block with a colorful mural, industrial buildings ready for loft conversions and views of the Manhattan skyline. Much of the surrounding South Bronx is now an opportunity zone.

“We have always been the most ignored,” Marlene Cintron, the borough’s head of economic development, told an audience of developers and lawyers in November. “These opportunity zones are here for you to take advantage of them.”

The case for the Bronx, where incomes are among the lowest in New York, is that it’s the last borough awaiting revitalization. The tax incentives are designed to unleash it. If developers can buy at current Bronx prices, before seeing a Brooklyn-like rise, the breaks would be massive.

“Huge, huge upside that you’re not going to get if you build a strip mall in Topeka,” said Terri Adler, managing partner of law firm Duval & Stachenfeld LLP, who also spoke at the event.

Yet the Bronx faces a formidable problem: It’s competing with other zones across the city, including waterfronts in Brooklyn and Queens with stronger momentum. The tax break Bronx officials hope will rejuvenate their borough may instead lure more money to what looks like a safer bet across the river.

In November, Amazon.com Inc. selected Long Island City for its next headquarters. Portions of that Queens neighborhood, including a former plastics factory the retailer plans to occupy, are inside opportunity zones, even though they’re among the city’s fastest-growing areas. In 2017, more apartments were built there than in any other neighborhood in the city.

 Driving Alabama
Alex Flachsbart, 30, has a lot of time to talk when he’s in his SUV crisscrossing Alabama. A lawyer who specialized in economic development grants and tax breaks, he quit his job last year to start Opportunity Alabama, aiming to connect capital to worthy projects. For the past several months, he’s been educating people about opportunity zones, speaking to local officials, businesses and investors.

“I have done the OZ PowerPoint God knows how many times,” Flachsbart, who grew up in the Bay Area, said from behind the wheel one day in December.

When he read about opportunity zones in a 2017 draft of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, his mind reeled. Here was an uncapped subsidy far more flexible than anything he’d used before. It could draw investment for an array of projects. He imagined funding startups in Huntsville, where NASA’s presence has lured a deep bench of talented engineers, and the renovation of an old civic complex in Mobile.