Business Trends COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE
Megan Charity (L) and Barrett
Worthington are using Virginia’s
opportunityva.org website to seek investors for their proposed $8 million entertainment complex in Richmond’s
Manchester area.
The Land of OZ A
nybody up for pickleball? Barrett Worthington and Megan Charity hope so.
Business partners based in
Charlottesville, Worthington and Charity are among Virginia’s opportunity zone pioneers. They hope to build an $8 million entertainment complex called Rally, containing a restaurant, beer garden and courts f or pickleball — a mix of badminton, tennis and pingpong — in Richmond’s Manchester neighborhood. Worthington, a University
of Virginia Darden School of Business graduate, and Charity, an internationally ranked pickleball
50 | FEBRUARY 2020
player and coach, are seeking $3.7 million in investment capital for Rally. In their quest, the part- ners are working with Opportunity Virginia, the state-funded online marketplace started by Virginia Community Capital and its subsid- iary, LOCUS Impact Investing. Opportunity Virginia’s mission
is twofold: connecting entrepre- neurs with investors via the recently launched
opportunityva.org web- site, and educating small business and property owners about avail- able tax benefits and how to market their ideas to investors. Created as part of the 2017
federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,
Opportunity zones have financial impact, but how much? by Kate Andrews
opportunity zones were designed to promote economic development in lower-income areas by giving investors the chance to defer and reduce capital gains taxes. Investors put their money into Qualified Opportunity Funds, investment vehicles for development projects in one of 8,700 census tracts designated by the U.S. Treasury as opportunity zones in 2018. Virginia has 212 such opportunity zones spanning the commonwealth, from rural tracts in Southern and Southwest Virginia to urban neighborhoods in Hampton Roads, Richmond and Arlington. Over the past year and a half since the zones were approved,
Photo by Caroline Martin
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72
