Lighthouse.one is an investment platform that brings together the most promising Opportunity Zone (OZ) projects and accredited investors on its community-centric platform. To learn more, visit OZ projects ranging from commercial real estate and affordable housing to sustainable infrastructure and high-growth startups can easily be discovered and gain access to capital like never before. Investors can build a unique OZ portfolio across target regions, industries, project types, and social goals.
OZs were established in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and amended in 2018. Over 8,700 OZs throughout the U.S. were designated by state governors in low-income census tracts. The legislation grants those who invest in Opportunity Zones the ability to reduce, defer, and eliminate taxes they would otherwise pay on capital gains.
Lighthouse.one is based in the Excelsior District in San Francisco, one of the few qualified OZ businesses established within the city limits. The company was founded by Peter Hirshberg, CEO, and Marcia Kadanoff, President and COO, who hail from Maker City®, which has an extensive track record of working with cities, towns, and the private sector to create new forms of civic innovation, economic development and transformation.
About once every decade there’s government legislation that allows an industry to go from zero to hero.
For the longest time, all the intellectual capital, all the social capital, the financial capital – the people with the means – have been flocking to the biggest cities throughout the world. And most of the world and most of the United States has been suffering from this continuous brain drain because all that capital has been aggregating in the big cities. And a lot of the country has been lacking in opportunity, lacking in capital.
Hello, I’m Peter Hirshberg, CEO of Lighthouse.one.
There’s lots of capital gains in the US, but it often sits on the sidelines. It’s waiting for something to do. And into this ferment came this remarkable moment when Republicans and Democrats, when Cory Booker and Tim Scott came together and created a mechanism that became part of the new tax legislation that allowed for community investment and community development.
And this is that opportunity to restart or rebuild America. This is an opportunity where all of the country has an opportunity to get investment that historically hasn’t been there.
If you have an entrepreneurial dream and you’re in Cincinnati, Ohio or Detroit or wherever you might be, there is now capital that is looking for opportunities in these 8,700 places where historically there may have been none.
The healthy way to make all of this happen is to create a marketplace, so you can see all at once what each community aspires for – what their ideas are – and then capital can make its own decisions.
Lighthouse is a marketplace and brings to the fore all of the market of Opportunity Zones because there are so many pieces: 8,700 census tracts, many different types of projects in each: real estate, commercial space, new companies to be built, infrastructure – like renewable energy and broadband – education, workforce development. Communities need this rich set of capacity, and at the center of that we think needs to be a marketplace, a ‘lighthouse’ that allows these connections to happen – that speeds these connections up – and allows America to have this next frontier moment.
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