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Brian Berman shows how to map eligible Opportunity Zones with Census tools
Summary
In a U.S. Census Bureau webinar, Brian Berman demonstrated step-by-step how to use the IRS GEOID spreadsheet and Census mapping tools to identify eligible Opportunity Zone census tracts and cross-check them with Treasury lists.
Brian Berman, a data dissemination specialist with the U.S. Census Bureau, led a live demonstration showing how to convert the IRS listing of eligible Opportunity Zone tracts into a visual map.
He began by explaining the GEOID structure used in the IRS appendix (state, county, tract digits) and walked attendees through filtering the spreadsheet and then loading tract geography on data.census.gov. "This is called a GEOID," Berman said, and he demonstrated freezing the top row, adding filters and sorting so users can extract all eligible tracts for a given county or city. He emphasized cross-checking any candidate tracts back against the Treasury/IRS spreadsheet to confirm designation.
Berman used King County, Washington, and the city of Renton as an example. He showed how to add place-level boundaries in the map view, reduce data classes to a single cut line and type the 70% of median family income threshold to render eligible tracts in a single color. "So I know for sure that these 8 tracks are eligible for opportunity zones," he said while highlighting the eight tracts identified in his Renton demo.
The presentation repeatedly instructed attendees to use the 2024 5-year ACS estimates for tract-level calculations and to verify each tract by copying its GEOID from the map and searching the IRS spreadsheet. Berman advised that visualizing eligible tracts makes it easier to match tract names across census tools and to prepare regions for further analysis in Census Business Builder and OnTheMap.
