That little nudge might just be forthcoming. A provision slipped into the Trump administration’s sprawling tax bill aims to transform places like census tract 06019000100 by luring private dollars to them. In Opportunity Zones, as they are called, investors will receive huge tax breaks for building office parks, warehouses, housing, grocery stores, and the like, helping to ease poverty and end blight in distressed communities. Despite being not much more than a remainder in the legislation, economists believe it could end up becoming the biggest place-based economic-development policy the federal government has.

“The key factors that have led to our uneven recovery are education, infrastructure, and workforce development. Can I address those three pillars by putting a target, a positive target, on distressed communities? Can I address those three issues and make a profit [as an investor] while also doing good?” said Senator Tim Scott, the South Carolina Republican who sponsored the provision, sitting in his Capitol Hill office—that’s census tract 11001008200. “The answer is yes.”

The answer to whether the Opportunity Zone designation might help places like Fresno might indeed be yes: Mayors and economic-development officials are enthusiastic about the initiative and scrambling to figure out how to capitalize on it, as are real-estate investors and developers. But economists argue that it looks unlikely to help revitalize the country’s most distressed communities—Flint and Detroit, the Mississippi Delta and Appalachia, Toledo and Youngstown—and that it looks likely to supercharge investment in places that were already growing. That means the provision might intensify the very regional inequality it seeks to remedy.

This is the dilemma posed by pursuing public policy with private capital. Leveraging the efficiency of markets will undoubtedly help many places on the margin. But it might take far more creative investment to truly solve the country’s worst-off communities and fix its growing problem of place.

The Economic Recovery’s Geographic Desparities

Since the 1840s, America has become a more equal place—or, more to the point, places in America became more equal. The South caught up with the North. Electrification, the rise of the car and truck, the development of the highway system, the growth of manufacturing, and the federal government’s enforcement of antitrust statutes spread prosperity around the country. Aided by the Great Society and the New Deal, the middle class grew, everywhere from Winnetka to Orlando to Humboldt. As Phillip Longman noted in this magazine, the disparities in per-capita income across the different states shrank through the 1980s.

Then, something changed. The differences in per-capita and median income between states started growing again. Average incomes in big cities, in particular hubs such as San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Seattle; and New York, soared. Average incomes elsewhere stagnated. The recovery since the Great Recession has only aggravated these trends, with rural employment and earnings actually falling in the postrecession years in many places. The average income in census tract 060081600115, in Atherton, California, is $250,001. The average income in census tract 060064680028, in Mendota, California, is 20 times smaller.