Musk announced in 2019 that SpaceX would buy out all the Boca Chica homes he hadn’t already purchased. Homes in the area had previously changed hands for $85,000 or $90,000, and SpaceX began offering property owners three times their homes’ appraised value, according to letters it sent to residents. Many took the deals. About a half dozen holdouts remain.
Stevens, who accepted SpaceX’s buyout but declined to reveal the amount, said the money wouldn’t be enough to relocate to a spot that would match Boca Chica’s unobstructed ocean views, solitude and starry night skies. “What they gave me will buy a house, but it won’t buy me a house anywhere like this,” she said.
In the long haul, a major space port could transform the entire surrounding Rio Grande Valley, according to Gilberto Salinas, who helped recruit the company to the area a decade ago when he was a member of the Brownsville development council. Salinas, now a member of the Texas Aerospace and Aviation Advisory Committee, said the project was an economic necessity for one of the country’s poorest communities. “For our youth to be able to dream big, and have an interstellar career, in their own backyard? That’s priceless,” he said.
For Bezos, there were no worries about displacing a residential neighborhood for his rocket engine plant.
The opportunity zone program was still languishing in Congress in 2017 when Bezos’s Blue Origin announced it would set up operations in Cummings Research Park, a 3,000-acre crucible of Fortune 500 companies, high-tech start-ups and university laboratories in Huntsville, Alabama. The research park, founded by space pioneer Wernher Von Braun, made logistical sense for Blue Origin: It’s close to NASA’s Marshall Space Center, which helped earn Huntsville the nickname “Rocket City.” Alabama officials helped make it more financially appealing, too, by giving Blue Origin $16 million in incentives.
The following year, as the company finalized its construction plans, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey’s administration included Cummings’s census tract on its list of opportunity zones. Blue Origin could potentially save tens of millions of dollars in federal taxes if it avails itself of the benefit for the $200 million plant, considering the 20% tax rate on capital gains in 2018. The company has said that at peak production, the rocket plant could employ 400 people.
The park itself is the antithesis of economic distress, with 26,000 jobs and 300 companies including Lockheed Martin, Teledyne and Booz Allen Hamilton. The vast majority of its workers commute from elsewhere. But the key qualifying factor for opportunity zones is the per-capita income of a census tract’s full-time residents, which is below Huntsville’s median. The park is located near a public housing project and a few low-income neighborhoods, satisfying the program’s definition of economically troubled.
Even some people who run Cummings were surprised to learn it was among Huntsville’s 10 chosen tracts. Erin Koshut, its executive director, said its officials didn’t discuss the program with the governor’s office until after the selection.
Ivey’s office declined to respond to questions about why the research park’s census tract was chosen over another one of Huntsville’s struggling neighborhoods. Ivey’s office said it didn’t discuss the matter with Blue Origin.
Alex Flachsbart, who founded a nonprofit group that connects investors with Alabama opportunity zones, said Cummings has so much potential to create jobs that he believes it was a wise choice by the governor’s office. “If you want to turn an area around, jobs are the factor,” he said.