You can use lending in a Qualified Opportunity Fund/ Qualified Opportunity Zone Business in the same way you can in a traditional investment. In order to benefit from the Opportunity Zone incentive, you will also need to have deferred gains that are invested into the fund as equity.
Qualified Opportunity Fund's (QOF) can use debt for the acquisition and improvement of real estate in a similar manner as other companies would.
I recommend that the Qualified Opportunity Fund (QOF) form a subsidiary QOZB to acquire the property and take out commercial lending (rather than having the QOF do it directly). But otherwise it shouldn't be any different than a borrowing for non-Opportunity Zone property.
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