（Ajin 開口）
華盛頓郵報這下油門踩下去，再也煞車不住了，駙馬爺庫甚納被搞定了，因為冰山不可能只這麼小塊而已！
更精采的是，原來這些都在川普競選前已經和土龍京爺們有順暢管道交流，所有關節也都打通了，所以整個總統大選期間批判中國貿易嗜血，剝奪美國人工作 - - - 整個罵陣原來都是套好招的演戲，事實上是在賤售美國。
好了，這下比尼克森版更好看囉！
How Jared Kushner built a luxury skyscraper using loans
meant for job-starved areas
By Shawn Boburg May
31 at 6:19 PM
（以下谷歌翻譯）
Jared Kushner如何用貧困地區的貸款建造豪華摩天大樓
豪華的50層住宅樓在後台由Kushner公司建造在65灣街，其合作夥伴位於澤西市蓬勃發展的濱水區。乘客在附近的輕軌站等候火車。 （雅各·帕斯科娃/華盛頓郵報）
JERSEY CITY - Jared
Kushner和他的房地產合作夥伴希望在2015年利用聯邦計劃，這將節省數百萬美元，因為他們在這個充滿活力的50層樓的住宅樓在這個繁華的海濱區，正對著哈德遜河從曼哈頓下城。
只有一個問題：該計劃的目的是為了在窮人，工作飢餓地區的項目受益。
所以項目顧問有創意，記錄顯示。
他們與新澤西州的國家官員合作，制定了一幅地圖，將地圖劃分為六十五號灣街，一片長達四英里的土地，包括該市最貧窮，最犯罪的街區。與此同時，他們只排斥了一些富裕的街區。
戰爭 - 評論家們將其視為立法區的格言，似乎豪華塔在失業率非常高的地區，允許庫什納公司及其合作夥伴通過EB-5簽證獲得5000萬美元的低成本融資程序。
這一舉動是合法的，其他開發商近年來也採用了類似的策略，經常受到歡迎現金注入的國家官員的幫助。但是，它說明了庫什納在他成為總統特朗普的高級顧問之前，曾經是家族房地產公司的經理，他的合夥人利用了一個聯邦計劃的漏洞，雙方的傑出成員都表示一直受到欺詐和虐待的困擾。
在紐約市地區有一些最根深蒂固的貧困的澤西市南部，許多上周訪問過的人很驚訝，他們的鄰里的煩惱是65灣街得到廉價融資的一部分。
世界外聯基督教教會的Shyrone
Richardson牧師在澤西城掙扎的卑爾根 - 拉斐特部分說：“太可惜了。 “不幸的是，從中受益的人不是這個地區的人。”
根據對犯罪和人口普查數據的分析，理查森的教堂處於五塊區域，其中近五分之一的人失業，並在2015年發生了三起致命的槍擊事件。
他的社區似乎是一個遠離閃爍的辦公樓和時尚的咖啡館圍繞65灣街的世界。澤西城海濱在9/11之後看到了一個建築繁榮，將該地區變成了紐約地鐵地區最熱門的房地產市場之一，吸引了曼哈頓和布魯克林的居民。
灣街大樓的公寓，以特朗普灣街市售，每月租金高達$
4,700，並提供曼哈頓下城的全景。附近的通勤火車幾分鐘內便可到達世界貿易中心。根據人口普查數據，在大樓周圍大致三塊半徑的地區，2015年失業率僅為2.6％。
澤西城65號灣右岸的發展商使用投資者簽證計劃獲得5000萬美元的低成本融資。 （雅各·帕斯科娃/華盛頓郵報）
開發商將65灣灣與距離近四英里的低收入地區相聯繫，使其成為高失業地區。 （雅各·帕斯科娃/華盛頓郵報）
根據EB-5計劃，富裕的外國人可以通過在“有針對性的就業領域”的一個項目中投資至少50萬美元來獲得快速居留簽證。要符合條件，該地區的失業率必須是全國平均水平的1.5倍。對於開發商而言，投資條件比銀行貸款更有利。
特朗普政府正在考慮是否採用可以阻止EB-5
gerrymandering的改造。庫什納表示，他將會從任何關於該計劃的討論中迴避自己。
同時，庫什納公司正在通過EB-5籌集1.5億美元的低成本融資，用於澤西市的一個單獨項目：位於一個名為“日廣場”的地區的一對豪華塔。庫什納的姐姐在這個月引起了轟動，當時她提到她的哥哥為這個項目投資中國的投資者。
這是你需要知道的這些簽證。
（Monica Akhtar / The Washington Post）
對於該項目，該公司也將發展與南部幾英里的鄰近地區聯繫起來，同時排除失業率較低的鄰近社區，記錄顯示。
美國移民基金新澤西州的一名執行官，捍衛了這一做法，該公司幫助庫什納公司為兩個項目籌集EB-5資金。首席運營官Mark Giresi稱之為“常識”方法，反映了每個項目周邊環境的更廣泛的經濟現實。他還表示，該項目創造的工作可能只有幾英里外的沮喪地區的工人才能填補。
Giresi在一份聲明中說：“在像澤西城這樣的大城市，這些類型的房地產開發項目創造了急需的就業機會，特別是在覆蓋多個普查區的城市地區的建築行業。人口普查區是政府定義的社區，有時在區域內只有幾個街區。
Giresi表示，灣街項目創造了1,280多項建築和其他工作，而1期刊廣場預計將創造6,600個。根據EB-5計劃，每筆50萬美元的投資必須至少創造10個工作崗位。
該計劃的批評者說，拼湊在一起的多個人口普查區，往往會使平均失業率上升太多，對開發商和不需要政府幫助的地區來說也是如此。他們指出了在曼哈頓繁華地區，華盛頓市中心和加利福尼亞州比佛利山莊的EB-5項目。
政府每年對EB-5簽證的數量進行限制，大部分投資都是在繁榮地區的高調項目。
紐約大學斯特恩商學院的學者學者加里·弗蘭德蘭（Gary
Friedland）說：“這些富裕地區的許多項目都將建成，而且沒有輸入EB-5資本就可以創造就業機會。 “因此，由於項目被剝奪了必不可少的資本，所以無法建造項目，造成的工作就會喪失。”
庫什納公司的發言人拒絕置評，Jared
Kushner的發言人也表示。
Jared Kushner已經將自己的興趣賣給了“日刊廣場”，但在海灣街65號擁有所有權。灣仔豪華閣的合夥人KABR集團也拒絕置評。
庫什納的突出表現是重新關注使用EB-5過程籌集資金，這是國會多年的辯論和房地產行業的激烈遊說。政策雜誌“城市與州”的作家上週出版了這兩個項目的地圖，在評論中寫道：這些項目對EB-5的意圖“嘲弄”。
在上週在澤西市的馬丁·路德·金大街採訪中，有一個共同的反應。 “這就像我們正在被使用，”Helen
Gathers說，她是澤西市38年的註冊護士。
一名54歲的Laville Penn在禁區之後，在藥物持有定罪後於2016年初被釋放監獄，正在尋找工作。他說，他一直在尋找穩定的建設工作六個月以上，但只發現了臨時工作。
現在，希望拿起幾個小時，他停了很多朋友在做合同拆遷工作。賓夕法尼亞州說，澤西城建造的高樓通常是聯合工作。 “如果您沒有認證或經驗，進入工會是很困難的，”他說。
旅行者在哈德遜 - 卑爾根輕軌線路上等候火車，該線線路靠近65灣聖開發區。 （雅各·帕斯科娃/華盛頓郵報）
正在尋找建築工作的左派，左邊的建築工人史蒂文·費爾德（Steven Price）談到他們的澤西城社區。 （雅各·帕斯科娃/華盛頓郵報）
EB-5計劃始於1990年，以幫助吸引外國投資到難以吸引常規融資或投資的農村和城市貧困地區。
但開發商可以自由地將無數個連續的人口普查區串起來，直到達到失業門檻。在經濟衰退以來的這幾年裡，這經常意味著找到最近的貧困地區，並為此而繪製一條線。
從新澤西州通過公開記錄申請獲得的文件顯示，Kushner公司和KABR集團在尋求建造海灣街塔時感覺如何輕鬆。
2015年5月6日，代表項目工作的顧問邁克爾·埃文斯（Michael K. Evans）向新澤西州勞工部的一名官員發了一封電子郵件，要求將灣街附近視為失業率高的地區。個別國家負責審查失業數據和發出信函，證明項目符合聯邦計劃資格。
埃文斯寫道，這樣的一個地區可以通過在澤西市的26個人口普查組合來創建
三週後，國家寫道，該項目符合不同但相似的衰減配置，實現了同樣的目標。新澤西州的州立網站表示，這將有助於開發人員使用人口普查數據對其項目執行“該地區的特別列表”。
國家核准的地圖共16個人口普查區，距離西南近四英里，穿越新澤西州收費公路，向南前往卑爾根 - 拉斐特和格林維爾地區。這些街區的平均失業率一直高於9.3％，當時的合格率。
這可能會使Kushner及其合作夥伴節省數百萬美元。
專家說，開發商通常每年僅通過EB-5支付的利息每年支付4％至8％的利息。傳統融資可以利率在12％到18％之間。在灣街5000萬美元的情況下，貸款期限每年的利息收入差額達數百萬美元。
1月5日，在特朗普上任前兩個多星期，另一名代表庫什納公司工作的顧問又與新澤西州官員聯繫。這一次，大概是1期刊廣場。其所在的人口普查局在2015年的失業率為2.9％，但顧問建議增加五個社區，將失業率提高三倍。
記錄顯示，四天后的批准。庫什納的姐姐五月份來到中國，尋求1.5億美元的EB-5融資。
特朗普政府將在未來幾個月內決定是否頒布由奧巴馬政府提出的規則，將只有那些與發展道路直接相鄰的EB-5資格考慮在內的人口普查。
國土安全部長約翰·凱利正在考慮這項建議。根據擬議的規則，65灣街道塔樓和擬建的1期“廣場”項目都不在“有針對性的就業區”。
Andrew Ba Tran為本報告做出了貢獻。在這個故事的數據分析中使用的文件和方法可以在這裡找到。
How Jared Kushner built a luxury skyscraper using loans
meant for job-starved areas
By Shawn Boburg May
31 at 6:19 PM
A luxury 50-story residential tower, in the background,
built at 65 Bay Street by Kushner Companies and its partners is in a booming
waterfront district in Jersey City. Passengers await a train at a nearby light
rail station. (Yana Paskova/For The Washington Post)
JERSEY CITY — Jared Kushner and his real estate
partners wanted to take advantage of a federal program in 2015 that would save
them millions of dollars as they built an opulent, 50-story residential tower
in this city’s booming waterfront district, just across the Hudson River from
Lower Manhattan.
There was just one problem: The program was designed to
benefit projects in poor, job-starved areas.
So the project’s consultants got creative, records show.
They worked with state officials in New Jersey to come up
with a map that defined the area around 65 Bay Street as a swath of land that
stretched nearly four miles and included some of the city’s poorest and most
crime-ridden neighborhoods. At the same time, they excluded some wealthy
neighborhoods only blocks away.
The tactic — critics liken it to the gerrymandering of
legislative districts — made it appear that the luxury tower was in an area
with extraordinarily high unemployment, allowing Kushner Companies and its
partners to get $50 million in low-cost financing through the EB-5 visa
program.
The move was legal, and other developers have used similar
strategies in recent years, often aided by state officials who welcome the
infusion of cash. But it illustrates how Kushner, who ran his family’s real
estate company before he became a senior adviser to President Trump, and his
partners exploited a loophole in a federal program that prominent members of
both parties say has been plagued by fraud and abuse.
On the south side of Jersey City, which has some of the most
entrenched poverty in the New York City region, many people interviewed one day
last week were surprised that their neighborhood’s troubles were part of the
reason that 65 Bay Street got cheap financing.
“That’s very sad,” said Pastor Shyrone Richardson of the
World Outreach Christian Church in the struggling Bergen-Lafayette section of
Jersey City. “Unfortunately, the people who are benefiting from this are not
the people in this area.”
Richardson’s church is in a five-block area where nearly 1
in 5 were jobless and three fatal shootings occurred in 2015, according to an
analysis of crime and census data.
His neighborhood seems a world away from the gleaming office
towers and trendy cafes that surround 65 Bay Street. The Jersey City
waterfront saw a building boom after 9/11 that transformed the area into
one of the hottest real estate markets in the New York metro region, drawing
residents from Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Apartments in the Bay Street building, marketed as Trump Bay
Street, rent for up to $4,700 a month and offer sweeping views of Lower
Manhattan. A nearby commuter train shuttles passengers to the World Trade
Center within minutes. The area within a roughly three-block radius around the
building had an unemployment rate of just 2.6 percent in 2015, according
to census data.
The developers of Jersey City’s 65 Bay St., the tower on the
right, used an investor visa program to obtain $50 million in low-cost
financing. (Yana Paskova/For The Washington Post)
The developers linked 65 Bay St. to low-income areas, some
nearly four miles away, allowing it to qualify as a high-unemployment zone.
(Yana Paskova/For The Washington Post)
Under the EB-5 program, a wealthy foreigner can get a
fast-track residence visa by investing at least $500,000 in a project in a
“targeted employment area.” To qualify, the area must have an unemployment rate
1.5 times the national average. For developers, the terms of the
investment are more favorable than a bank loan.
The Trump administration is considering whether to adoptchanges that would prevent EB-5 gerrymandering.
Kushner has said he will recuse himself from any discussions on the program.
Kushner Companies, meanwhile, is rushing to raise
$150 million in low-cost financing through EB-5 for a separate project in
Jersey City: a pair of luxury towers in an area called Journal Square.
Kushner’s sister caused a stir this month when she mentioned her brother in a
pitch for the project to investors in China.
Here’s what you need to know about those visas. (Monica
Akhtar/The Washington Post)
For that project, too, the company is linking the
development to blighted neighborhoods miles to the south while excluding
adjoining neighborhoods that have lower unemployment rates, records show.
An executive at U.S. Immigration Fund-NJ, a firm helping
Kushner Companies to raise EB-5 money for both projects, defended the practice.
Mark Giresi, chief operating officer, called it a “common sense” approach that
reflects the broader economic reality of each project’s surroundings. He also
said jobs created by the project could be filled by workers from the depressed
areas only miles away.
“In large urban markets like Jersey City these types of real
estate development projects create much-needed jobs, particularly in the
construction industry across areas of the city that cover multiple census
tracts,” Giresi said in a statement. Census tracts are government-defined
neighborhoods, sometimes as small as a few blocks in area.
Giresi said the Bay Street project created more than 1,280
construction and other jobs and that 1 Journal Square is projected to
create 6,600. Under the EB-5 program, each $500,000 investment must create at
least 10 jobs.
The program’s critics say that cobbling together multiple census
tracts to push up the average unemployment rate too often benefits developers
and areas that do not need the government help. They point to EB-5 projects in
prosperous areas of Manhattan, downtown Washington and in Beverly Hills, Calif.
The government caps the number of EB-5 visas it issues each
year, and most of the resulting investment goes to high-profile projects in
prosperous areas.
“Many of these affluent-area projects would have been built
and jobs created without the infusion of EB-5 capital,” said Gary Friedland, a
scholar in residence at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
“Consequently, deserving projects can’t be built and the resulting jobs are
lost because the projects are deprived of the essential capital to proceed.”
A spokeswoman for Kushner Companies declined to comment, as
did Jared Kushner’s spokesman.
Jared Kushner has sold his interest in 1 Journal Square
but maintains an ownership stake in 65 Bay Street. The KABR Group, a
partner in the luxury tower on Bay Street, also declined to comment.
Kushner’s prominence is drawing renewed attention to the use
of the EB-5 process to raise financing, which has been the subject of years of
debate in Congress and furious lobbying by the real estate industry. A writer
for the policy magazine City and State, which published the maps for both
projects last week, wrote in a commentary that the projects made “a
mockery” of EB-5’s intent.
In interviews along Martin Luther King Drive in Jersey City
last week, there was a common reaction. “It’s like we’re being used,” said
Helen Gathers, a registered nurse who has lived in Jersey City for 38 years.
Down the block, Laville Penn, a 54-year-old who was released
from prison in early 2016 after a drug-possession conviction, was looking for
employment. He had been searching for steady work in construction for more than
six months, he said, but had found only temporary day jobs.
Now, hoping to pick up some hours, he stopped by a lot where
a friend was doing contract demolition work. Penn said the high-rises built in
Jersey City are typically union jobs. “It’s difficult to get into the union if
you don’t have certification or experience,” he said.
Travelers await trains on the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail line,
which runs near the 65 Bay St. development. (Yana Paskova/For The Washington
Post)
Laville Penn, left, who is seeking a job in construction,
and Steven Price, a construction worker, talk about their Jersey City
neighborhood. (Yana Paskova/For The Washington Post)
The EB-5 program was initiated in 1990 to help attract
foreign investment to rural and poor urban areas that have trouble drawing
conventional financing or investment.
But developers are free to string together an endless number
of contiguous census tracts until they reach the unemployment threshold. In the
years since the Great Recession, this has often meant finding the nearest poor
area and drawing a line to it.
Documents obtained from New Jersey through a public records
request show just how easy that was for Kushner Companies and KABR Group as
they sought to build the Bay Street tower.
On May 6, 2015, Michael K. Evans, a consultant working
on behalf of the project, sent an email to an official in the New Jersey
Department of Labor asking that the Bay Street vicinity be deemed an area with
high unemployment. Individual states are responsible for reviewing unemployment
data and issuing letters certifying that projects qualify for the federal
program.
Evans wrote that such an area could be created by combining
26 census tracts in Jersey City that stretch more than two miles to the
northwest and three miles to the southwest.
“The client as always is in a great hurry so if you can
e-mail me the letter as soon as it is finished it would be appreciated,” Evans
wrote. Evans did not respond to a request for comment.
There was a problem, though. Probably because the developers
were using outdated census data, the tracts were not contiguous — and didn’t
include the project itself.
Three weeks later, the state wrote back that the project
qualified under a different but similarly attenuated configuration that
achieved the same goal. New Jersey’s state website says it will help developers
“perform a special tabulation for the area” of their project using census data.
The state-approved map strung together 16 census tracts that
went nearly four miles to the southwest, crossing the New Jersey Turnpike and
heading south to the Bergen-Lafayette and Greenville areas. Together, those
neighborhoods had an average unemployment rate that edged just higher than
9.3 percent, the qualifying rate at the time.
That likely saved Kushner and his partners millions of
dollars.
Developers typically pay only 4 to 8 percent interest
annually on money raised through EB-5, experts said. Conventional financing can
carry interest rates of between 12 and 18 percent. On the $50 million
for Bay Street, the difference in interest charges amounts to millions of
dollars annually over the life of the loan.
On Jan. 5, a little over two weeks before Trump was to
take office, another consultant working on behalf of Kushner Companies got in
touch with New Jersey state officials again. This time, it was about
1 Journal Square. The census tract where it is located had an unemployment
rate of 2.9 percent in 2015, but the consultant suggested adding five
neighborhoods to triple that unemployment rate.
The approval came four days later, records show. Kushner’s
sister went to China in May seeking the $150 million in EB-5 financing.
The Trump administration will decide in the coming months
whether to enact rules, proposed by the Obama administration, limiting the
census tracts that can be considered for EB-5 eligibility to only those
directly adjacent to the tract containing the development.
The proposal is being considered by Homeland Security
Secretary John Kelly. Under the proposed rules, neither the 65 Bay Street
tower nor the proposed 1 Journal Square project would be in a “targeted
employment area.”
Andrew Ba Tran contributed to this report. The files and
methodology used in the data analysis for this story can be found here.
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