Another Reason to Hate Hudson Yards

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/opinion/hudson-yards.html

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It would be hard to build a more damning case against the cash-for-visas program than Hudson Yards.

Manhattan’s gleaming new $25 billion development was financed in part through EB-5, a preferential immigration program that luxury developers have come to adore. This once-obscure category allows foreign nationals to purchase a family pack of visas by investing capital in job-creating businesses in the United States. The price is $1 million. But EB-5 offers a lower-cost option (for $500,000) to visa applicants who invest in projects in rural or distressed urban areas. It’s meant as an incentive for investment in impoverished America.

With its angular skyscrapers, luxury retailers and bizarre basket-shaped playground, Hudson Yards is the opposite of troubled — financially — although architecture critics have pounced on its placelessness. Yet New York State authorities enabled Related, the project’s developer, to raise more than $1.2 billion in EB-5 financing at the lower-tier rate reserved for urban areas with severe unemployment. As I recently reported in CityLab, the state allowed Hudson Yards to qualify for this designation by gerrymandering a map that connects this elite West Side haven to public housing projects in Central and East Harlem.

Much of the nation badly needs investment. And place-based incentive programs like EB-5 could lure capital and jobs to distressed areas that have yet to recover from the foreclosure epidemic after the 2008 housing crash — if the program worked properly. Hudson Yards is emblematic of how the EB-5 visa program has been corrupted by developers and state authorities to divert capital from places that need it to those that don’t.

One of the reasons this happens is states draw the boundaries for Targeted Employment Areas, the economic zones with a lower threshold for investment visas — $500,000 instead of $1 million. Investing in projects within these rural or low-resource urban areas is a good deal for visa applicants, since these visas cost less. Virtually all EB-5 investments are given at the discounted rate in targeted urban zones. It’s supposed to help struggling places in America. But New York, Texas, California and most other states tilt the system in luxury’s favor. Sometimes this means stringing together dozens of census tracts in long spaghetti-noodle maps to qualify luxury projects as falling within poor urban districts. The Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, the Resorts World Las Vegas and the Wharf in Washington are among the many projects that have raked in hundreds of millions in cash-for-visas financing.

Gerrymandering is only one thing that needs to change. The cash-for-visas program has garnered an impressive record of lawsuits and indictments for fraud and dozens of possible breaches of national security. While the program falls under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, oversight is lax, and real estate is not its explicit domain. Reforming EB-5 is a vital priority, but legislation to fix this program is most likely just as doomed as any other immigration bill. According to New York University’s Stern Center for Real Estate Finance Research, no proposal for a fix in Congress has reached a vote in committee.

Still, the case for reform is urgent. It is not just that scammers are gaming the system. Or that it heaps risk on foreign investors, mostly Chinese nationals who face yearslong waiting lists to participate in the program (and few safeguards against fraud when they do). The EB-5 program could be putting money to work across America. Instead, mega-developers are skillfully redirecting the rewards. There’s a maximum of 10,000 visas available annually through EB-5, which also limits how much money the program can create. Hudson Yards garnered so many investors that the visas it generated alone probably maxed out an entire year’s quota.

Change could be on the horizon. Regulations written during the waning days of the Obama administration, and largely prompted by Senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, have yet to take effect (and might never). While the completed rule was delivered to the Office of Management and Budget in February, it will languish there until the Trump administration decides to proceed. The regulations would raise the thresholds for investment and eliminate the option of gerrymandering. Ultimately, the best road forward for EB-5 may be to maintain investment levels where they are, to maximize capital for distressed areas — meaning single census tracts. No more district linguine.

While prospects are dim, support for and opposition to reform do not fall along traditional partisan lines. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader and a darling of the real-estate lobby, has joined Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz in leading the fight to preserve the status quo. The Kushner family has reportedly used Jared Kushner’s proximity to the president to sell EB-5 properties to investors in China. It’s feasible that EB-5 could unite the Trump administration with Representative Jerrold Nadler, the president’s chief antagonist on the House Judiciary Committee, since his district covers much of the West Side of Manhattan — including Hudson Yards.

The boondoggles facilitated by EB-5 are embarrassing. But the program could work elegantly. The fix is straightforward: Eliminate the gerrymandering. Kick states out of the qualifying process. Establish an escrow function that enables immigrants to make reasonably safe investments. If wealthy immigrants want to come to America and help build it up financially at the same time, let them. But bring an end to a reverse Robin Hood system that takes from Harlem and gives to Hudson Yards.

Kriston Capps is a staff writer at CityLab.

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