Kushner Companies Raised Cash For Luxe Tower Using Anti-Poverty Program

Image by wikipedia

By Daniel J. Solomon June 1, 2017

Jared Kushner’s real estate company used an underhanded, though legal tactic to save millions in the construction of a luxury development in Jersey City, effectively gerrymandering the pricey building into a high poverty zone, allowing it to benefit from preferential government terms.

According to the Washington Post, Kushner’s consultants presented maps to the federal government that presented the building at 65 Bay Street as being within a high-poverty area by drawing lines that included it in a tract of land with low-income areas of southern Jersey City, despite its location on the town’s booming waterfront.

That arrangement permitted developers to raise $50 million in low-cost loans through the EB-5 program, which rewards investors who put $500,000 or more into American projects with special access to United States visas. The program is popular among real estate industry titans, and the Kushner firm has attempted to use it with other developments.

When the Post informed people in the low-income stretches of south Jersey City about the arrangement, some were indignant.

“That’s very sad,” Pastor Shyrone Richardson, a pastor in the afflicted neighborhood, told the newspaper. “Unfortunately, the people who are benefiting from this are not the people in this area.”

Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon

Daniel J. Solomon is the former Assistant to the Editor/News Writer at the Forward. Originally from Queens, he attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where he wrote his senior thesis on French-Jewish intellectual history. He is excited to have returned to New York after his time in Massachusetts. Daniel’s passions include folk music, cycling, and pointed argument.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO