Kushner deal shines spotlight on Jersey City's struggling inner city

Oak Street is less than a three-mile drive from the Trump Bay Street luxury high-rise but it feels like another world entirely.

Daytime shootings are not uncommon here. Bags of garbage sit beside overflowing sidewalk trashcans. The street signs at Oak and Martin Luther King Drive are so faded you can't read the letters. Residents say the signs have been that way for two years.

But this neighborhood and similarly economically struggling areas nearby have an improbable link to Trump Bay Street, a 50-story high-rise developed in part by Kushner Companies, run by the family of presidential son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner. Documents show state officials allowed developers to cite the high unemployment in the city's southern areas like Oak Street to obtain foreign investment through a program intended to help rural areas and places with high unemployment.

Residents and local leaders said the news illustrates the long-standing divide between the south side of the city, which struggles with poverty and crime, and a trendy downtown that is increasingly out of reach to residents of lesser means.

A two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment on Trump Bay Street's 48th floor costs $5,300 a month to rent, or $63,600 for a yearlong lease. Census figures show the median household income in the area around Oak Street is $30,563.

Gary Jones, a 53-year-old retired truck driver who lives on Oak Street, scoffed when asked if Trump Bay Street has benefited his neighborhood.

"Take a look around," Jones said. "Of course not."

Jersey City man Gary Jones points out the faded street signs that line Martin Luther King Drive. 

The $194 million Trump Bay Street tower, located just blocks from the waterfront at 65 Bay St., was built with $50 million in financing through the federal EB-5 visa program. Foreign investors can obtain visas if they invest $500,000 in projects located in areas where jobs are scarce, called "targeted employment areas."

The upscale neighborhood surrounding 65 Bay St. does not qualify -- its unemployment rate is less than 3 percent, Census figures show -- but areas in Bergen-Lafayette and Greenville do.

Retired cop Viola Richardson represented Bergen-Lafayette on the City Council for more than 10 years starting in 2001. She bristled at the notion that these struggling neighborhoods were cited to help get Trump Bay Street built.

"Anyone who has lived in Jersey City knows that Bay Street is so far from the inner city, where people are struggling with lack of employment," Richardson told The Jersey Journal. "It's as far from here as we are to Newark. Give me a break."

The visa program requires approval at the federal level but Trump Bay Street was assisted by the state. A May 26, 2015 letter from the state Department of Labor to a consultant working with Kushner Companies on EB-5 issues listed 16 Census tracts the developers could cite to win federal approval designating 65 Bay St. as located inside a TEA. The letter was obtained by Brooklyn journalist Norman Oder, who first wrote about this issue last week on the site City & State.

Those Census tracts stretch from 65 Bay St. down to the Bayonne border, more than four miles through some of the city's toughest neighborhoods.

To qualify as a TEA, an area has to have a combined unemployment rate of at least 9.3 percent. The jobless rate of the 16 Census tracts noted in the DOL letter was 9.8 percent.

Mark Giresi, chief operation officer at U.S. Immigration Fund-NJ, which helped Kushner Companies raise EB-5 money for Trump Bay Street and its two-tower One Journal Square project, defended the practice in a statement to The Washington Post. 

"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 told The Washington Post.

In May 2014, when Kushner Companies broke ground on Trump Bay Street, it said construction of the tower would lead to as many as 500 union jobs.

The Downtown Jersey City neighborhood surrounding Trump Bay Street, left, is one of the wealthiest in the city.​

A request for comment from Kushner Companies was not returned. Kushner retains a financial interest in Trump Bay Street but not in One Journal Square, a Kushner spokesman told The Jersey Journal recently. Construction on One Journal Square, for which the state signed off on a similar set of Census tracts in the city's most distressed neighborhoods, has not begun.

Chris Perez, 40, is a community activist who lives on Carteret Avenue, inside one of the Census tracts used to help Trump Bay Street win its foreign investment. Perez said he knows of no benefit his neighborhood as seen from the high-rise.

Using the unemployment rate in areas like his to win support for a project on the waterfront reflects a poor understanding of Jersey City as a whole, Perez said. The whole thing is "kind of funky," he said.

"This city has different neighborhoods," he said. "Some are thriving, some are struggling."

The areas shaded red are the Census tracts where unemployment rates were used to pave the way for foreign financing for 65 Bay St.​

http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/2017/05/kushner_deal_shines_spotlight_on_jersey_citys_stru.html

Mentions

• U.S. Immigration Fund - NJ
• 88 KUSHNER-KABR (Trump Bay Street)
• One Journal Square (EB-5 Not Used)

States

• New Jersey