Legal, but unethical: Jared Kushner's Jersey City gambit | Editorial

Anyone who's ever driven through Jersey City will recognize the indecent absurdity of what Jared Kushner did to save millions on his luxury tower.

Or just read the reactions of people in its poorest neighborhoods, in the Washington Post or Jersey Journal: "It's like we're being used," one said.

These are the folks who are supposed to benefit from a federal program designed to boost development in blighted and rural areas, where jobs are scarce. Its purpose is to lure investors to needy neighborhoods where they wouldn't otherwise have built.

Not to give a multi-million-dollar discount to the presidential son-in-law's waterfront high-rise, in a booming downtown area, where monthly rent for a two-bedroom is as much as $5,300, and unemployment virtually nonexistent.

This new tower, 65 Bay Street, is located one of the New York area's hottest housing markets. Yet with a wink from state officials, Kushner and his partners availed themselves of the huge discounts provided by this federal program, by tinkering with city maps to qualify.

Like a politician gerrymandering his own district, they included far-flung, destitute areas like Greenville as supposed beneficiaries of this posh new apartment complex. And Bergen-Lafayette, where nearly 1 in 5 are jobless.

Is Kushner the first investor to do this? Of course not. But it's evidence that Trump's son-in-law and advisor is willing to exploit a loophole in a federal program to financially benefit himself - just as he's been exploiting loopholes in ethics laws to profit from his role in Trump's presidency. 

Like Trump himself, Kushner has refused to divest in his family business. He's retained most of his holdings, "selling" some interests to his brother and a trust controlled by his mother, from whom he could simply get them back later.

That's a shell game, not a true blind trust, in which an independent party sells the assets and he can never retrieve them. So Kushner's still financially benefitting from his proximity to the presidency - and from Trump's policies, like his recent renewal of this EB-5 program, the benefit Kushner used in Jersey City.

It allows a wealthy foreigner who invests at least $500,000 in a project in a struggling, jobless area to get a fast-track residence visa. The developers also benefit, because the terms of the investment are better than what they'd get from a bank loan, saving them potential millions.

Kushner's now trying to pull the same thing for a pair of luxury towers in another rapidly-developing area of Jersey City, called Journal Square. To say this creates construction jobs misses the point: These fancy towers would have been built and the jobs created anyway, without any help from the EB-5 program.

Investments like Kushner's are why more deserving projects that do far more to create jobs in poor or rural areas don't get this benefit. And isn't that the America Trump's presidency was supposed to make great?

Trump called struggling Atlantic City his "cash cow," and considered his bankruptcies there a sign of success - because he came out richer. For Kushner, apparently, it's grabbing loans meant for the poorest areas in Jersey City.

http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2017/06/legal_but_unethical_jared_kushners_jersey_city_sch.html

Mentions

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

States

• New Jersey