Kushner-linked firm targets richer areas in program for poor
Source: Associated Press
Kushner-linked firm targets richer areas in program for poor
By JEFF HORWITZ and STEPHEN BRAUN
December 16, 2018
WASHINGTON (AP) — A real estate investment firm co-founded by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, is betting big on the administration’s Opportunity Zone tax breaks but isn’t that interested in steering its investors to the poorest, most-downtrodden areas that the program seeks to revitalize.
New York-based Cadre, in which Kushner still holds at least a $25 million passive stake, made it clear to potential investors in recent marketing materials that it doesn’t plan to look for development deals in most of those zones because of their “unfavorable growth prospects.”
Instead, Cadre says it will target a “small subset” of zones in such cities as Los Angeles, Seattle and Miami where both populations and incomes are already set to rise faster than the national average.
Cadre is a high-profile example of how early investor interest in the program appears focused on the places that need it the least: zones that qualified for the tax breaks despite already drawing substantial investment or are undergoing obvious gentrification.
Among the examples of such zones is a swath of the Upper East Side of Manhattan that includes the top of Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile, where three-bedroom apartments overlooking Central Park sell for $4 million. Another is Ledroit Park in the nation’s capital, which falls mostly in what real estate blog Curbed has anointed Washington’s “most gentrified” ZIP code. Yet another Opportunity Zone includes part of The Willows neighborhood of Menlo Park, California, less than 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) from Stanford’s campus, where the tech boom has driven home prices to $1,500 per square foot, 10 times the national average. The Opportunity Zone where Amazon put its New York City headquarters in Queens has a median household income of more than $130,000.
“It’s hard to imagine why we should be subsidizing that,” said Brett Theodos, a researcher whose Urban Institute analysis found nearly one-third of the nation’s more than 8,700 Opportunity Zones are showing signs of pre-existing heavy investment. “These investors are not bad people. They are responding to the incentives.”
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Read more: https://apnews.com/94b1dc5da1134a9eb324eb1a539b1eae
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That directly benefits from a program put in place by the Trump Administration.
If she were Chelsea, and Hillary were POTUS, the wingnuts would be PITCHING A HISSY FIT over this (oh, and about 95% of what Trump and him minions are now doing, if the shoe were on the other foot, as we all often note 
).
One of about 100 glaring conflicts of interest within the Trump family themselves, let alone the Cabinet and such.
