OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

Kushner Firm Snaps Up Real Estate Under Program for Poor

Cadre targeting so-called Opportunity Zones in already-rich areas.

An investment firm co-founded by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner is snapping up real estate using a Trump administration tax-break program designed to regenerate areas with high rates of poverty. Cadre, in which Kushner still holds at least a $25 million passive stake, is targeting a “small subset” of zones in such cities as Los Angeles, Seattle, and Miami under a scheme in which both populations and incomes are already set to rise faster than the national average. “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.” Opportunity Zones cover 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, and the Willows neighborhood of Menlo Park, California, where the tech boom has driven home prices to $1,500 per square foot.

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