EB-5 is just a way to buy a green card. The US government should cut out all of these middlemen with dubious “investment opportunities” and just have the money go straight to the federal budget.
Can't do it. If you try to change it people will say "The US is up for sale to the highest bidder" and you'll get run out of office. It's fortunate it even exists. Best not to mess with this stuff.
>Doug Bereuter, then a Republican congressman, framed the [EB-5] law as a violation of American values, noting that he was saddened to learn that American citizenship was “for sale to the highest bidder.”
And this is with a veneer of legitimacy by framing it as an "investment". Outright selling is sure to attract more ire.
I live and ski in this area[0]. Have season's passes to Burke Mountain and even met Stenger and Quiros back when they were running the ski areas.
On the slopes, at my coworking space, and around the campfire in the Summer, the topic of how to make this little pocket of Northeast Vermont more economically viable is a topic that comes up often.
I'm starting to form an opinion that we shouldn't try to compete, at any level, with larger job centers. We lost a huge (per capita, it was never large in total dollar values) number of manufacturing jobs over the past 20 years. That's not coming back. Perhaps there's a niche for us, and other rural communities in creating a great place for people to live and work remotely. Funding co-working spaces and high speed internet is a lot easier than getting a manufacturer to move in given that we have a tiny labor market.
Bigger issues for getting any population growth is our perverse tax and housing regulations. Not going to go into them in depth here but we have a water protection act that adds 10-20% to any construction project near water and wetlands even if the area already has a lot of development. Besides making things more expensive, it also encourages sprawl since many communities are built near water but it's cheaper to build in the hills surrounding them away from wetlands. One of the only ways to make a real estate investment pay off up here is to buy a plot, subdivide into 3 acre lots, put in a road and electricity and sell housing lots. The hassle of dealing with Act 250 doesn't make it worth it to do the actual development and so you don't see it. The only developments in my area are either 40 years old or the aforementioned building lots.
We also have an aging and decrepit housing stock and the tax structure for capital gains strongly penalizes flipping houses which is an accelerator on updating housing inventory. Instead, housing investment, like many places, is solely in short term rental or buy and hold/rent.
> On the slopes, at my coworking space, and around the campfire in the Summer
Your answer is pretty much right there. Make the ski resort into a world-class apres-ski destination that many people would love to live around that environment or visit on the weekends from the Montreal metro of 4.3m or Boston CSA of 8.5m people. Then you'll have the second-order effects of buses, coworking places, cafes, restaurants, and breweries.
We've kind of got that already. It's not world class but it is quite nice. We do have world-class competition at Stowe and Killington though so not sure how well we could compete.
I really do think that the bigger issue is the housing. That and NIMBYism. We have the Wildflower Inn nearby that I used to vacation at with my family when I was a kid. It was run by a family for 40 years before it was sold a few years ago to a guy who had fallen in love with the area. I've ridden the lift with him a few times and chatted about all the problems he had trying to get approval for his development ideas.
The original owners did some beef farming on the land around the Inn. The new owner wanted to take the old barns and pastures and build a bunch of vacation cabins and camping spots with shared public spaces. The area was set back and not visible from the road. It would have been visible from the mountain biking trails but that's it. He got so much push back from the town and locals that he canceled the project.
Of course, he could just subdivide into the minimum rural 3 acre lots and the town could do nothing about it and then we'd have 40 individual driveways and large houses obstructing the view instead.
That’s what’s awesome about Jay peak tho in VT. If you want gaudy corporate attractions ski town then go to Stowe. There’s plenty of west coast and rocky mountain ski town targets too for that type of bland investment and redevelopment. Jay peak is awesome how it is as a low key border community. There was a corner store there that sold milk to the Canadians at CAD parity to USD around 2018.
Not every town needs to become a tech hub. And VT basically locked itself in a time capsule by their regulations on development ensuring that the only land owners are wealthy people who can afford to buy large areas of farmland. Also the environmental aspirations of the state don’t support a population boom. They don’t have new landfills and restrictive waste policies that keeps the place awesome now but is not universally economically achievable with larger population centers.
One of the things I have trouble understanding is why "rural mountain towns near large population centers" are exploding in the West, but not the East.
I understand some of the issues. The mountains are smaller and the snow isn't nearly as consistent.
But still. It seems like a ski resort 3.5 hours from Boston should be absolutely brimming with customers every long weekend.
On the other hand, I sat in a hot tub with a New Yorker at a Salt Lake City ski resort who claimed that it was quicker and easier for him to get there, than to Vermont ski hills.
I don't think the math quite adds up (The drive from NYC to Jay is going to be 6.5 hours, but you could fly from JFK to Burlington in 1hr 20min, and drive another 1hr 20min to Jay, vs a 4hr flight and 1hr drive to Park City, UT) - but I get the point.
This is happening at the big Vermont ski resorts like Stowe and Killington. Stowe might as well be a suburb of Boston, New York and Quebec.
No one around here can figure it out either. I sit next to a guy at my coworking space who works on rural economic development. Just today he was putting together a report on some funding that was given to promote small businesses. He said they were supposed to present the report to the board but the program had done so poorly that they were just going to file the report and never bring it up again.
I'm a fellow Kingdom resident -- there are plenty of ski hills between here and Boston. The ones closer get more play. Stowe is a bigger resort, and it gets more play. Less so between here and Montreal, but there's ski hills north of Montreal that are closer. A place like Littleton, just beyond Cannon Mountain, _is_ brimming with customers every long weekend. Jay (and Burke, which is _really_ a locals' mountain) are very much in the in-between.
In spite of doing a reasonable bit of downhill skiing at one point out of the Boston area, I have never been to Jay and have only been to Burke because a Dartmouth professor I knew was I think on the board and his son had gone to Burke Mountain Academy.
Stowe was about my journey limit for a weekend and I was in a ski condo after graduation from grad school around Killington for 5 years or so. (Combination of New Yorkers and people in the Boston area.) Jay and Burke were always pretty much out of my range.
Yeah but the total travel time is still longer, especially if you don't live in the core urban area. That said, latterly I mostly gave up on weekend New England trips and went to generally Utah for a week.
>It seems like a ski resort 3.5 hours from Boston should be absolutely brimming with customers every long weekend.
They at least used to be. Probably still are but those are basically the mountains near route 93 in NH. NYC was more inclined to hit Vt. peaks like Stratton and Killington. (Stowe too but longer drive.)
There's more overhead with hopping on a plane but, as I wrote elsewhere, I tended to switch from weekends/long weekends in New England to weeks out West where the snow was (usually) a lot better. And SLC is unusually easy to get to the mountains from.
> One of the things I have trouble understanding is why "rural mountain towns near large population centers" are exploding in the West, but not the East.
The skiing sucks? Never skied out east, but I understand it's basically ice skating. But that's hearsay.
There can be a lot of ice and hard-pack; sure it's not getting any better.
Don't know how true the generalization is but, while some people have condos for the weekend in New England, you tend to live nearer a major metro center and go up for 2 or 3 day weekends.
Out West, I imagine it's more common for people to just move to one of the larger ski towns--or at least to get a second home there for their recreational season of choice. At least, that's the very anecdotal impression I get. If I wanted a season pass and had a lot of free winter time to spend downhill skiing, I'd probably do it out West. New England is more accessible for multi-season activities but the locations are probably also more accessible for weekends and long weekends.
There's a reason it's called the /r/icecoast. These mountains are all terrible, all the time, especially after a snowstorm and especially Jay Peak. Never go there and tell your friends to stay away.
not great, but most of the people going out to utah for a ski weekend are on manmade snow on blue groomers, and the blue groomers out east are just as good as the blue groomers in the west.
On a good day it is great to ski out east (particularly spring conditions) but it is not always a good day. An alumni club I am in is thinking about scheduling a ski trip to the local ski area in the next few weekends, it is 30 min away or so and only $65 but conditions might be terrible.
The better ski resorts in the Northeast — Killington, Sugarloaf — aren't as close to the big cities. NH is sort of an exception. But in general, you can drive there on Friday, ski on the weekend, and drive home on Sunday, or you can't. Six hours is just over the line.
There are also more ski resorts in the East. After the environmental movement really kicked off in the '70s it became a lot harder to open a new ski hill with a Forest Service permit. There are no ski resorts in the Rose Mountains or the Wallowas, regions of the West with huge vertical drops and high snowfall. They're protected wilderness. (Today the nearby towns are much poorer than Vail.) Competition keeps prices down.
And the smaller ski resorts in the West aren't exactly driving local economies. Leadville and Lakeshore are just muddling through. It's a very winner-take-all market.
I think there’s an underestimation of the impact that mega-passes (e.g., Ikon, Epic, and Mountain Collective) have on non-local skier traffic at resorts. A lot of Vermont resorts are crowded with “flat landers” aka Boston, New Jersey, or New Yorkers on weekends; however these tend to be resorts on multi-mountain passes like Killington, Sugarbush, Stowe, Okemo, etc. These resorts and towns aren’t hurting because they draw in outsiders and casual skiers who stay in hotels or condos and spend money at bars, restaurants and other local businesses.
In my experience Jay attracts locals, Canadians from southern Quebec, and a few die hard skiers. Most of these are day trippers or stay on resort and are not spending lots of money in the limited establishments that surround Jay.
Passes also make travel to a west coast or European resort more feasible financially and logistically. The cost of skiing is already accounted for you just need to find reasonable flights and accommodations for 7-10 days and you have already broken even on the pass.
> One of the things I have trouble understanding is why "rural mountain towns near large population centers" are exploding in the West, but not the East.
West coast tech types have all gone nuts, believe they're Ernst Stavro Blofeld and think they need to build secret mountain lairs. Either that or nuclear lifeboats. (Different symptoms of the same disease.)
In NYCs Hudson Yards they literally let foreign multimillionaires build their own pied-a-terres with an EB-5 discount. To achieve this they invented a phony blighted neighborhood that gerrymandered part of Harlem with midtown joined by a strip of central park.
> The whole program, it turned out, lent itself to dishonesty. Faraway investors were desperate to get to the U.S., and didn’t keep close track of where their money was going. The lawyers and brokers got large transaction fees and had little incentive to point out potential wrongdoing. “Everybody was making millions of dollars, but very few people wanted to speak the truth about the riskiness of these investments,” Gibson, the EB-5 adviser, said. There was almost no governmental oversight built in.
Tale as old as time. Whenever the government simply funnels money out to "businesses" without oversight, it's going to get embezzled. The massive fraud that came along for the ride with PPP COVID relief is just the latest example. The government never seems to learn though, and I'm sure in 2-5 more years, there will be another money firehose and along with it the predictable fraud.
Funny how when it comes to handing money out to low income individuals, the government is willing to spend $100 for every $1 handed out: to scrutinize, means-test, and put these payments under a microscope of enforced rules. But when it comes to handing money out to rich people and businesses, all of a sudden "there's no way we can oversee such a complex program!"
And that's worse than poor people not being able to eat how? It's the same excuse trotted out time and again, but the only beneficiaries that actually exist are people anyway, so it makes no sense (unless you think rich people are more deserving than poor people.)
When pressed, most of the people who support strict means testing for welfare will eventually admit that it's not about saving the government money, and that they support it even if it ends up costing taxpayers on net (which it almost always does). They're pretty clear that this is about punishing indigence.
>They're pretty clear that this is about punishing indigence.
But why? Are they doing so so they want to oppress poor people? Or are they doing so to make the welfare experience shitty so people are incentivized to seek normal employment?
For many politicians and voters, mere cruelty is the entire point[1] of lawmaking. The government's purpose is to hurt one's opponents, which is more important than helping... anyone.
> Or are they doing so to make the welfare experience shitty so people are incentivized to seek normal employment?
Yes, and to foment general distaste and dislike towards the welfare system, with the ultimate goal of ending the program. Related to "starve the beast" policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
> And that's worse than poor people not being able to eat how?
Food programs are pretty widely supported. People don't want poor people not being able to eat, they want poor people not being able to drink alcohol/do drugs/play videogames/watch movies/..., the things they see as a fun indulgence.
That is, people are willing to make food assistance programs wildly cost-inefficient, based on the imaginary premise that poor people don't know how to prioritize, budget, or control their impulses.
And yet businesses still laid off people, people lost their job, homes and struggled to feed themselves.
propping up failed businesses is preventing the capitalism/the market from working. Why save for a rainy day or ensure your business can weather a storm when you can just do stock buybacks abs shovel money to the shareholders and the Goverment will prop you up?
It’s better to just ensure people’s needs are taken care of then this weird “trickle down middleman” plan that literally never works.
> And yet businesses still laid off people, people lost their job, homes and struggled to feed themselves.
The fact that people got laid off regardless shouldn't be an indictment of the program. We should instead compare to the counterfactual where the PPP program hasn't bee implemented.
I'm not going to argue with your central point that we spend too much time scrutinizing small dollar awards. The PPP program was ridiculous. I had a very difficult time helping two legit non-profits (one a nursery school, one a food pantry) get a fraction of the money they were entitled to under the PPP program, while less scrupulous people got far more.
In the EB-5 real-estate investment program, the government doesn't hand out money here. If you're a rich overseas individual who wants to relocate to the US, you can invest like $1-2m (used to be lower), and boom you're in.
You’re right of course. In this case it’s not the government’s money, but they are still in a sense holding the funnel, guiding its direction, and promising (falsely) to regulate the flow. This stink attracts the same sort of fraudulent flies as other money funnels.
What type of promises did they offer? Based on the newyorker article as well a quick skim of the wikipedia article on eb-5, it doesn't seem like the government was supposed to do any due diligence. The government doesn't require you invest in specific investments that it endorses. Any investment that meets the given criteria would work. You can even create your own enterprise to use as an investment.
Invest in me and I can get you something of value that normally only the government can give you. Surely you'd pay more for the same investment when it opens up an immigration pathway.
But if you don't have anything to offer an investment in, you're excluded from this program.
But all of this exists in a competitive market. The person soliciting investment in your example isn't the only person that can help people get visas. Anyone who has some sort of business that falls under the applicable criteria is eligible. The immigrant can even start their own business. Therefore, blaming the government doesn't really make sense. Caveat emptor.
What makes you think that? It takes two to tango. Jon approve all these questionable requests/grants/loans say its too hard to manage, then since the watchers dont want to punish the watchers when they have you resign in "shame" there will be a cush CEO job with a ridiculous salary at a company you have no qualifications for.
Wont people ask questions about how someone incompetent got to such a position.........................
>The massive fraud that came along for the ride with PPP COVID relief is just the latest example
This happened because the Trump admin deleted the oversight of the program. The fraud in PPP was intentional. Democrats pitched it with oversight and accountability, republicans burned out the accountability, and of course everyone blames this nebulous "the government" instead of the ones actually responsible.
It wasn't explicitly shut down, the regional center program failed to be reauthorized by Congress. Investors always could make a direct EB-5 investment, but there are fewer of those around.
For such a long and detailed article about a complex case, the sentences handed down by the quart room very minor. All that for basically six months in jail. I don't get the point of it all.
For such a long and detailed article about a complex case, the sentences handed down by the court were very minor. All that for basically six months in jail. I don't get the point of it all.
61 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] thread>Doug Bereuter, then a Republican congressman, framed the [EB-5] law as a violation of American values, noting that he was saddened to learn that American citizenship was “for sale to the highest bidder.”
And this is with a veneer of legitimacy by framing it as an "investment". Outright selling is sure to attract more ire.
Or less. If you paint the program as something that reduces everyone's taxes or other gov fees.
On the slopes, at my coworking space, and around the campfire in the Summer, the topic of how to make this little pocket of Northeast Vermont more economically viable is a topic that comes up often.
I'm starting to form an opinion that we shouldn't try to compete, at any level, with larger job centers. We lost a huge (per capita, it was never large in total dollar values) number of manufacturing jobs over the past 20 years. That's not coming back. Perhaps there's a niche for us, and other rural communities in creating a great place for people to live and work remotely. Funding co-working spaces and high speed internet is a lot easier than getting a manufacturer to move in given that we have a tiny labor market.
Bigger issues for getting any population growth is our perverse tax and housing regulations. Not going to go into them in depth here but we have a water protection act that adds 10-20% to any construction project near water and wetlands even if the area already has a lot of development. Besides making things more expensive, it also encourages sprawl since many communities are built near water but it's cheaper to build in the hills surrounding them away from wetlands. One of the only ways to make a real estate investment pay off up here is to buy a plot, subdivide into 3 acre lots, put in a road and electricity and sell housing lots. The hassle of dealing with Act 250 doesn't make it worth it to do the actual development and so you don't see it. The only developments in my area are either 40 years old or the aforementioned building lots.
We also have an aging and decrepit housing stock and the tax structure for capital gains strongly penalizes flipping houses which is an accelerator on updating housing inventory. Instead, housing investment, like many places, is solely in short term rental or buy and hold/rent.
[0] https://northeastkingdom.com/
Your answer is pretty much right there. Make the ski resort into a world-class apres-ski destination that many people would love to live around that environment or visit on the weekends from the Montreal metro of 4.3m or Boston CSA of 8.5m people. Then you'll have the second-order effects of buses, coworking places, cafes, restaurants, and breweries.
I really do think that the bigger issue is the housing. That and NIMBYism. We have the Wildflower Inn nearby that I used to vacation at with my family when I was a kid. It was run by a family for 40 years before it was sold a few years ago to a guy who had fallen in love with the area. I've ridden the lift with him a few times and chatted about all the problems he had trying to get approval for his development ideas.
The original owners did some beef farming on the land around the Inn. The new owner wanted to take the old barns and pastures and build a bunch of vacation cabins and camping spots with shared public spaces. The area was set back and not visible from the road. It would have been visible from the mountain biking trails but that's it. He got so much push back from the town and locals that he canceled the project.
Of course, he could just subdivide into the minimum rural 3 acre lots and the town could do nothing about it and then we'd have 40 individual driveways and large houses obstructing the view instead.
Not every town needs to become a tech hub. And VT basically locked itself in a time capsule by their regulations on development ensuring that the only land owners are wealthy people who can afford to buy large areas of farmland. Also the environmental aspirations of the state don’t support a population boom. They don’t have new landfills and restrictive waste policies that keeps the place awesome now but is not universally economically achievable with larger population centers.
I understand some of the issues. The mountains are smaller and the snow isn't nearly as consistent.
But still. It seems like a ski resort 3.5 hours from Boston should be absolutely brimming with customers every long weekend.
On the other hand, I sat in a hot tub with a New Yorker at a Salt Lake City ski resort who claimed that it was quicker and easier for him to get there, than to Vermont ski hills.
I don't think the math quite adds up (The drive from NYC to Jay is going to be 6.5 hours, but you could fly from JFK to Burlington in 1hr 20min, and drive another 1hr 20min to Jay, vs a 4hr flight and 1hr drive to Park City, UT) - but I get the point.
No one around here can figure it out either. I sit next to a guy at my coworking space who works on rural economic development. Just today he was putting together a report on some funding that was given to promote small businesses. He said they were supposed to present the report to the board but the program had done so poorly that they were just going to file the report and never bring it up again.
Stowe was about my journey limit for a weekend and I was in a ski condo after graduation from grad school around Killington for 5 years or so. (Combination of New Yorkers and people in the Boston area.) Jay and Burke were always pretty much out of my range.
They at least used to be. Probably still are but those are basically the mountains near route 93 in NH. NYC was more inclined to hit Vt. peaks like Stratton and Killington. (Stowe too but longer drive.)
There's more overhead with hopping on a plane but, as I wrote elsewhere, I tended to switch from weekends/long weekends in New England to weeks out West where the snow was (usually) a lot better. And SLC is unusually easy to get to the mountains from.
The skiing sucks? Never skied out east, but I understand it's basically ice skating. But that's hearsay.
Don't know how true the generalization is but, while some people have condos for the weekend in New England, you tend to live nearer a major metro center and go up for 2 or 3 day weekends.
Out West, I imagine it's more common for people to just move to one of the larger ski towns--or at least to get a second home there for their recreational season of choice. At least, that's the very anecdotal impression I get. If I wanted a season pass and had a lot of free winter time to spend downhill skiing, I'd probably do it out West. New England is more accessible for multi-season activities but the locations are probably also more accessible for weekends and long weekends.
not great, but most of the people going out to utah for a ski weekend are on manmade snow on blue groomers, and the blue groomers out east are just as good as the blue groomers in the west.
The blue groomers out west are about twice as long and usually a lot less icy.
There are also more ski resorts in the East. After the environmental movement really kicked off in the '70s it became a lot harder to open a new ski hill with a Forest Service permit. There are no ski resorts in the Rose Mountains or the Wallowas, regions of the West with huge vertical drops and high snowfall. They're protected wilderness. (Today the nearby towns are much poorer than Vail.) Competition keeps prices down.
And the smaller ski resorts in the West aren't exactly driving local economies. Leadville and Lakeshore are just muddling through. It's a very winner-take-all market.
West coast tech types have all gone nuts, believe they're Ernst Stavro Blofeld and think they need to build secret mountain lairs. Either that or nuclear lifeboats. (Different symptoms of the same disease.)
Tale as old as time. Whenever the government simply funnels money out to "businesses" without oversight, it's going to get embezzled. The massive fraud that came along for the ride with PPP COVID relief is just the latest example. The government never seems to learn though, and I'm sure in 2-5 more years, there will be another money firehose and along with it the predictable fraud.
Funny how when it comes to handing money out to low income individuals, the government is willing to spend $100 for every $1 handed out: to scrutinize, means-test, and put these payments under a microscope of enforced rules. But when it comes to handing money out to rich people and businesses, all of a sudden "there's no way we can oversee such a complex program!"
But that the cost of not implementing the program is far worse.
Which in the case of PPP would've meant a lot of businesses failing and workers without a job.
But why? Are they doing so so they want to oppress poor people? Or are they doing so to make the welfare experience shitty so people are incentivized to seek normal employment?
1: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelt...
Yes, and to foment general distaste and dislike towards the welfare system, with the ultimate goal of ending the program. Related to "starve the beast" policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
Food programs are pretty widely supported. People don't want poor people not being able to eat, they want poor people not being able to drink alcohol/do drugs/play videogames/watch movies/..., the things they see as a fun indulgence.
propping up failed businesses is preventing the capitalism/the market from working. Why save for a rainy day or ensure your business can weather a storm when you can just do stock buybacks abs shovel money to the shareholders and the Goverment will prop you up?
It’s better to just ensure people’s needs are taken care of then this weird “trickle down middleman” plan that literally never works.
The fact that people got laid off regardless shouldn't be an indictment of the program. We should instead compare to the counterfactual where the PPP program hasn't bee implemented.
In the EB-5 real-estate investment program, the government doesn't hand out money here. If you're a rich overseas individual who wants to relocate to the US, you can invest like $1-2m (used to be lower), and boom you're in.
What type of promises did they offer? Based on the newyorker article as well a quick skim of the wikipedia article on eb-5, it doesn't seem like the government was supposed to do any due diligence. The government doesn't require you invest in specific investments that it endorses. Any investment that meets the given criteria would work. You can even create your own enterprise to use as an investment.
The government is handing out value here. What's the difference?
But if you don't have anything to offer an investment in, you're excluded from this program.
What makes you think that? It takes two to tango. Jon approve all these questionable requests/grants/loans say its too hard to manage, then since the watchers dont want to punish the watchers when they have you resign in "shame" there will be a cush CEO job with a ridiculous salary at a company you have no qualifications for.
Wont people ask questions about how someone incompetent got to such a position.........................
This happened because the Trump admin deleted the oversight of the program. The fraud in PPP was intentional. Democrats pitched it with oversight and accountability, republicans burned out the accountability, and of course everyone blames this nebulous "the government" instead of the ones actually responsible.
Wow yea, shocking.