Want a Green Card? Invest in Real Estate - NYTimes.com: "One aspect that has come under scrutiny is location. Projects are supposed to be in areas of high unemployment, yet are in prosperous neighborhoods like Midtown, Chelsea and TriBeCa. This is because developers are allowed to incorporate contiguous census tracts in their calculations. Pacific Park Brooklyn, for example, is on the border of wealthy brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods, yet relied on high unemployment figures from areas of Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant to make its case.
Parts of the visa program are up for renewal in September, and Congress is likely to address some concerns; the rapidly snapped-up 10,000-visa allotment may be among them. “It is going to be fixed and they will reshuffle the number of visas to make more available,” said Mona Shah, an immigration lawyer who specializes in the visa program.
There is also a good chance that the $500,000 investment threshold will be raised, an effort that Invest in the USA supports, and the practice of using contiguous census tracts may be curtailed. Ending such gerrymandering could have major ramifications in New York, as there are few areas of Manhattan, for example, that have high enough unemployment rates to qualify.
In the meantime, “the market is still a bit like the Wild West,” said Min Chan, a lawyer and associate real estate broker at City Connections. The brokerage firm is applying for a license to assist developers with the visa program, one of the first brokerage firms to do so. “There are a lot of people out there who don’t know what they are doing. It is very complicated, and there are a lot of I’s to dot and T’s to cross.
“But it also is worthwhile, because it creates jobs and gives people access to the American dream.”"
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Parts of the visa program are up for renewal in September, and Congress is likely to address some concerns; the rapidly snapped-up 10,000-visa allotment may be among them. “It is going to be fixed and they will reshuffle the number of visas to make more available,” said Mona Shah, an immigration lawyer who specializes in the visa program.
There is also a good chance that the $500,000 investment threshold will be raised, an effort that Invest in the USA supports, and the practice of using contiguous census tracts may be curtailed. Ending such gerrymandering could have major ramifications in New York, as there are few areas of Manhattan, for example, that have high enough unemployment rates to qualify.
In the meantime, “the market is still a bit like the Wild West,” said Min Chan, a lawyer and associate real estate broker at City Connections. The brokerage firm is applying for a license to assist developers with the visa program, one of the first brokerage firms to do so. “There are a lot of people out there who don’t know what they are doing. It is very complicated, and there are a lot of I’s to dot and T’s to cross.
“But it also is worthwhile, because it creates jobs and gives people access to the American dream.”"
'via Blog this'
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