Tag Archives: national security

Planning for a Wetter Future

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picture by Charly W. Karl

Enterprise has issued Safer and Stronger Cities: Strategies for Advocating for Federal Resilience Policy. The report

offers a menu of federal recommendations organized into five chapters focusing on infrastructure, housing, economic development and public safety. Each chapter includes a set of strategies, background on the issue, explanations of the role of the Federal Government, listing of potential allies in advocating for the recommendations, and relevant examples of current or previous local, state, and federal actions.

To better support city resilience, these recommendations include high level proposals for cities to coordinate with federal government for both legislative and agency actions, which cities can drive forward. Policy and program changes will increase or leverage investment from the private sector are highlighted. (2)

The report recommends, among other things, that the federal government should

  1. Create a National Infrastructure Bank that supports private-public investments in resilient infrastructure, including retrofits.
  2. Align cost-benefit analyses across federal agencies and require agencies to consider the full life cycle costs and benefits of infrastructure over the asset’s design life and in consideration of future conditions.
  3. Cultivate partnerships between cities and the Defense Department to promote resilience of city assets that are critical to national security and military installations.
  4. Implement a system that scores infrastructure based on its resilience to better prioritize scarce federal funds.
  5. Coordinate Federal Government grant-making and permitting related to hazard mitigation and disaster recovery. (10)

These are good proposals, no question about it. I am not too optimistic that the current leadership in Washington will heed any of them. Local partnerships with the Defense Department might have some legs in today’s environment though, particularly given recent news reports about foreign hacking into the electrical grid.

Even those who discount the global risks arising from climate change should acknowledge the need to bolster the resiliency of our coastal cities. Let’s hope we start planning for a wetter future sooner rather than later.

Reiss on EB-5 Green Card Reform

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Ellis Island

GlobeSt.com quoted me in Congress Moves to Revamp EB-5. It reads in part,

Last week Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and ranking member Senator Patrick Leahy introduced bipartisan legislation to reauthorize and reform the EB-5 Regional Center program.

This did not come as a surprise to the commercial real estate industry, which has been watching the approaching Sept. 30, 2015 deadline with a mixture of dread and anticipation.

Simply put, the program has become an increasingly popular funding source for projects, David Cohen, a shareholder at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck in Washington DC, tells GlobeSt.com.

“As the popularity of the EB-5 program has grown in the last few years, so too has the scope of the deals its being used to fund,” he says. “There is far more money at stake than there was even a few years ago.”

The changes proposed in the bill — officially called the American Job Creation and Investment Promotion Reform Act — touched upon some of the more controversial parts of the program. It proposes strengthening oversight by Department of Homeland Security and Securities and Exchange Commission oversight and putting in place measures that would discourage fraud. Overall, national security would have a greater focus this time around.

*     *     *

The EB-5 program “has a very interesting mix of policy goals, including immigration, community development and employment ones,” says David Reiss, a law professor at Brooklyn Law School and research director of the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship (CUBE).

It also has a great deal of flexibility – and many say too much flexibility, he continues. “For instance, companies have been able to characterize hot locations in Brooklyn and Manhattan as areas of high unemployment by defining the targeted employment area expansively,” he tells GlobeSt.com.

“For instance, the biggest real estate project in Brooklyn, Pacific Park — formerly known as Atlantic Yards –used nearby neighborhoods with high unemployment for an EB-5 investment located in a relatively low unemployment area,” he says.

In short, “there is a lot of talk of reform of the program that comes from all different directions – raise the minimum investment amount! – ensure that the targeted employment area is more narrowly drawn! – establish national standards!” Reiss says.

“But it is too early to tell which reforms might stick.”