Donald Trump's Real Estate Empire Built on Jewish Inside Connections and $885 Million in NYC Tax Breaks
nytimes.com
- Donald J. Trump has relied on the government and taxpayers to benefit the core of his Manhattan real estate developments.
- He is relentless in his “pursuit of every single dime of taxpayer subsidies he can get his paws on,” said one New York City official.
The way Donald J. Trump tells it, his first solo project as a real estate developer, the conversion of a faded railroad hotel on 42nd Street into the sleek, 30-story Grand Hyatt, was a triumph from the very beginning.
The hotel, Mr. Trump bragged in “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” his 1987 best seller, “was a hit from the first day. Gross operating profits now exceed $30 million a year.”
But that book, and numerous interviews over the years, make little mention of a crucial factor in getting the hotel built: an extraordinary 40-year tax break that has cost New York City $360 million to date in forgiven, or uncollected, taxes, with four years still to run, on a property that cost only $120 million to build in 1980.
The project set the pattern for Mr. Trump’s New York career: He used his father’s, and, later, his own, extensive political connections, and relied on a huge amount of assistance from the government and taxpayers in the form of tax breaks, grants and incentives to benefit the 15 buildings at the core of his Manhattan real estate empire.
Since then, Mr. Trump has reaped at least $885 million in tax breaks, grants and other subsidies for luxury apartments, hotels and office buildings in New York, according to city tax, housing and finance records. The subsidies helped him lower his own costs and sell apartments at higher prices because of their reduced taxes.
Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee for president, has made clear over the course of his campaign how proud he is that “as a businessman I want to pay as little tax as possible.”
While it is impossible to assess how much Mr. Trump pays in personal or corporate income taxes, because he has refused to release his tax returns, an examination of his record as a New York developer shows how aggressively he has fought to lower the taxes on his projects.
Mr. Trump successfully sued the administrations of Mayors Edward I. Koch, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Michael R. Bloomberg after they denied him tax breaks for Trump Tower, his signature building on Fifth Avenue, and, two decades later, for Trump World Tower, on First Avenue, for what were some of the highest-priced condominiums in the city in 2001.
The tax breaks for those two projects alone totaled $157 million.
The tax break at the 44-story Trump International Hotel and Tower at Columbus Circle came to $15.9 million.
No possible subsidy was left untapped. After the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Mr. Trump lined up a $150,000 grant for one of his buildings near ground zero, taking advantage of a program to help small businesses in the area recover, even though he had acknowledged on the day of the attacks that his building was undamaged.
“Donald Trump is probably worse than any other developer in his relentless pursuit of every single dime of taxpayer subsidies he can get his paws on,” said Alicia Glen, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s deputy mayor for housing and economic development, who first battled Mr. Trump when she worked in Mr. Giuliani’s administration.
In seeking those subsidies, Mr. Trump is not that different from many other developers. But the level of subsidies he has received along with his doggedness in claiming them seem at odds with his rhetoric as an outsider candidate who boasts of his single-handed success and who has denounced what he calls the pay-to-play culture of politics and a “rigged” system of government.
Without addressing specific questions about his pursuit of tax breaks and other subsidies, Mr. Trump in a telephone interview defended going after them. “In many cases, they made the difference between building and not being able to build,” he said. “I’ve gotten incentives in other parts of the world as well.”
