Perspective: Trump International Hotel is a scandal — but so are other taxpayer-subsidized hotels
The Trump International Hotel in Washington. By Pat Garofalo Pat Garofalo is the author of"The Billionaire Boondoggle: How Our Politicians Let Corporations and Bigwigs Steal Our Money and Jobs," and the managing editor of TalkPoverty.org. April 2 at 6:00 AM Scandals come fast and furious in the Trump administration, but one that has been festering since its first day involves the Trump International Hotel in Washington.
The idea is usually that a hotel will boost economic development by increasing tourism or helping to increase business at a city’s convention center. There’s also an allure to hotel jobs because they can’t be outsourced, unlike so many other positions in 21st-century America. A call center, for example, can be in another nation, but a housecleaning crew can’t.
The main program used to achieve this was the Urban Development Action Grants program, which dispensed about $4.5 billion to support 3,000 projects in 1,200 cities across the United States. In 1983, The Washington Post noted that UDAG money had been used on 59 hotels, from Maryland to Michigan to Missouri. Half of the cities that received UDAG grants used one on a hotel; about a quarter of UDAG money went into those projects.
Investing in hotels had the double advantage of a clear connection to the tourism industry and, depending on how they were financed, being projects that could be portrayed as supported only by tourism dollars. Such was the case when Washington subsidized a Marriott next to its convention center in 2009; Mayor Adrian Fenty made it sound as though all the money spent would be recouped only via taxing tourists .
Specifically, he benefited from the National Park Service’s historic-rehabilitation tax credit, which provides developers with 20 percent of the cost of redoing buildings certified as historic structures. That put about $40 million of public money into Trump’s hotel, which opened in 2016.
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