Chamber courts investors for $9M World Trade Center in Youngstown

By GRACE WYLER

gwyler@vindy.com

youngstown

Eric Planey is on a global crusade to sell the Valley as an emerging hub of international commerce.

As vice president of international business attraction for the Youngstown Warren Regional Chamber, Planey has spent the past several months criss-crossing Europe and Asia to find investors for a $9 million global trade center in downtown Youngstown.

The project, dubbed the Youngstown World Trade Center, would convert the former Wells Building into modern office space with an adjacent six-story glass office tower to house small-and medium-sized foreign companies interested in establishing a presence in the North American market, Planey said.

Though raising funds for the trade center is still in the early stages, the project could be underway as early as the end of the first quarter of 2011, Planey said.

“I want to be conservative before saying that this is a done deal,” Planey said. “But we have a benefit in being able to execute the project quickly — we can finish the building in a year.”

To finance the project, the Chamber is hoping to take advantage of a visa program that allows foreigners to invest $500,000 in a U.S. business project in exchange for residency.

Under the EB-5 visa program, high net-worth foreigners can obtain permanent residency if they can prove their investment created at least 10 jobs in the census tract where the project is located. Investors do not have to live where the investment is made. Investments must be approved by an EB-5 Regional Center that has been designated by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services as eligible to receive immigrant investor capital.

Investments in the Youngstown World Trade Center will go through the Northeast Ohio Regional Center in Wooster, Planey said.

The EB-5 visa program, established in 1990, has increased in popularity as businesses look for alternatives to bank financing in an unstable credit market and student visas and green cards become more difficult to obtain.

Chamber officials hope to line up 18 EB-5 investors for the trade center, and have been working with an asset management company in Asia to pitch the project to potential investors, Planey said.

Read the full story Monday in The Vindicator and on Vindy.com