Fortress-Backed Rail Company Brightline Gets an Ally in California’s Treasurer
Romy Varghese
Tue, December 21, 2021
Bloomberg
"California Treasurer Fiona Ma’s support for a costly private rail project to shuttle gamblers back-and-forth from the outskirts of Los Angeles to Las Vegas is no secret.
When housing nonprofits argued in late 2019 that California’s deepening housing crisis deserved all of the state’s allotment of subsidized financing, Ma rejected that idea. Some affordable housing developers got shut out, and the rail project won its entire request, about 15% of California’s limited annual allocation of the funding resource.
What’s less well known is the influence that the train’s developer Brightline Holdings -- a company controlled by the $50 billion private equity giant Fortress Investment Group -- had on the process..."
https://news.yahoo.com/fortress-back...142857504.html