Golden opportunities for California

Local officials in the US including Quan have said real estate investors from China's growing middle- and upper-income populations seem particularly interested in the visa program.

The 2008-09 financial crisis, spurred by the collapse of the US housing-market bubble, left banks and other lenders reluctant to finance residential or commercial developments, stalling projects including several in hard-hit California.

For municipal and state governments that slashed spending to deal with reduced tax revenue as property prices sank, foreign investors are increasingly sought as a financing source.

Oakland is an easy fit for Chinese investors, with hotels close to the city's predominantly Chinese-American neighborhoods and a large population of skilled, bilingual workers.

"There is a growing middle class and more tourism in China," Quan said. "Chinese understand exporting and importing, and there is more interest in import-export exchanges."

As an example, the mayor cited the deal for the Tribune Tower, a city landmark whose neon sign bears the name of Oakland's daily newspaper, a former tenant.

In late 2011 the 20-story, 8,175-square-meter building was bought in foreclosure for $8 million by a group of private investors assembled by businessman and Oakland native Tom Henderson. Henderson won't identify the investors by name, but he has said most are from China.

The Tribune Tower now houses CallSocket LLC, a call-center operator that Henderson co-founded, as well as another of his startups, San Francisco Regional Center LLC, which attempts to find prospective EB-5 immigrants who could help finance local development projects. The company - and Henderson - would take a stake in any deal and operate as a general partner on the project that's formed.

In addition, Henderson is investing $3 million to $4 million to renovate the building, helping to attract tenants, including a restaurant, for the rest of the building.

The businessman said that CallSocket, which so far has created 300 jobs in the city, could be a job-creation model through the immigrant-investor program.

"We are bringing in $100 million to Oakland alone. Over the next 18 months, we'll create 2,000 jobs in Oakland through the EB-5 program," said Henderson, who recently returned to California from China. The trip was his 19th to China since January 2011. He has offices in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou.

Henderson's San Francisco Regional Center was established under the auspices of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the government agency that created the EB-5 program in 1990.

About 95 percent of prospective EB-5 immigrants turn to regional centers to help navigate the visa-application process, a USCIS spokesman was quoted as telling The Wall Street Journal earlier this year.

There are 245 regional centers in the US, 61 of them in California, according to the USCIS website.

Mayor Quan said she's seeking EB-5 money from Chinese investors for either of two potential projects, Victory Court and Coliseum City, that would be home to Oakland's professional baseball, basketball and football teams.

Quan, Oakland's first woman mayor and the first Chinese-American to lead a major US city, headed a trade mission to China last year to spur investment in her largely working-class city across the bay from San Francisco.