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      A New Law Would Remove Many Architectural Protections in Miami Beach

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      Lawmakers say preservationists held too much power over decisions on whether buildings should be demolished and what should be allowed to replace them.The oceanfront Eden Roc Hotel is an icon of Miami Modernist architecture, a style that epitomized the postwar glamour and grandeur of Miami Beach. Two turquoise panels wrap the white facade. The oval canister perched atop the building resembles a cruise ship’s funnel. Crooners like Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte, and Sammy Davis, Jr., stayed and played there.But a new Florida law could make it easier for hotels like the Eden Roc and other architectural icons along Miami Beach’s coastline to be demolished. The battle pits the pressures of development and climate change against the benefits of historical preservation, in a city that has long paved over its past and prizes the new, shiny, and glitzy.Supporters say the law addresses environmental and safety challenges of aging properties after the deadly 2021 collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo. But critics believe the legislation is a pretext to facilitate the demolition of historical buildings — ones that give Miami Beach its distinct look — to make way for high-rise luxury condos.The new law effectively strips Miami Beach Historic Preservation Board of its long-held power to say whether historic structures can be demolished and, if a structure is knocked down, to ensure that at least some elements of its design are preserved or replicated. “Let’s just bulldoze the past — that’s their idea,” said Daniel Ciraldo, the executive director of the nonprofit Miami Design Preservation League. “I don’t think we’ve seen such an attack on our local controls since the 1980s, back when the city first started to do historic preservation.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Soho House Seeks to Knock Back Its Critics

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      The members club operator disclosed improving financial results as it faces criticism from a short seller and weighs going private again.Soho House has refocused its business on operating members clubs, including a newly opened location in Portland, Ore.Mason Trinca for The New York TimesSince going public nearly two years ago, the members club chain Soho House has endured a sharp decline in its stock price, economic turmoil and a short seller declaring that its shares are worthless.But the company’s chief executive, Andrew Carnie, insists it is on the right track — even as its main shareholders consider taking the business private again.“There’s no looking back,” Mr. Carnie said in an interview. “We’ve been pretty consistent over the past 12 months in delivering results.”The company released its latest quarterly financial results on Friday, reporting that it lost $118 million last year, down from a loss of $220.6 million in 2022. Using the pro forma earnings measure known as adjusted EBITDA, which excludes some expenses, it doubled its profit to $128 million.The results come amid a shift in strategy since the company’s initial public offering in July 2021.Back then, the company was still navigating pandemic-related restrictions and said it was focused on new offerings like digital memberships in countries without clubs, as well as its nascent co-working business.Soho House now believes its core business of high-end private clubs in major cities is enough to deliver the robust growth demanded by the stock markets and maintain its cool reputation.Soho House has continued to grow. Over the last year, it has opened locations in Mexico City; Portland, Ore.; and other cities. It operates 43 houses and has a membership waiting list of more than 100,000 people.In its results on Friday, Soho House reported rises in revenues both from membership fees and spending at its houses.But the company’s stock is down nearly 60 percent from its initial offering price. Developer partners have been hurt by the decline of commercial real estate and an increase in labor costs. And in November, the company blamed bad weather and the temporary closure of its location in Tel Aviv for disappointing quarterly results.The earnings announcement on Friday will be closely scrutinized in light of a report last month by the short-seller Glasshouse Research that derided the company as having a “broken business model and terrible accounting” and compared it to WeWork. Short sellers profit from declines in a company’s stock price.“The report is pretty false and inaccurate,” Mr. Carnie said. “The way it was written, it was designed to grab headlines.” (Soho House’s stock price dipped after the report was published, but it has largely recovered.)A bigger question is what Soho House’s biggest shareholders, including the billionaire Ron Burkle, have in mind for the company. In its rebuttal of the Glasshouse report, Soho House disclosed that a special committee of its board was weighing potential transactions, including taking the company private.Mr. Carnie declined to comment on those deliberations, but said he would be happy to keep running Soho House as a publicly traded company.“There are no regrets,” he said. “I’m really happy with our progress over the last 12 months.” More

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      A.I. Frenzy Complicates Efforts to Keep Power-Hungry Data Sites Green

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      West Texas, from the oil rigs of the Permian Basin to the wind turbines twirling above the High Plains, has long been a magnet for companies seeking fortunes in energy.Now, those arid ranch lands are offering a new moneymaking opportunity: data centers.Lancium, an energy and data center management firm setting up shop in Fort Stockton and Abilene, is one of many companies around the country betting that building data centers close to generating sites will allow them to tap into underused clean power.“It’s a land grab,” said Lancium’s president, Ali Fenn.In the past, companies built data centers close to internet users, to better meet consumer requests, like streaming a show on Netflix or playing a video game hosted in the cloud. But the growth of artificial intelligence requires huge data centers to train the evolving large-language models, making proximity to users less necessary.But as more of these sites start to pop up across the United States, there are new questions on whether they can meet the demand while still operating sustainably. The carbon footprint from the construction of the centers and the racks of expensive computer equipment is substantial in itself, and their power needs have grown considerably.Just a decade ago, data centers drew 10 megawatts of power, but 100 megawatts is common today. The Uptime Institute, an industry advisory group, has identified 10 supersize cloud computing campuses across North America with an average size of 621 megawatts.This growth in electricity demand comes as manufacturing in the United States is the highest in the past half-century, and the power grid is becoming increasingly strained.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Walmart to Add 150 U.S. Stores in Five-Year Expansion Drive

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      The retail giant, which last opened a domestic location in 2021, said most of the stores would be newly built.Walmart will add 150 stores in the United States over the next five years, a major expansion drive for the retail giant.The company, which announced the move in a statement on Wednesday, said would involve millions of dollars in investment. Walmart employs roughly 1.6 million people in the United States, and said it hires hundreds of people each time it opens a new store.Walmart had just over 4,600 stores nationwide at the end of October 2023, down from more than 4,700 a year earlier. The company has not opened a new U.S. store since late 2021.Most of the stores Walmart plans to open will be newly built, while others will be conversions of existing locations to new formats. The first two new stores will open in the spring, in Florida and Georgia, and the company is finalizing construction plans for 12 other stores this year. It also said it would remodel 650 locations.Walmart announced this week that it was raising salaries and benefits for store managers and offering them stock grants.The company reported sharply higher profit in the first three quarters of 2023, and its share price is hovering near a record high.Consumer spending, which powers the U.S. economy, has been resilient even though shoppers have been squeezed by high inflation and rising interest rates. Credit card data from the holiday season showed retail sales increased from a year earlier.Jordyn Holman More

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      Real Estate Giant China Evergrande Will Be Liquidated

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      After multiple delays and even a few faint glimmers of hope, a Hong Kong court has sounded the death knell for what was once China’s biggest real estate firm.Months after China Evergrande ran out of cash and defaulted in 2021, investors around the world scooped up the property developer’s discounted I.O.U.’s, betting that the Chinese government would eventually step in to bail it out.On Monday it became clear just how misguided that bet was. After two years in limbo, Evergrande was ordered by a court in Hong Kong to liquidate, a move that will set off a race by lawyers to find and grab anything belonging to Evergrande that can be sold.The order is also likely to send shock waves through financial markets that are already skittish about China’s economy.Evergrande is a real estate developer with more than $300 billion in debt, sitting in the middle of the world’s biggest housing crisis. There isn’t much left in its sprawling empire that is worth much. And even those assets may be off limits because property in China has become intertwined with politics.Evergrande, as well as other developers, overbuilt and over promised, taking money for apartments that had not been built and leaving hundreds of thousands of home buyers waiting on their apartments. Now that dozens of these companies have defaulted, the government is frantically trying to force them to finish the apartments, putting everyone in a difficult position because contractors and builders have not been paid for years.What happens next in the unwinding of Evergrande will test the belief long held by foreign investors that China will treat them fairly. The outcome could help spur or further tamp down the flow of money into Chinese markets when global confidence in China is already shaken.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      What Improv Can Do for Mathematicians

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      Coaching sessions at the People’s Improv Theater were aimed at helping math experts connect with laypeople and give engaging presentations.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll solve for x and y, where x is a group of high-level mathematicians and y is an improvisational theater workshop. This one’s easy, even if you’re not very good at math. We’ll also look at Mayor Eric Adams’s fund-raising.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesWhat’s funny about quadratic equations? Is there something to laugh at in Euclidean geometry?Those questions went unanswered in unusual coaching sessions last week, and no wonder: The instructor’s background is not in Cartesian geometry or matrix algebra but in improvisational theater and standup comedy.The students were mathematicians from across the country — assistant professors, postdoctoral students and a few who are months away from their Ph.D.s, along with Cindy Lawrence, the executive director and chief executive of the National Museum of Mathematics, which arranged the three-day workshop.The sessions were “not so much about being funny,” explained the instructor, Kihresha Redmond, the artistic director of the People’s Improv Theater, a comedy theater and improv training center on West 29th Street that is also known as the PIT. The purpose was to show the mathematicians how to do engaging presentations for laypeople.“You don’t get a Ph.D. because you’re just so-so at something,” Lawrence said, but mathematicians “may not be quick at responding to an audience and they may not be comfortable in front of a room of strangers. Improv helps you build those kinds of skills.”Redmond did not mention it to the group, but she knew something about math. “I thought it was something I was going to major in” when she went to college, she confided one morning last week, before the group arrived. “It was a last-minute left turn to theater.”One session with the mathematicians involved no scripts, no carefully rehearsed “to be or not to be” moments — and no math. It began with Redmond leading some loosening-up exercises. Later, as a drill in thinking fast and talking in front of an audience, she had the mathematicians conduct mock news conferences. They made up companies and products to promote and assigned someone in the group to be the spokeswoman fielding questions. The others in the group played reporters.Angela Avila, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Arlington, said the think-on-your-feet training would be useful in her work, which involves using math to solve agricultural problems, like how many more cows could be fed in a given pasture if a dairy farmer increased the nutrient yield.She said she could use artificial intelligence and “big fancy equations” to come up with an answer, but if she explained it that way, there would probably be a lot of head-scratching.“If I am speaking line from line on my research paper, they’d get lost,” she said, “but if I connect with them and read the energy in the room, that won’t happen.”Lawrence, from the math museum, said she had invited women to the workshop because women are underrepresented in mathematics and in science, technology and engineering. “It’s a problem that self-perpetuates because young women who don’t see female mathematicians get the impression that math is a field that’s not for them, it’s for men,” she said.She wants the participants to help bring about more balance by serving as role models for girls: Each workshop participant is to present a talk about her specialty in a setting like a middle school. She said the idea was “to incentivize women who maybe already have an interest in reaching the younger generation to do so” before their focus is on the publish-or-perish pressures of tenure-track academics.“One of the women told me she was not looking forward to improv and went along with it because it was part of the program,” Lawrence said. “She said this turned her mind completely around.”WeatherOn a partly sunny day with a high near the mid-80s, prepare for a chance of showers and thunderstorms persisting through the evening. At night, temps will drop into the low 70s.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until Aug. 15 (Feast of the Assumption).The latest New York newsJohnny Milano for The New York TimesGilgo Beach killings: The wife of Rex Heuermann, the suspect in the Gilgo Beach murders, was away when the killings happened and has not been charged. Experts say it’s not unusual for the spouses of serial killers to be unaware of their crimes. Rikers management: The federal judge in charge of deciding whether New York City jails will be taken over by an outside authority expressed disapproval of how Rikers Island and other lockups are managed.Housing moves: Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a series of executive actions to promote residential real estate development and ease the state’s housing crisis.Museum director: Stephanie Hill Wilchfort, who most recently served as the president and chief executive of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, will be the next director and president of the Museum of the City of New York.Remembering Chisholm: City officials approved designs for a monument in Prospect Park to Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress.Landmarks’ protector: Beverly Moss Spatt, who battled real estate and political interests as chairwoman of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in the 1970s, died on Friday. She was 99.Amassing cash for a campaign that’s two years awayBenjamin Norman for The New York TimesEric Adams was a prodigious fund-raiser when he ran for mayor in 2021. Now, with his eye already on a second term, he is raising big money for 2025 — $1.3 million since January.My colleagues Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Nicholas Fandos write that Adams appears to be eager to amass a large war chest to fend off serious competitors. He faced seven serious opponents in the Democratic primary two years ago and won by only 7,197 votes.With matching funds that Adams campaign officials expect to receive under the city’s public financing system, his re-election effort is expected to have about $4.6 million on hand by the time the 2025 campaign gears up. The matching funds program can turn a $10 contribution from someone who lives in New York City into $90 for a campaign.Adams could be difficult to beat, despite recent setbacks. Chris Coffey, a Democratic strategist who was a campaign manager for Andrew Yang, an Adams opponent two years ago, said the mayor’s low approval rating was not terribly worrisome — it fell to 46 percent in a Siena College poll last month. Coffey noted that Michael Bloomberg’s approval rating dipped as low as 24 percent in his second year in office, but he went on to win two more terms.Among Adams’s donors are Marc Holliday and Steve Green, the chief executive and founder, respectively, of the city’s largest commercial landlord, SL Green. Each gave $2,100. Also on the list of Adams contributors are Alexander and Helena Durst, from the Durst real estate dynasty. In addition, the mayor has taken in $12,600 from people who work for Top Rock Holdings, a real estate investment firm.A fund-raiser for the mayor at a performance of the Broadway musical “New York, New York” last month was lucrative despite lackluster reviews for the show. Seats went for as much as $2,100 apiece. Adams’s campaign took in about $600,000 from the event, which a campaign spokesman said was organized by Frank Carone, Adams’s former chief of staff.The real estate industry is also making donations to Gov. Kathy Hochul, whose term runs through 2026. Of the $4.5 million her campaign raised from January through June, more than $885,000 came from developers and real estate investors. Among the donors contributing $18,000 — the new legal maximum for statewide candidates — were Holliday; members of the Durst family; and Scott Rechler and Jeff Blau. Both are Democratic megadonors whose firms are competing with Holliday’s for a casino license for the New York City area.METROPOLITAN diaryA sliceDear Diary:He carried the box while they held each other’s hands, their sweat stuck between warm, tanned palms.They walked down the cobblestone street, and she kept her heels out of cracks in the ground. New York heat held her neck. It smelled like new deodorant, smoke, like summertime.She put her head near his ear.They sat at the bottom of a Brooklyn stoop — the lights were on — and he passed her a slice.Their elbows touched.She wiped the corner of his lip and put her leg over his.He traced constellations between spots of orange oil on her scabby knees.“It tastes good,” she said.“The cheese?” he asked with a laugh.“Yeah.”He whispered in her ear.“But we’re on the street,” she said.“Come on,” he said, and took her hand again.— Laila Hartman-SigallIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Melissa Guerrero, Shivani Gonzalez and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nyimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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      Adams’s Re-election Bid Fueled by Real Estate Titans and Out-of-Towners

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      The mayor has raised $1.3 million for re-election since January, relying on many wealthy donors from New York City and beyond.Despite falling poll numbers and critical news coverage, Mayor Eric Adams clearly has the continued monetary support of two influential spheres of influence: real estate leaders and the donor class from New York City and beyond.Mr. Adams has raised $1.3 million since January for his 2025 re-election effort in the latest reporting period, drawing maximum $2,100 donations from real estate magnates like Marc Holliday, the chief executive of SL Green, the city’s largest commercial landlord, and its founder, Steve Green; and Alexander and Helena Durst, members of The Durst Organization real estate dynasty, according to new filings with the city’s Campaign Finance Board. About $550,000 came from donors outside New York City who live in the suburbs, Florida and other states — a continuation of a pattern displayed early in his tenure, when he held fund-raisers in Beverly Hills and Chicago in his first months in office.As mayor, Mr. Adams has often taken positions that benefit the real estate industry, including being supportive of rent increases and criticizing state lawmakers for failing to replace a tax-incentive program for developers known as 421a.He has frequently met with real estate leaders and has used One Vanderbilt, one of the city’s newest skyscrapers, developed by SL Green, as a backdrop for photo ops and news conferences. As a small-time landlord, Mr. Adams once declared, “I am real estate.” And major landlords have consistently been among his most faithful donors.Mr. Adams frequently asserts that his political base of working-class New Yorkers and churchgoers understands and supports his mission. But the continued support from real estate interests only furthers the notion that Mr. Adams may be too aligned with major developers.Vito Pitta, a lawyer for the Adams campaign, insisted that the mayor’s success in addressing crime and job losses was driving donations.“Our campaign is well on its way to raising the maximum amount it can spend under the city’s campaign finance system — just 18 months into the mayor’s tenure — because New Yorkers see that Mayor Adams is lowering crime, increasing employment, and moving our city in the right direction,” Mr. Pitta said in a statement.Marc Holliday, left center, the chief executive of SL Green, the city’s largest commercial landlord, donated the maximum allowed to Mr. Adams, who watches from the side.Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty ImagesThe spending cap for the 2025 primary is $7.9 million. Under the city’s generous public financing system, his campaign is expected to have about $4.6 million on hand, after matching funds are included.Mr. Adams has faced a series of setbacks in recent weeks. His approval rating fell to 46 percent in a Siena College poll last month. A longtime associate of his was charged in a straw donor scheme to raise money for his mayoral campaign; the mayor was not implicated. The New York Times reported that a photo of a police officer killed in the line of duty, which the mayor said he had long carried in his wallet, was created by employees in the mayor’s office last year, and was made to look old.The mayor also drew attention for his response last month to an 84-year-old tenant-rights activist whose family had escaped the Holocaust. The mayor publicly likened her to a plantation owner after he believed the activist had been disrespectful to him.Still, Mr. Adams, a Democrat who ran for office on a public safety message, could be difficult to beat in 2025.He is likely eager to show off a large war chest to fend off a serious competitor. He won a competitive Democratic primary in 2021 by only 7,197 votes.“The bigger the fund-raising number, the less likely that someone else gets into the race,” said Chris Coffey, a former campaign manager for Andrew Yang, one of the mayor’s primary opponents in 2021.Mr. Coffey said that the mayor’s low approval rating was not too worrisome, noting that Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor, had an approval rating as low as 24 percent in his second year in office and still won two more terms.“If the city has made progress on public safety, it’s really hard to see the mayor have any re-election challenges,” Mr. Coffey said.The real estate industry once again also provided the largest donor base for Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Buffalo Democrat who narrowly won a full four-year term in November. Of the $4.5 million her campaign raised in the first six months of the year, more than $950,000 came from developers and real estate investors, and more from other industries with business before the state, according to an analysis of her public filings by The Times.At least 45 donors connected to the real estate industry chipped in $18,000, the new legal maximum for statewide candidates, including Mr. Holliday, Scott Rechler and Jeff Blau. Mr. Rechler and Mr. Blau are both Democratic megadonors whose firms are competing with Mr. Holliday’s for a license to operate a casino in the New York City area.Gov. Kathy Hochul’s campaign raised $4.5 million since January, with roughly a fifth coming from developers and real estate investors.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesWith New York facing an affordable housing crunch, Ms. Hochul has spent much of the year fighting for new government programs to spur development. On Tuesday, she announced she would bypass opponents in the legislature and take executive actions that had been a priority of the real estate industry.Other major donors included members of the Sands family, which controls the Rochester-based beverage giant Constellation Brands; well-known Albany lobbyists Emily Giske, Giorgio DeRosa and the firm Cozen O’Connor; and tech executives like Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber. Ms. Hochul also brought in more than $250,000 at a fund-raiser this month from board members and doctors connected to Somos Community Care, a Bronx-based nonprofit that has tapped into lucrative government health programs.Ms. Hochul managed to raise the sum — plus another $1.5 million for the state Democratic Party — despite new, stricter contributions limits that cap individual gifts at $18,000, down from nearly $70,000 last election cycle. For much of the period, Ms. Hochul was also dealing with tumult within her political operation after reporting by The Times prompted the ouster of her top political aide.For his part, Mr. Adams was a prolific fund-raiser in 2021 and received significant support from a super PAC, which received donations from Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire who owns the Mets and is vying for a casino license in the city. Earlier this year, SL Green retained Frank Carone, the mayor’s former chief of staff, to aid its bid to build a Caesars Palace casino in Times Square.A Broadway fund-raiser for the mayor last month at a showing of the musical “New York, New York” proved especially lucrative. The campaign raised about $600,000 at the event, which was organized by Mr. Carone, according to Evan Thies, a spokesman for the campaign.Helena Durst, principal of the Durst Organization, donated the maximum of $2,100 to Mr. Adams’s campaign.Santiago Mejia/The New York TimesFred Elghanayan, a founder of TF Cornerstone, a real estate company, and Todd Cooper, a founder of RIPCO Real Estate, both donated to the Adams campaign. A dozen people who work at Morgan & Morgan, a national personal injury law firm, donated a total of $25,000 to the mayor’s campaign. Four employees of Meridian Properties, another real estate firm, donated $8,400. Six people who work at another real estate firm, Top Rock Holdings, each gave the maximum of $2,100 to the mayor’s campaign.Many donations came from outside the state, including from Alex Havenick, a gambling and cannabis entrepreneur in Miami, and David Kovacs, a virtual reality video game developer in Miami. Brock Pierce, a cryptocurrency investor who once flew Mr. Adams to Puerto Rico on his private jet, donated $2,100. He listed his address as a ZIP code in Puerto Rico.There were plenty of smaller donations as well. A senior pastor at a church in Queens donated $250 to the mayor’s campaign, as did the director of a New York City children’s theater. More

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      Trump Real Estate Deal in Oman Underscores Ethics Concerns

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      On a remote site at the edge of the Gulf of Oman, thousands of migrant laborers from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan are at work in 103-degree heat, toiling in shifts from dawn until nightfall to build a new city, a multibillion-dollar project backed by Oman’s oil-rich government that has an unusual partner: former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Trump’s name is plastered on signs at the entrance of the project and in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel in Muscat, the nearby capital of Oman, where a team of sales agents is invoking Mr. Trump’s name to help sell luxury villas at prices of up to $13 million, mostly targeting superrich buyers from around the world, including from Russia, Iran and India.Mr. Trump has been selling his name to global real estate developers for more than a decade. But the Oman deal has taken his financial stake in one of the world’s most strategically important and volatile regions to a new level, underscoring how his business and his politics intersect as he runs for president again amid intensifying legal and ethical troubles.Interviews and an examination by The New York Times of hundreds of pages of financial documents associated with the Oman project show that this partnership is unlike any other international deal Mr. Trump and his family have signed.The venture puts Mr. Trump in business with the government of Oman, an ally of the United States with which Mr. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, cultivated ties while in office and which plays a vital diplomatic role in a volatile region. The Omani government is providing the land for the development, is investing heavily in the infrastructure to support it and will get a cut of the profits in the long run.Mr. Trump was brought into the deal by a Saudi real estate firm, Dar Al Arkan, which is closely intertwined with the Saudi government. While in office, Mr. Trump developed a tight relationship with Saudi leaders. Since leaving office, he has worked with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to host the LIV golf tour and Mr. Kushner received a $2 billion infusion from the Saudi fund for his investment venture.Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, has already brought in at least $5 million from the Oman deal. Under its terms, Trump Organization will not put up any money for the development, but will help design a Trump-branded hotel, golf course and golf club and will be paid to manage them for up to 30 years, among other revenue.The project could also draw scrutiny in the West for its treatment of its migrant workers, who during the first phase of construction are living in compounds of cramped trailers in a desertlike setting and are being paid as little as $340 a month, according to one of the engineers supervising the work.Former President Donald J. Trump’s name is plastered on giant signs at the entrance of the project and in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel in Muscat, the capital.Andrea DiCenzo for The New York TimesA saleswoman at the Oman showroom of the $4 billion Aida project, which will include a Trump hotel, villas and golf course.Andrea DiCenzo for The New York TimesLuxury villas at the golf course are priced at up to $13 million.Andrea DiCenzo for The New York TimesMr. Trump’s business ties in the Middle East have already been under intense scrutiny. Federal prosecutors who brought criminal charges against him in the case stemming from his mishandling of classified documents issued subpoenas for information about his foreign deals and the agreements with the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour.During his presidency, Mr. Trump’s family business profited directly from money spent at his Washington hotel by foreign governments including Saudi Arabia, just one example of what ethics experts cited as real or perceived conflicts of interest during his administration. His stake in the project in Oman as he runs for president again only focuses more attention on whether and how his own financial interests could influence foreign policy were he to return to the White House.“This is as blatant as it comes,” said Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit group that has investigated Mr. Trump’s foreign deals. “How and when is he going to sell out U.S. interests? That is the question this creates. It is the kind of corruption our founding fathers most worried about.”Not ‘the Hamptons of the Middle East’In February, Eric Trump, the former president’s son who is overseeing the project for Trump Organization while also playing a role in his father’s re-election campaign, traveled to Oman to visit the cliff-side site where the golf course will soon be built. He met with executives from Dar Al Arkan, the Saudi firm, as well as top government officials from Oman who control the land.“It’s like the Hamptons of the Middle East,” Eric Trump said in an interview, declining to address other questions about the project.Oman is ruled by a sultan, who plays a sensitive role in the Middle East, as Oman maintains close ties with Saudi Arabia and its allies, but also with Iran.Andrea DiCenzo for The New York TimesPortraits of the current and former sultan of Oman in the lobby of a hotel in Muscat.Andrea DiCenzo for The New York TimesTaxi drivers wait for passengers in Muscat. Oman is pursuing rapid development under a national strategy to bolster growth and diversify away from oil and gas.Andrea DiCenzo for The New York TimesOman, in fact, is nothing like the Hamptons. It is a Muslim nation and absolute monarchy, ruled by a sultan, who plays a sensitive role in the Middle East: Oman maintains close ties with Saudi Arabia and its allies, but also with Iran, with which it has considerable trade.As a result, Oman has often served as an interlocutor for the West with Iran, including in the lead-up to the 2015 agreement the Obama administration and other Western governments negotiated with Iran to slow its move to build nuclear weapons, a deal Mr. Trump later abandoned. In recent months, Oman has hosted indirect talks to try to ease tensions between Iran and the United States.Oman is also a buyer of weapons from the United States, including Lockheed Martin’s F-16 fighter jets and a Raytheon-manufactured missile system that it agreed to purchase last year. Mr. Trump, while at the White House, had sent Mr. Kushner to Oman in 2019 to meet with Sultan Qaboos bin Said, then the nation’s monarch, to discuss the Arab-Israeli dispute. More