In his annual letter to shareholders last week, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon offered a pointed reminder to investors who had grown comfortable in the extended low-rate era: the credit cycle, he wrote, “has not been repealed.” His words landed against a backdrop that many developers already know firsthand. Despite some easing at the top end of the market, capital for development-stage projects remains selective. Refinancing timelines are uncertain. The equity partners and lenders who seemed abundant just a few years ago have grown considerably more cautious about the sectors and geographies where the risk feels hardest to model.

None of this is without precedent. Credit markets have tightened before, and the development finance ecosystem has adapted. The more instructive question for sponsors evaluating their options today is not whether conditions will eventually improve, but what the historical record shows about how patient, long-duration capital has performed when conventional sources pull back, and what that pattern suggests about the tools worth understanding now.

A Tighter Credit Market: What the Data Shows

The current environment has its own specific contours, but the underlying dynamic is recognizable. Deutsche Bank’s March 2026 annual report identified U.S. commercial real estate as a continuing “key risk,” noting that “significant impairment risk remains depending on property types and regions.” The Mortgage Bankers Association estimated $875 billion in CRE debt matures in 2026, a figure that, while lower than 2025’s peak, still represents substantial refinancing activity across the market. The broader picture, however, is one of selectivity rather than systemic distress. Many well-positioned assets in liquid markets are refinancing successfully. The pressure is concentrated, and that concentration is precisely what creates the opening.

The sectors where conventional lenders are most selective are familiar ones: hospitality, mixed-use urban development, infrastructure projects in secondary and tertiary markets, and development in communities where bank appetite has historically been thinner. These are not marginal project types. They represent a substantial and durable share of the development pipeline, and they share a common characteristic: the projects are sound, the demand is real, but the conventional capital stack is harder to assemble than it was two or three years ago.

That gap between viable projects and available conventional financing is not a signal of broader market weakness. It is a structural feature of how credit cycles work, and it is the condition under which alternative capital sources have historically played their most important role.

Tom Rosenfeld, founder and CEO of CanAm Enterprises, who has overseen the firm’s deal flow through multiple cycles, describes what he is seeing on the ground today:

“There’s a lot of uncertainty in the market now. There’s the inflation factor, interest rates, tariffs, political uncertainty, all those things. When you have that kind of level of uncertainty, people are nervous. Business people do not like uncertainty. Ernst & Young did a study that 30% of deals are now being renegotiated midstream. That is a sign of fear and uncertainty.”

Read More: The Economic Environment and Why Caution Matters for EB-5 Investors

What 2008 Taught Us About Alternative Capital in a Credit Downturn

The 2008 financial crisis remains the most instructive modern reference point for how development finance behaves under stress. When the credit markets seized, the consequences for project sponsors were immediate and structural. Banks stopped lending to construction and development at scale. Private equity pulled back. Mezzanine debt became scarce. The result was not simply that financing became more expensive; for many project types, it became genuinely unavailable at any price.

What the post-2008 period illustrated was that development needs do not pause when credit tightens. Infrastructure still needed to be built. Hospitality assets still needed capital to reach completion or stabilization. Mixed-use projects with long entitlement timelines could not simply wait for the cycle to turn. The gap between what conventional lenders would provide and what projects actually required had to be filled by something.

Rosenfeld draws the parallel to prior cycles directly:

“It reminds me closer to 2008, 2009, maybe not that terrible, but pretty close. There is a liquidity crunch out there. Capital is much harder to get now. A lot of deals that penciled out three years ago when interest rates were so low don’t pencil out anymore, and refinancing is much tougher. Banks are much tougher.”

The capital that stepped into the post-2008 gap shared certain characteristics. It was long-duration, committed on timelines measured in years rather than quarters. It was not dependent on the interbank lending market or short-term rate conditions for its availability. And it was aligned, by design or by structure, with the job-creation and economic development outcomes that the projects themselves were intended to produce. These were not incidental features. They were what made that capital useful when conventional sources could not perform.

The recovery that followed did not eliminate the structural role that patient capital had come to occupy. If anything, the post-crisis regulatory environment, with its higher capital requirements for banks and more conservative underwriting standards, made certain project types durably dependent on non-bank sources of long-duration capital. The gap that opened in 2008 narrowed, but it did not fully close.

What Prior Credit Cycles Tell Developers About EB-5 Financing

Credit cycles differ in their causes and their severity, but they tend to produce similar structural effects on development finance. Bank appetite contracts most sharply in exactly the sectors, geographies, and project stages where it was already thinnest. Equity partners grow more selective. Mezzanine debt becomes harder to source at terms that make a project viable. And the sponsors who weather these periods most successfully are typically those who had already thought carefully about capital stack diversification before the cycle turned.

The current environment shares enough with prior tightening cycles to make that history worth consulting. The specific pressures are different, but the structural logic is consistent: when conventional capital becomes selective, the projects that continue to move forward are those with access to capital sources that operate on different terms and different timelines.

For developers evaluating their options in this environment, the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program is one instrument worth understanding in this context. EB-5 capital has historically played a more prominent role in development finance during periods of conventional credit constraint, precisely because its structural characteristics, long duration, independence from rate cycles, and alignment with job creation and economic development, make it most relevant when the gaps in a conventional capital stack are hardest to fill by other means. It is not a fit for every project or every sponsor, and the program carries its own compliance requirements and timelines that demand careful evaluation. But as a source of patient, long-duration mezzanine capital for the right project types, it has a demonstrable track record across prior cycles.

That said, Rosenfeld is direct about the heightened scrutiny that the current environment demands from any regional center making deployment decisions:

“The first question for every deal is: is this going to repay? Is this deal going to have enough liquidity four, five, six, seven years down the road? Sponsors have to have a lot of skin in the game. Any deal that’s over-reliant on EB-5, that’s a red flag. That is not what this program should be about. You’ve got to make sure the capital stack is really in place and there are completion guarantees.”

CanAm Enterprises has operated as an independent EB-5 regional center for more than 20 years, financing 75+ projects and raising more than $4 billion in capital across real estate, infrastructure, hospitality, and other development sectors. Since the passage of the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act in 2022, CanAm has tracked a 1,500 percent increase in investment directed to rural projects nationally, a figure Rosenfeld cites as evidence the program is delivering on Congress’s original intent. Loans through CanAm’s EB-5 and Redeployment Capital programs typically range from $25 million to $200 million. More than $2.5 billion has been returned to investors, a track record that reflects the firm’s disciplined underwriting approach. As a FINRA-registered broker-dealer, CanAm operates with the compliance and transparency standards that institutional development partners expect.

For developers evaluating whether EB-5 is the right fit for a specific project, the starting point is a clear-eyed understanding of how the instrument works: where it sits in a capital stack, what distinguishes a sound structure from a problematic one, and what questions to ask of any regional center before committing. The JTC/CanAm EB-5 Investor Due Diligence White Paper was written precisely for that purpose. It covers capital stack structures, red flags in project selection, the questions sponsors and investors should be asking, and what responsible fund administration looks like in practice, and is widely regarded as the most useful single resource for anyone approaching EB-5 for the first time or returning to it after the RIA reforms.

Download the EB-5 Investor Due Diligence White Paper to get started. Developers interested in discussing a specific project can visit canamenterprises.com/for-developers or reach our team directly at (212) 668-0690 or info@canamenterprises.com.