On Gatsby's north shore, Chinese luxury home buyers pause as curbs bite

Jericho, NY

AMONG the sprawling colonial homes and well-tended lawns on the north shore of New York's Long Island, there are signs that Chinese policies crafted 11,000 kilometres away are taking a toll.

In the past year, there has been a slowdown in the stream of affluent Chinese looking for luxury homes in the area - widely thought to have been the setting for F Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby - property brokers said.

Over the past eight months, the Chinese authorities have introduced a series of measures to make it more difficult for Chinese to move capital out of the country as they seek to keep the Chinese currency, the yuan, from falling.

At the end of last year, for example, disclosure rules were tightened to try to prevent individuals from using any of the maximum US$50,000 they are allowed to buy in foreign currency in any one year to purchase overseas property and other overseas investments. Those who vi…