There's this: "I'm not the guy; I just raised a lot of money for him," said David Voelker, the New Orleans businessman who is chairman of the board of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. At $80,300, Voelker appears to have been Obama's top fundraiser in Louisiana.
Which is best characterized as "I dunno, man, I just work here. Ask Virginia Boulet."
She's not an inner circle type of gal, y'all...I coulda told the Times-Picayune this last month. She does some good cheerleading on the Prez-Elect's behalf, but she passes us on to Jennifer Borum Bechet, a former Harvard Law Review colleague...who hasn't talked to him since those bygone days.
They should just spin a wheel of prominent Louisiana Dems and thrust whoever the arrow points to into the limelight at this rate. Nice to see that the White House is looking beyond geography with some of its appointments, anyhow...
If there were more prominent Louisiana Dems, perhaps they would have helped put a stop to naked land grabs in the making such as this one, in which everyone's time to speak to the city council was shrunk from three minutes to one, with no questions being taken.
New Orleans' Lower Mid-City residents and businesses put together a slide show of images from the neighborhood, demonstrating what would be lost if this portion of the Mid-City National Register District were destroyed to make way for new VA and LSU medical centers. Historic Charity Hospital and its Mid-City neighborhood were listed on the 2008 list of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.
Once again, I give you, for your perusal, some stuff from a previous post on this matter of the LSU/VA location...
The dots you are seeing below are of properties cleared for demolition in December 2007:
Oyster's comment on the latest Squandered Heritage post from which the above map comes:Much of where you mapped, of course, is a block away from planned billion dollar VA hospital. It will be prime commercial and residential real-estate in a few years, especially if the neighborhood has been considerably “altered”.And now, for your perusal, a map of the proposed site for the new LSU/VA:
With planning like this, who really needs the local paper to chime in on it all, I ask you?Ugh.
3 comments:
It is all mighty scary. Even if the area is cleared will a hospital be built. And if it is built how long till it is abandoned? And how long till something happens with Charity and the other significant buildings which no one talks about.
What a waste.
The insanity is that there is so much decrepit real estate at the CBD end of the corridor, but we’re clearing land on the north side. This is just stupid. We’ll end up with new construction on the north side and falling down building on the edge of the CBD. Brilliant.
First, the google map is really deceptive. Each marker is about the size of the Superdome. These are, in fact isolated residential lots, scattered over a wide area.
Isolated residential lots (which are still owned by the individual people) are worthless to any developer seeking to do anything more than build a few infill houses.
I keep saying it...for there to be a land grab, there has to be land, and someone actually grabbing it. Note: the VA/Charity site is what a land grab looks like. Otherwise, no one's grabbing much of anything.
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