Land Rush

The following video was posted on NOLA.com. It's the scene yesterday as hundreds.. maybe thousands of New Orleans property owners stood in line at City Hall to protest their ridiculous "reform" assessments.



The more one thinks on this business the worse it seems. Remember, not everyone in line yesterday was seen by an assessor. Worse.. it doesn't take much imagination to surmise that those homeowners with the least means to pay the taxes based upon the new astronomical assessments.. those most in danger of actually losing their homes because of this.. were either unable to make it to City Hall or unaware of/intimidated by the appeals process.

At this point the arguments for "rationalizing" the assessment process strike me as academic while people (mostly poor and middle class people) are in real danger of being dispossessed of their homes as a result of the City's "open high" bargaining gambit.

But this is just the latest in a seemingly endless string of (yes) Kafakaesuqe absurdities emerging from governmental authorities as the NOLA land rush reaches a fever pitch this summer. These days the government wants your house and it wants it bad. If they can't tax you out of it, they may just show up one day and knock it down. Without rehashing the entire demolition list saga again. I'll just add another to the long list of well deserved "Thank God for Karen Gadbois"es. Thanks to the tireless work of Karen and her crew, the City has been made to.. at least.. think a bit more before sending unannounced bulldozers to citizens' doorsteps.

Meanwhile HANO is moving right along with its plans to demolish.. what remains to be demolished of.. New Orleans's public housing and turn the land over to developers who promise to then create...... wait for it........................... coming........... .................... ready? ......................................................... ........ Yup, GOLF COURSES!

But at its regular monthly meeting Wednesday, HANO officials checked off a few more bureaucratic chores needed for the massive redevelopment, approving four "pre-development agreements" with the firms they have chosen to redesign public housing in New Orleans.

Those plans call for a vastly different landscape for low-income housing in post-Katrina New Orleans: A revitalized St. Bernard with two 18-hole "championship" golf courses and a 45,000-square-foot YMCA, free for the complex's public housing residents, and two charter schools.

Wow.. what remarkable chutzpah displayed by this HUD managed housing agency. Note that the golf courses and the YMCA will be free to residents of the re-developed "mixed-income" community. I think that's nice.

The overall scheme does have a certain beauty in that it is an exact reversal of another plan once proposed by George Carlin

I know where we can build housing for the homeless----golf courses...... Land that is currently being wasted on a meaningless, mindless activity, engaged in primarily by white, well-to-do male businessmen who use the game to get together to make deals to carve this country up a little finer amongst themselves.....Golf is an arrogant elitist game and it takes up entirely too much room in this country.....There are over 17,000 golf courses in America. They average over 150 acres a piece. That’s 3 million plus acres, 4820 square miles. You could build two Rhode Islands and a Delaware for the homeless on the land currently being wasted on this meaningless, mindless, arrogant, elitist, racist....boring game.

Like I said.. Chutzpah.