Got to admit I am somewhat perplexed.
Your permanent state of mind. What don’t you understand now?
This FoodPort collapse. Can’t work out when it became clear to the developers that it wasn’t going to happen: before or after Possibility City went public with the $7-million Housing and Urban Development loan deal and made itself look like Dick City. Not that it matters now, but it struck me as a bizarre plan for West Louisville from the get-go.
You’re right that it doesn’t matter now, but for once I won’t piss on its grave. It would’ve been a major step forward for the West End, which will presumably now have to wait another 20 years before someone comes up with a good enough idea to get their Brass Bands on that HUD funding. What I can guarantee you is that nobody’ll benefit from it if it continues to sit around gathering dust.
Rubbish. The whole thing reeked of inauthentic, white paternalism, an ego trip for Stephen Reily and Greg Fisher. It wasn’t the details — it was the optics. And the optics were dreadful. Plenty of real West End entrepreneurs applied for that loan, and they all got turned down. Then, Reily turns up, and Fischer says ‘sure mate, have the lot,’ only for him to turn around a day or two later and admit that the whole thing is kaput.
I hate to be the bluebottle in your soup, but nobody else was lining up to create hundreds of jobs in the Russell neighborhood, so it might as well have been Reily. As I’ve said before, on the rare occasion that this city’s willing to take the high ground and support something that isn’t just about making some quick coin for a bunch of greedy out-of-town developers, I’m inclined to support it. And who are you to question his motives? Everyone who actually knows him, speaks very highly of him, thus making him your polar opposite.
If the point had really been bettering lives in The West End, he would have listened to what residents need, not planned a glorified farmers market. I’m sure there are a ton of other worthy projects that can benefit The West End without it being patronized by someone who earned his money the old-fashioned way. By inheriting it.
I don’t care how he got his dosh. What was he supposed to do? Buy a red tie and a Slovenian wife and run for president? I care that he wanted to invest in The West End — and do it properly, unlike Walmart. Its failure will put other developers off, which doesn’t exactly help The West End.
I’m not sure how much of his own money he was actually investing. I’d wager not much. Now, we’ve got his buddy Fischer saying that the project was “too big” for some people to grasp. What condescending claptrap. The project collapsed for very prosaic reasons, like never having the money or the investors.
I’d go back to my original point, which, for the benefit of your impenetrable loaf, is that if that HUD loan isn’t invested somewhere, then nobody will benefit. Which is what is now going to happen. And that’s a shame for the future of The West End.
So here’s the challenge — if these people really care as much about The West End as they claim to, they’ll come back with a workable alternative. One with better optics than college sports.
That’s no challenge, at least on the optics front. College sports couldn’t be more bent if it was run out of a Nigerian email server.
Bit harsh on Nigerian email scammers. If a lab came up with the perfect corrupt industry, it would probably come out looking something like college sports, not emails asking for your bank details.
I think everyone who follows college sports must know that. Right? Surely Cardinal fans are not so naive — or, more possibly, senile — to recognise how shady the whole thing is.
What gets me is the misty-eyed bollocks fans who talk about student-athletes. Meanwhile half of them leave university unable to string more than three sentences together. Still, they’re all more articulate than the NCAA’s investigator. Talk about word spaghetti.
What was it? “We have a very high evidentiary standard.” Yeah, that dog’ll hunt. If they threw out every corrupt program Spalding would be national champs.
Millions of dollars changing hands, almost every penny of it ending up in the hands of a select few white people, while black kids are told to stop being ingrates. Sounds just like some HUD loans I heard about.
