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"I'm holding out because they're being unfair and heavy-handed," Guth said. "The leverage I got is being there, being in their way. I think the hospitals will be good for the city, but it's also a land grab, pure and simple." Officials invoked eminent domain to make way for the development. It will include a replacement for Charity Hospital, which served the city's poor and uninsured and has been shuttered since being ravaged by Katrina's floodwaters, and a new Veterans Affairs hospital. Mayor Mitch Landrieu has repeatedly defended the development as a "transformative project," said spokesman Ryan Berni. Berni also noted that, at the urging of preservationists, $3.2 million is being spent moving historic homes, rather than demolishing them. Still, there were alternatives to the "urban renewal by removal," said Sandra Stokes of the Foundation for Historical Louisiana, a group that sought to get Charity Hospital reopened and save the neighborhood. She said a recent tour of the neighborhood's "vastness of the space" left her feeling awful. "It had a visceral effect on me, like a punch in the stomach," she said. Amanda Jones, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, said the project would provide health care for veterans throughout the South and pump billions of dollars into the city's economy. One veteran, though, doesn't see it quite that way. "They bulldozed everything down on me when I was 80," said Wallace Thurman, an Air Force veteran who was born in a home a few streets away from the Outer Banks Bar. A stable his grandfather built shortly after arriving from Germany was torn down, and the main house was relocated. Thurman spent more than two years rebuilding his home after Katrina and even rented another house he owned to volunteers who worked to rebuild his neighborhood. Now, though, he lives in the suburbs
-- unwilling to go back to see the emptiness of his childhood streets. "I don't want to go back to New Orleans since they took my house," he said. "I hate it."
[Associated
Press;
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