After a decade of uncertainty, New Orleans, Louisiana‘s long-abandoned Charity Hospital has attracted the interest of investors eager for a front-row seat to downtown New Orleans’ budding economic boom.
Five teams of developers submitted offers Wednesday (July 1) to revamp the art deco-era landmark, possibly ranging from a public-private partnership to buying it outright from the state Department of Administration.
The offers come a little more than a year after Mayor Mitch Landrieu abandoned his idea to turn Charity into a new government center, replete with City Hall offices and courtrooms to handle civil cases.
Landrieu estimated that that $270 million project needed $100 million in state financing, a sum Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration resisted to promise.
The hand-wringing over Charity’s fate began almost immediately after the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina, and the hospital that had served generations of New Orleanians went fallow.
Rather than return to the historic building, the state decided to build a new $1.1 billion University Medical Center in Mid-City.