NEW ORLEANS — Let's build a hospital now. Let's put our veterans first.
That was the message of an ad running this week on New Orleans radio stations, introducing a creative solution to an impasse in building new hospitals for veterans in New Orleans.
Challenging Louisiana State University (LSU) to give way for the Department of Veterans Affairs, the ad says that the VA office should build a hospital on the site planned for LSU's teaching hospital.
The ad says, "Put the hospital that's ready to build, VA, on the virtually shovel-ready site that is controlled by LSU, which is unable to build its own new hospital because of financing problems. The site, currently proposed for the VA hospital, would force the demolition of a tight-knit residential community."
Sponsored by Smart Growth for Louisiana, the radio ad is an attempt to speed construction of the first of the two hospitals needed to drive the jobs-producing development of a biomedical economy for New Orleans.
The ad also points out that New Orleans voters believe that LSU should not even be using the site in the Lower Mid-city neighborhood. The voters, according to a poll conducted by Prof. Edward Renwick at Loyola University, prefer building a state-of-the-art LSU hospital inside the Charity Hospital building by a 2-to-1 margin over building the hospital in Lower Mid-city.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
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