This story has many twists and turns, but the end result could be refugees housed inside Revel, a shuttered Atlantic City casino.
Via Zero Hedge:
Which brings us to Straub’s latest proposal how to use the vacant, money-losing building: use it as shelter for Syrian refugees.
Straub told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he’s willing to let people displaced by the civil war in Syria stay at the 47-story Revel resort as he fights in court over its future.
“We treat our dogs better than we treat the Syrians right now,” he said. “If the government wanted to house Syrian refugees, I’d give them use of the building and let them put those people there.”
Which is great news for Obama: recall that recently the White House announced it would accept 100,000 refugees in the US starting in 2017. Surely a few thousand of them wouldn’t mind staying in the luxury building.
Straub added the building is likely to remain vacant for the foreseeable future while he hashes out a half-dozen lawsuits or regulator battles involving its utilities, taxes and former business tenants.
Is Straub doing this out of the goodnews of his own heart? Hardly: he told AP that his “only request would be to be reimbursed for the cost of operating the building while refugees were staying there.”
In other words, the Florida developer made a terrible deal, found himself stuck with a terrible “asset” which he can’t refund or resell, and on top of that, he now has to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in municipal fees even if the building remains vacant forever. His solution: unleash a few thousand Syrian refugees in New Jersey because, drumroll, he is such a noble guy.