Where’s the funding coming from?
A year to build a hotel? Hell they are slapping those things up left and right. McDonalds doesn’t redesign anymore they just tear it down and rebuild usually in 6 months or so. About the same for a China Panda I watched go up after tearing down another commercial property.

It can be as much as two years. It only takes six months or so to tear down and rebuild, but the planning and permitting stage can take 6-12 months.

A hotel is more like 8-10 years. Planning and permitting, environmental impact reports and such, usually takes several years. Permitting takes 2-3 years or so. Construction takes anywhere from 2 to 5 years or more.

I really don't care whether or not Trump's sons can or cannot build a hotel. The topic is trivial. But comparing the building of a major hotel to the building of a MacDonalds is like comparing building the Gerald Ford class aircraft carrier to building a 12' dinghy in your back yard.

Point taken.

Eventually the 100-room hotel, half-completed on a 17-acre site, will be surrounded by 10 other buildings for restaurants and event space in a complex costing more than $20 million. Chawla estimated he would spend $5 million more than he originally planned.

“They looked at all our plans, and they liked the basic layout of the hotel, but they did not find our meeting space functional,” Chawla said. “They worked with us around how it could be restructured.”

Chawla, whose father was a refu­gee in India before emigrating to Canada and then the United States, said he is pleased with the changes because to succeed the project needs to become a destination for tourists and meeting business. The starting room rates for Scion hotels are expected to run $200 to $300 a night.

Many locals may not be able to afford to stay there, as 59 percent of households in surrounding Bolivar County make less than $35,000 a year. While the area attracts tourists in search of blues music, three other new hotels are in the works in Cleveland even though the town — surrounded by soybean and cotton fields — is home to just 15,800 people.

“We need to grow the pie,” Chawla said. “If we just capture the current Cleveland visitors’ market, we’d be going into bankruptcy.”


Local tourism officials are bullish on the property, located less than a mile from the Grammy Museum that opened in 2016 and Delta State University.

“I think it’ll draw people in, having a nice hotel. We’ve seen over the last three or four years a boost to tourism with the Grammy Museum,” said Judson Thigpen, executive director of the Cleveland-Bolivar County Chamber of Commerce.



Taking bets on how quickly this will sink - IF it even opens.