Thursday, June 28, 2012

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan Inspects ‘Versailles’

As secretary of housing and urban development, Shaun Donovan has responsibility for a host of problems, including distressed housing projects, an epidemic of home foreclosures and rental discrimination against minorities and the disabled.
But on Monday, Mr. Donovan turned his attention to a more rarefied segment of the housing market—a $100 million, 90,000 square foot mansion modeled after Louis XIV’s palace, Versailles. Accompanied by a full house of HUD staffers, Mr. Donovan attended a private Washington screening of “The Queen of Versailles,” a documentary about the edifice, now partly erected in Orlando, Fla., and the couple who dream of its completion, timeshare developer David Siegel and his significantly younger wife, Jackie.
Mr. Siegel built a fortune by selling timeshare stakes to a clientele bankers call “subprime” and known within his company, Westgate Resorts, as “moochers”—people who sit through a marketing presentation to get a free vacation. The moochers’ monthly payments financed an extravagant lifestyle for the Siegels, something they hoped to enshrine in their Orlando Versailles, purportedly the largest house in America.
Mr. Siegel’s deadpan personality, slightly discordant among the bathing beauties and baroque furnishings that decorate his life, contrasts sharply with his pneumatic wife’s celebration of all things opulent. While strangely engaging and, defying expectations, even sympathetic, the Siegels demonstrate that all the world’s riches cannot buy a sense of irony.

Read more: http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/06/26/hud-secretary-shaun-donovan-inspects-versailles/

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