Who is Maria Isabel?

Besides being an ardent supporter of Barack Obama, she’s a “precinct captain” and the co-chair of something called Houston Obama Leadership Team. We know she’s Cuban by birth. And we know she idolizes Che Guevara. But now we know a few more things about her. She’s apparently quite the local character in Houston:

The Che Guevara flag that is flying in the Barak [sic] Obama Houston Headquarters is no doubt the work of Maria Isabel, who I have talked alot about in this blog. She and her husband Barry Norman fought the historic preservation regulations that Old Sixth Ward residents were pushing hard for. They demolished the historic 1890 Valentine house…
I have seen the flag flying over their apartment on Washington Avenue. You can see it from Center street.

Apparently Maria Isabel made a few enemies of her neighbors who did not want to see the historic home torn down and replaced with a new house featuring a 50-foot “meditation tower” looming over them. Here’s a blog post with excerpts from a Houston Chronicle story at the time.

Yes, the house’s new owner, Barry Norman, told the city commission, he knew he was buying property in a historic neighborhood, the Old Sixth Ward. But he had no intention of keeping the little Queen Anne cottage that stood at 1814 Lubbock since 1885. In fact, he was applying for permission to tear it down.
On the lot, Norman and his wife, Maria Isabel, proposed to build an aggressively modern house out of concrete block, metal and Hardiplank siding. Isabel, an architectural designer, had drawn up the plans herself.
With its tallest point (a meditation tower) at 49 feet 9 inches, the new house would loom over its one-story neighbors, blocking their views of nearby downtown. Though the neighbors’ porches hug the sidewalk — the old-fashioned setback is only 10 feet — the new house would hang back 17 feet and more, creating an unsettling gap. And to the pretty street, the house would present a blank face: a wooden fence and the door to a garage big enough to accommodate five cars and the couple’s RV….
On Sept. 2, Norman and Isabel will be free to raze the house. “I want to get the neighborhood cleaned up,” says Isabel, who likes the Old Sixth Ward for its proximity to downtown, Memorial Park and Buffalo Bayou. “Right now that lot is full of bums. People come and put trash there. Cleaning it up — that’s my thing. The historical movement, it’s not my bag.”

Now come on Ms. Isabel, that’s no way to talk about the homeless. What kind of a Democrat are you?
You can watch her talking about her property rights, the ones that commies like her idol Che Guevara would take away in heartbeat by clicking here.
Here’s the house she built on the lot where she tore the historic home down: an old winnebago.

Ms. Isabel apparently runs something called Isabel Design.
H/T: PJ-Comix