Our city needs to buck up and take notes!

Clean up the trash, find a home for the homeless and hire world-renowned architects to build new projects.

As much as I don’t want to say it, Dallas has done a phenomenal job in beautifying its city: landscaping in people-filled areas (Turtle Creek, Uptown), creating a large, beautiful area that’s walkable.

They also have a sparkling downtown skyline, lit up at night in beautiful colors. It looks creative and gives the city a great energy.

Houston could do more to take aesthetics into consideration when building new structures - more modern, world-class design. The new skyscrapers in downtown Houston will look fantastic - Hines and Hess Tower; however, has nobody noticed or commented on how BORING and drab Finger’s One Park Place turned out? Geez, it’s so dull and traditional. Even if they were going to go traditional, they could have added some unique features. It’s very plain.

Major metro downtowns also provide great flat surfaces for murals, artwork and creative, artsy vinyl billboards (approved by the city) on the sides of buildings, something Houston takes pride in NOT allowing to preserve the “historic” look. Well, guess what - it results in a very dull look that makes visitors think Houston is boring. They can’t place it, but they think our downtown looks boring.

It’s getting better, indeed, but needs more of the forward-thinking creative people to push it.

Let’s get going!

I don’t think it’s unrelated at all - there is the same attitude of “the law doesn’t apply to us” in this as there was in Enron and quite a few of the Enron executives were responsible for the “rennaisance” of Southampton including, no doubt, some of the “unindicted co-conspirators” and add the two “co-chairs” of the Stop Ashby movement who are also partners of the law firm that responded to the “concerns” of Sherron Watkins by advising Ken Lay how to deal with whistleblowers and, well, the thing sort of speak for itself.

They believe the law, and the City Charter, doesn’t apply to them.

The neighborhood association should be aruging for a change to the laws rather than doing this backdoor. Unfortuantly, laws cannot be changed retroactivly so they are using the only tool available in the toolbox.

I can’t buy the argument that this is stopping “progress”. This building could have been sited in many, many other places without a fight from a surrounding neighborhood or any regulatory headaches. The developer made a poor site selection and is facing the consequences. Aren’t developers supposed to be skilled in making decisions like this? If they never considered (risked) kickback from the neighborhood they are extremely short-sighted.

But then we have homeowners involved who through their connection to Enron, both directly and indirectly, have made it perfectly clear that they believe that the law does not apply to them.

Hopefully a judge at some point will inform them that in fact it does.