COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE RIGHT TO PROTEST “. . . not to say I always concur with my own neighbors, where I live. A ‘greenbelt’ consisting largely of invasive species follows the dry creek behind my house and cleaned up would make a nice trail (she said shyly — she’s much bolder on the internet). But the people hereabouts hear the word trail and think transients, even after I tried to push their dog-loving buttons with ‘dog park,’ so I gave up on that notion a long time ago. My neighborhood abuts a mall. A group wanted to put a ‘luxury hotel’ on the mall’s anvil-like parking lot with its wasted city view. Terrific, I thought, a hedge against the inevitable decline of the mall. At a meeting of a couple hundred people: I was the only one in support. Neighbors won that one, or rather, the bottom shortly dropped out of the ‘mall parking lot luxury hotel’ business. Then too there’s a defunct movie theater, returning to a state of nature these ten years, at the edge of the neighborhood. The re-developer — retail, townhomes, offices — is dropping several hundred thousand dollars into a mitigation pot to conserve land elsewhere in the watershed, even though this land is already ruined. I don’t see this enormous abandoned cineplex as an asset, but the others around here do, apparently, and had lined up to derail its transformation into . . . whatever. I confess that this time my exasperation was such that I contrived some ad hoc ‘neighborhood support’ (i.e. all my friends) to inundate Council and give them some cover for the vote. I have no ‘rights,’ you say? I figure I have a right to whatever I can take from you, and I assume you’ll do the same.” [luciaphile, commenting on Comment of the Day: Houston’s Master Planners] Illustration: Lulu