By: Travis McGee
Houston has no zoning, but there’s no reason not to have commonsense. Most of if not all the environmental hazards, eyesores, unwanted businesses, and undesirables are all in our communities/ neighborhoods. When I say our, I mean the Black and Brown communities which all have already been neglected and underserved for decades now. When we report these injustices in the city, we are always instructed to a call center aka 311. Call 311 is the slogan that is repeated time and time again since it was created in August of 2001 and 24 years later no significant improvements or real time results. It has zero guarantee to resolve anything but instead it does somewhat keep count and a record that a complaint was made.
The next question is do you have deed restrictions, but depending on how deep the developer pockets are that’s just another overrated excuse for not using commonsense to write meaningful legislation and ordinances to protect We the People for lack of zoning.
Why so many landfills and crush concrete plants in our community considering we have some of the worse air quality and some of the highest cancer rates? Why attempt to put salvage/junk yards in preexisting communities? The exhaust from the equipment, machines, forklifts, semi- trucks and etc. have to go somewhere.
Our communities shouldn’t be oversaturated with Charter schools while closing our traditional schools that we paid the most in taxes on, however some of our tax dollars actually have gone to Charter schools which is the competition of our very expensive tax funded schools.
Soon we will have more halfway houses than churches and more sex offenders than children all in our area that have one too many already. If any area is considered to be below the poverty level that mean it’s a lot of poor people there. We all know its hell to be poor and sometimes desperate people do desperate things like go to a Payday loan place or another predatory lender trying to make ends meet, but in reality, if we can’t afford the cost of living, we can’t afford a payday loan either at 300 to 600 plus percent here in Texas.
Affordability of housing is not affordable and the more concrete poured increases the flood risk of areas with zero history of flooding. The new development both raises our flood risk and our taxes. Commonsense should always outweigh Nonsense when it comes to quality of life, affordability, and livelihood however Good Legislation and even better City ordinances are a must to protect We the People since we have no zoning.
