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Neatly ordered living in a cage of wrought irony
All across the
city’s northern tier there dwells a strange tribe – they’re variously called
conservatives, Republican or just plain rich people – whose members oppose big
government, heavy taxes and socialistic infringements on property rights. But then, what do they turn around and do? They move into
hotsy-totsy enclaves and set up their own extra governments with their own
extra taxes and their own extra limits on property rights.
San Antonio Express-News
Neatly ordered
living in a cage of wrought irony
Let’s see if I have this right:
All across the
city’s northern tier there dwells a strange tribe – they’re variously called
conservatives, Republican or just plain rich people – whose members oppose big
government, heavy taxes and socialistic infringements on property rights.
But then, what do
they turn around and do?
They move into
hotsy-totsy enclaves and set up their own extra governments with their own
extra taxes and their own extra limits on property rights.
The governments, taxes and
petty interference the rest of us live with aren’t enough for these folks. They
want more, more, more.
They’re greedy, if you ask
me.
Consider, for example,
the case of Janet Ahmad, who posted signs in the front yard of her new $212,000
house to air a grievance with her builder, Booth & Booth Ltd, alias Prestige
Homes.
In most neighborhoods,
people have a right to freedom of speech and of the press, even if the press is
just a hand-painted yard sign.
But Ahmad’s
house is located in the autonomous gated garrison of Bluffview Greens, which
has a mandatory homeowners association to defend the battlements and maintain a
suitable level of hotsy–totsiness.
The Bluffview Greens
deed restrictions make the yard signs a no-no, so Booth & Booth took her
and husband Mohammad Ahmad to district court last week and won a temporary
injunction against further infraction of the subdivision’s niceness code.
I’ve been crusading
against gated subdivision for years but I’ve been guilty of paying too little
attention to the mandatory associations and deed restrictions that are even
more pervasive on the far North Side.
There are deed restrictions
that tell you what colors and materials you may use on you house, how big it
has to be, how much you have to pay for it and what you can use your property
for.
The rules tend to be more narrowly
drawn and less flexibly applied than the city’s zoning code, or even the
special rules governing historic districts.
Many subdivisions’ deed
restrictions even forbid the benign weekend tradition of garage sales.
The North Siders may espouse the virtues of
free enterprise with their lips, but in their hearts they’re thinking, “Eek! Capitalism!
The sky is falling, the sky is falling!â€
The subdivisions with walls
and gates tend to have the most draconian rules and the most burdensome taxes,
which are politely called “fees.â€
The resident of these
enclaves grouse about spending a few pennies in city tax dollars for “frillsâ€
such as public art, but they willingly pay hundreds of dollars a year to
maintain their own frills – their status gates, their Prestige walls, their
liveried footmen (also called “security guardsâ€), their member-only amenities.
The unifying thread in the
gates and deed restrictions is a pathological pursuit of order, at all
costs. Everything has to be just so.
Everything has to be nice.
A hand-painted protest sign
in a front yard risks smudging the subdivision’s gloss of niceness.
Allow that first crack in
the social order, and next thing you know, kids from a mile away will storm the
gates and start selling Girl Scout cookies door to door.
Of course, the Ahmad’s
chose to live where they do. It’s fair
to suppose that they, like their neighbors, desired the luxury of paying more
for less freedom.
Nobody
forced them to move
there. They could have chosen to live
somewhere else.
Such as, for example, the
United States of America.
Mick Greenberg, San Antonio Express-News
October 22, 1997 |
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