League City vs. the USA, Part 6: Those who live in glass tract houses

Most League City residents have contributed to illegal immigration through their own economic activity.  We can't all reap the benefits of the cheap construction provided by the 50% of Texas tradesmen who are undocumented and then turn around and disavow all responsibility for the corresponding problems that demand-driven illegal immigration predictably brings to our doorsteps.

Here's a join-the-dots example showing exactly how these moving parts all work together.  I chose this example below because this speaker voluntarily elected to self-identify in public and therefore it can be reasonably assumed that she claims no expectation of privacy with respect to her personal identity or her views on this subject.  

Screengrabbed from Y. C. Orozco's very thoughtful and thorough account (non-paywalled) of the vote that was held this past week.  

But where was Ms. Vickers' objection to third-world illegal immigration when those same people were most likely building her own house?  Publicly-available CAD records (PDF link) suggest that she and her husband purchased their 2002 suburban masterpiece directly from builder D.R. Horton, the same D.R. Horton who made the news shortly thereafter for its treatment of illegal alien residential construction workers.

I've read other news stories in which major builders proudly disavow any hiring of illegal aliens.  But of course they hire subcontractors en masse, and they typically don't check the immigration status of anyone working in the resulting supply chain.

Screengrabbed from this site.  

I am by no means singling out Ms. Vickers as disproportionately responsible for contributing to the local demand for illegal labor.  I suspect that, if a thorough analyses were done, every local homeowner would share a roughly equal responsibility.  Including the bulk of our City Council.

Every one of those elected reps who voted for that unenforceable resolution... every one of them appears to hold title to exactly the kind of suburban tract home that we can reasonably assume was likely built using a significant component of illegal labor.  But was there a single one of those representatives who was overtaken by the strength of their principles at the time of their home purchase and said, "Oh no, I cannot in good conscience follow through with this purchase because I know from simple statistics that this house was likely built in significant part using illegal labor, and I have taken a strong moral stand against contributing to the support and economic stimulation of illegal immigration in any way."

Apparently, not a one of them experienced an actionable twinge of conscience, a conscientious objection, at the time their sales closed.  But when there's an opportunity for political grandstanding that invokes those same anti-illegal-immigration principles that they'd prefer not to see violated, that is another story.

This is the basis for my objection to what League City has done here:  Those who live in glass tract houses should not throw stones.  Other commentators have invoked a humanitarian justification against the resolution, but I don't think that the analysis needs to progress beyond this simple bit of common sense that I'm presenting here.  

I am a legal immigrant.  It took me 13 long, difficult years to follow the procedure and finally attain the rights of American citizenship.  During those 13 years, I watched millions and millions of illegal immigrants simply walk into the country across an open border.  I would fervently like to see the federal government secure the border once and for all and stop all this madness.

Given those personal circumstances of mine, you'd think that I would be counted among those who are the most angry at the specter of tens of thousands more undocumented people streaming across our border at this time.  But the situation is not that simple because I recognize my own contribution to creating the conditions that brought us all to this unfortunate juncture.  

Before the illegal?? labor-intensive transformation: 
Our subdivision lot in League City, prior to the start of construction. How many of you have had the amazing privilege of building your own home?  It's a remarkable experience, especially if you're able to take a base architectural plan and transform it utterly into an almost-unrecognizable one-of-a-kind custom home, as my husband and I did with ours.

A hard hat, buckets of fresh joint compound, but no worker:
I have almost two thousand pictures of our home in progress, but only three of those pictures contain any evidence of human presence, and those three photos show no faces.  That's because every time I would show up with my camera to document each day's building progress, the tradesmen would hide themselves away until I was done.  I was always very careful to be discrete and respectful about what I was photographing, because it's not proper behavior to frighten vulnerable people, especially when they are working fourteen hours a day seven days a week on your behalf.   

Nameless, faceless, and furtive:
It was plenty warm out that day, as the mason in the blue T-shirt indicated by not wearing a jacket or even a long-sleeved shirt.  But his low-skilled helper felt compelled to pull up his hoodie so his face could not be seen.  Why might he have done that??  

I have absolutely no evidence that our builder or its subcontractors used any illegal construction labor.  I can only report the behaviors that I saw and the statistics that characterize the industry, those being that a full 50% of Texas' construction workers are undocumented (PDF link).     

I signed our home build contract.  I put up all that money that was used to stimulate additional demand for the services of those construction workers, including the very young man shown above who felt compelled to hide his face.  We have most definitely made our own suburban beds on the illegal immigration issue.  Now we have to lie in them.  

Good advice:
League City's building inspectors did not suffer fools gladly during our construction process, but this is good advice for everyone - Ms. Vickers, City Council, and everyone else who forms an opinion on our current illegal immigrant issue:  WAKE UP!  Wake up and see your own wider role in our collective situation.  

League City vs. the USA, Part 5: Next time, vote

I ask you to remember these images when the next League City election rolls around:

Screengrabbed from WFAA in Dallas.  

Instead of devoting energy to the actual needs of League City, Council is squandering resources on the kind of culture war activity that cannot, by definition, lead to a measurable benefit for taxpayers.

Screengrabbed from KHOU.  

Even Judge Ed Emmett used the term "grandstanding", for crying out loud.  For those of you not familiar with local politics, Judge Emmett is not even our county judge, but he's a respected local Republican leader, and people in greater Houston pay attention when he speaks.

Notice the way the news media refers to League City as "this Houston suburb", in a pejorative sense.  Not a real city in manifested character, more like a red-headed stepchild of the suburban sort.

Screengrabbed from Google and KVUE.     

Trying to usurp that authority makes them look like foolish foot-stompers.  A lot of public resources have been squandered on previous attempts, but both the regulatory framework and the case law are settled.

Screengrabbed from KHOU.  

And whose fault is it that we have this line-up in office?  Emphatically, ours.

Election results from 2011. which is when four of the current seven were elected. Note the "total votes" column.
Screengrabbed from this page.  

Voter turnout during that election was a memorable 9.47% (PDF link).  Voter turn-out was naturally a bit better in 2012 (PDF link) because the other three Council positions were voted during the general election, when people were already at the polls for federal voting purposes.  But even with a federal election drawing people to the polls, look at the number of undervotes:

I believe that a lot of LC residents had no idea of who these people even are, and so they didn't vote for any of them. The effective voter turn-out was closer to 30%.

Screengrabbed and simplified from this PDF.  

I know what a lot of residents are going to want to say in response to this - they're going to claim that it's very difficult to obtain enough detail about a local candidate to make an informed voting decision, and therefore they don't vote for Council members at all.  This response is understandable -  I myself feel that I went into the 2012 election as an ignorant voter, despite my candidate research efforts. It is hard to get relevant information.  We don't even have a real newspaper in League City despite the fact that our population is rapidly approaching six figures, so it's very difficult for facts (as opposed to campaign propaganda) to get disseminated.

The juggernaut that hasn't yet come into its own.  Arguably, we are large enough to do better than what we have been.

Screengrabbed from Google.  

Our local blogging community is even worse than our newspaper situation, as most bloggers activate only within the context of narrowly-defined personal agendas, and then quickly grow dormant once any given election cycle is concluded, leaving nobody to monitor what's going on most of the time.  And then what happens??  We elect our local reps by partial ignorance and accident, and League City ends up in the international news portrayed as child haters and Constitutional rights violators.

My husband likes to tell me that I'm a crappy political blogger and that I should stick to the suburban lifestyle content that was my original intent and which continues to be my forte.  To which I reply that I don't do political commentary because I envision myself to be any good at it.  I do it because there isn't a single other soul out there who is lifting a finger in this regard.  If I give it a shot, hopefully that meager effort will help contribute to a tipping point of awareness which will inspire more people to make contributions (a scenario that becomes increasingly likely by simple statistics as our population continues to expand).

I've leave you with a meme-type graphic that I doctored in order to emphasize my bottom line.  There aren't enough sufficiently-informed League City residents electing our local reps, but here's what transpires when people choose not to vote.  

How many of you feel like you've had sausage involuntarily thrust into your voting mouths after watching LC's ongoing tedious series of guns, God, and grandstanding efforts?

Let me explain the graphic in a bit more detail.  In my opinion, Canada is the world leader in double entendre, where the practice is considered acceptable and even desirable within the public discourse.  I've modified the original intent of this humorous offering from Fairvote.ca, and the resulting communication is rather shocking by American public standards, but you get the underlying message loud and clear, don't you?  And that's the point.  

Epic racism

It really, really chaps my rear end when I have to get important and mainstream Houston news by way of the "Epic Sh*t" Facebook group instead of through what are supposed to be the conventional, respectable channels of journalism.

I read Houston Chronicle daily, including the paid subscriber portions, and I saw not one word on the story of Landry Thompson, who traveled to Houston with her dance instructors and was forcibly taken into CPS custody despite overwhelming evidence that her circumstances were proper.

Furthermore, when I search the Chronicle online edition, I find no hits involving her name.

Screengrabbed from www.chron.com's search engine.

I can, however, get the story from HuffPost.  I can get it from ABC's Good Morning America - but apparently not from the ABC affiliate KTRK (which dominates our local TV market, by the way). 

Silencio.  What's up with that, exactly??  ABC can't claim that they didn't possess the content, because they broadcast it nationally. 

Screengrabbed from KTRK. 

This was an incredibly important local story last week, and apparently only KHOU had the guts and the conscience to report it.

"Only on KHOU" indeed.  Screengrabbed from Facebook. 

This story was incredibly important for two reasons:

(1)  Because HPD really screwed up.  There is no excuse for what they did to these people.  And then they compounded their unbelievable screw-up by intentionally NOT issuing a proper apology!!

(2)  Because this could have been an excellent teaching moment for the public in more ways than one, instead of being something that the local news media seems to have buried  - why? - because they don't want Houston or HPD to look bad so maybe it's best to sweep it under the rug?  Or far worse, maybe because they think that there was really no story here?!

These young people did everything correctly, and their civil rights were still violated, in my opinion. 

Most importantly, they were traveling with a notarized custody document.  That's the big missed opportunity for public education here.  Properly-presented news coverage could have given the public more information on this vital tool which is designed to eliminate confusion and ambiguity on exactly this kind of situation. 

And on that subject, I myself can speak from experience.  I have a daughter whose last name is different from mine, who isn't the same color as I am, and who doesn't strongly resemble me.  Particularly when we travel abroad, we always travel with a notarized document from her other biological parent explaining that she's properly in the custody of me and/or whatever larger group she is with (I can't tell you what law or rule compels this practice, because I only learned to do it by word of mouth from other people with similar family complexities). 

Racial profiling does work both ways, eh?  Of course, it's absolutely nowhere near as common for a white woman to be profiled as a black man, but it does happen.   Over the years, I have been interrogated.  It always starts with the same suspicious question:  "What is the relationship of this child to you?!"  And it always proceeds with the same initial answer:  "I gave birth to her."  If I'm feeling a bit puckish that day, I might volunteer that I delivered her naturally after only 12 hours of labor, which is unusually short for a first pregnancy in an ass-less American white woman (translation: small pelvic structure), but I was very physically fit and so it was an efficient process. 

But it doesn't matter how much TMI I provide.  More than once, the historical result has been a furious glare as the "authority" mentally embraces his or her default belief:  That it's more likely that I'm one of those sinister rich bitches who trafficked the defenseless child of color out of the third world so that I could chain her to my toilet and use her for slave domestic labor for the next fifty years of her life.

Unlike the young people in last week's news story, I've never been pushed beyond the initial phase of interrogation.  Maybe its because of that expectant look on my face that always says, "Go ahead - make my day."

I do hope that the Thompson family decides to litigate in this situation.  I certainly would if I were in their position, but that's an individual decision and a tough call either way.  It probably wouldn't gain them that much personally, but it would do a tremendous favor for American society by publicly emphasizing that not all young black men are criminals.  And not all unusual child custodians are criminals, either. 

Major, major kudos to KHOU in stepping up to the plate on this one. Here's their initial coverage:

If it leads, it bleeds

*CURSE* the American commercial news media anew today as stories of an altercation between League City Councilmen Okeeffe and Becker spread widely on GCDN (paywalled), Chron, FOX, KHOU, a few out-of-state sites such as this one courtesy of the AP, and gosh knows where else. 

Obviously my post title is a punny play on words which acknowledge that, in this case, it was the leaders who ended up bleeding rather that a simple bleeder who ended up leading the evening news in what has come to be characteristic vacuous style. 

Screengrabbed from this NPR piece which explores some of the ethical issues. 

I say *CURSE* because this is yet another example of the media reporting superficial bullsh*t instead of the meaningful backstories that likely underpin that bullsh*t and which might have even prevented some of that bullsh*t had they been properly exposed in a timely manner as is the media's ethical function in society! 

Thomas Jefferson said it first and in general terms, and I've said it before, and I've said it very recently within the context of League City's affairs:  this municipal store is not being properly minded, and when that happens, all hell is guaranteed to break loose.  The only questions are when and in what specific forms. 

But rather than focusing on the non-minding, the news media focuses on the hell - in the race for meaningless HTML clicks, the meaningful investigation doesn't happen very much anymore.  An opportunity for presentation of actual content is superseded by a vacuous vignette of voyeurism.

And then to make matters even more ridiculous, they don't even do a proper job of investigating the hell breaking loose!!  So Okeeffe and Becker apparently decided to exchange blows, and based on current vacuous voyeuristic vignettes, the key word there is exchange, meaning, neither the news nor the police citations suggest that either man was disproportionately at fault.  OK, if that's the case, why wasn't this considered to be an incidence of mutual combat, which is legal as I understand it?  Maybe there were extenuating circumstances which warranted the police citations, but my profoundly important point is we'll never know under our present bottom-feeding news media reporting standards!!

The whole thing is disheartening, but I'm trying to look on the bright side: maybe this incident will now - FINALLY - push a real investigative journalist to take a closer look at what happens in League City.  Maybe someone can leverage this punch line as a hook that justifies closer examination. (Hint for any professional journalist who considers doing this: Lead your stories with anecdotal reference to Wednesday's fisticuffs which will then get you the clicks you need while at the same time having your supplemental content actually fulfill a supportable journalistic ethic).  And if that closer look does happen, maybe we'll then start seeing some of the real League City issues come to light where they can be hashed out and resolved, thereby lowering fist-clenching tensions for all involved. 

And oh - that "Hall of Shame" label that I placed on this blog post?  That's not intended to apply to Okeeffe and Becker, whose altercation appears to have been executed in fairness.  That's intended for the news media, whose execution was not. 

LC vs. the good ol' USA, Part 3

GCDN has done us a great favor today by uplinking the PDF of the recent day laborers' judgment, the PDF that I did not have access to when I wrote Part 1 and Part 2 of this post.  Having the corresponding filing information allowed me to search for this cleaner link to the judgment which should not be restricted by any commercial news media paywall.

As I noted before, I'm not an attorney and my comments on this matter are purely citizen-based and opinion-based.  But now that I get to read the judgment in its entirety, I find it to be even more damning and disturbing than I had initially realized.

If you wish to learn what really goes on in America and how America really works, don't read the news, don't read the history books, and don't listen to most of what is presented in educational settings.  Simply read Court judgments and see America through the remarkable lens that they hold aloft. 

The results are often shocking, as they are in this example.  League City was alleging that day laborers were posing a risk to public safety by interfering with traffic in the public roadways.  But the Court appears to have found that LCPD intentionally conspired to arrest day laborers on private property where they had the owner's permission to be physically present.  And they didn't just show up to arrest them - they deployed a pre-meditated set-up.  So said the Court in the paragraphs above, as I interpret it. 

I am not an attorney, but it is very difficult for me to imagine how League City could successfully appeal this decision with skeletons like this rattling fiercely in their collective closet.  I don't presume to understand the mind of the Court, but the inclusion of this passage looks like it could be a shot fired across League City's bow, as if to say "Yeah, we both know that you only got busted on the First Amendment portion of this deal, but we also both know that there's more going on here than anyone has fully fleshed out yet.  Watch yourselves." 

The judgment names certain other roadway-soliciting groups who were not targeted by the actions of LCPD, and in fact, my original intention for this Part 3 post was to spoof one of those other groups, just to overstate a point about enforcement selectivity which I personally find to be arbitrary at best and discriminatory at worst.

Uh-oh.  More solicitors on the hoof, and on FM 518 to boot. 

As Danny DeVito famously noted in The Big Kahuna, it doesn't matter whether you're selling industrial lubricants or salvation (or for that matter, day labor services) - selling is selling.  This is true regardless of whatever is alleged within that whacked-out (and unconstitutional) anti-solicitation passage in the Texas Transportation Code. 

But after reading the full judgment linked above, I've lost my appetite for a spoof.  This thing is so sobering that I no longer have the gumption to tell you just how much more acutely I've been injured by the group shown in the photo above, rather than by League City's day laborers (whose services I try my best not to personally engage, as I think I explained convincingly and quantitatively - ka-CHING! - in this post). 

Those other guys got an explicit hall pass, and explicitly for FM 518. 

Not only have the white-collared guys shown in the pic above solicited me from League City's rights-of-way, they have further encroached on my rights and my general sanity by repeatedly entering my private property without my permission.  I was going to demand that LCPD do something to "crack down" on this group which I find to be an affront to dignity, peace, and good order, not to mention traffic safety.

Of course, maybe I've got it all wrong.  This is quite possibly the only solicitation group in League City to repeatedly transit the notoriously-dangerous and congested Five Corners intersection on bicycles without getting themselves killed.  Maybe they really do have the inside track on God, because surely this otherwise-unexplainable survival is evidence that they have been granted His divine protection...?

OR perhaps their success is more a function of the fact that they tend to operate mechanized vehicles in pedestrian crosswalks against the lawful flow of traffic, as they are doing in this photo.  Maybe LCPD ought to crack down on them for that.   

Yeah, you can see that there was an hilarious spoof brewing in there somewhere.  But I've lost my appetite for a full blogging tour de force.  As I'm nursing my indigestion in the wake of the Jornaleros judgment, I guess we'll all wait to see whether League City is foolish enough to appeal this decision.


And foolish enough to waste even more of our taxpayer dollars on this case.  GCDN reported that they have so far spent $424,000 on it. Presumably the cost recoup award to which the day laborers are now entitled would be in addition to that figure. 

Perhaps this is the real reason why League City is now endeavoring to reduce its spending.  Maybe they need to divert some money to their legal bills. 

Sigh...

League City versus the United States of America

GCDN has reported on a recent legal judgment in which the City of League City was found guilty of violating the First Amendment rights of laborers soliciting work within its city limits. 

The Constitution of the United States wasn't written yesterday, and by this time, there are are plenty of established case law and administrative precedents for how to compromise and balance individual vs. collective rights.  But the City of League City arguably doesn't have the best track record when it comes to learning by example, or even by blunt suggestion.  In this case, litigation has succeeded where other methods failed.  Litigation that you, the taxpayer, paid for, of course. 

Sign photo from Wikipedia.  

Houston Chronicle covered the same ruling in some depth in a feature titled "Case proves Constitution works for day laborers, too". 

Unfortunately, both of those stories are behind the paywall, and I can't find where the Associated Press or any other major outlet has picked up on this yet.  You'd think they would - after all, it's not every day that a branch of American government is found guilty of violating the Constitutional rights of its own citizens, for crying out loud.  Huffpost?  NYT?  CNN?  Slate? Anyone??  A few weeks ago, pretty much all of you covered the "if it bleeds, it leads" story of the West, Texas explosion ad nauseum, but the League City implosion which is far more nauseating?  Not sufficiently titillating?? 

If any of you people decide to get off your journalistic duffs and actually investigate this story, you'll probably want to get some live-action feedback from persons directly affected by the Court ruling.  You might want to toddle on down to the area south of the intersection of FM 518 and Texas Avenue, which is one of the very few local places where affected persons can still be found, albeit in reduced numbers. 

Image screengrabbed from Googlemaps ground view. 

The predicament in which the declining state of the mainstream news media (MSM) has placed us grows more dire by the day.  Without question, this is one of our most important local stories of the year, but given the haphazard and decentralized way in which League City residents tend to receive news, you can bet that most of them don't have access to this information.  That snippet at the bottom of my blog where I quote Thomas Jefferson as saying "When the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe"?  Let's me make a profound understatement in saying that I'm worried. 

So the MSM is MIA, but you can read a synopsis of the litigation here.  Basically, what happened is that the Court found the City of League City guilty of interfering with the rights of local laborers who solicit work by presenting themselves at public locations on a daily basis.  This case centered on Constitutional rights and had nothing to do with the immigration status of any of those persons - that's a different legal question.  And the result was not surprising because case law has confirmed time and time again that all persons in this country have Constitutional rights.  

Whether or not anyone likes this provision is not the point.  The point is that the provision exists.

Screengrabbed from this University of Nebraska website (actually a subpage produced by the College of Journalism and Mass Communications... hmmm, maybe they would like to report on this story...). 

In editorializing, I can go further than either the pay-throttled and outright-silent MSM.  Here is my personal prediction regarding the City of League City's relationship with its minority populations: 

Unless something fundamentally changes, this litigation is not going to be where the problem ends. 

This will not be the last time League City steps on its own d*ck in this regard - and you'll please excuse me for using such an impolite metaphor, but I really can't think of any other succinct way to deliver that perspective complete with all the nuances that it warrants.   

The fact that the workers whose Constitutional rights were violated were overwhelmingly if not exclusively Hispanic is not an accident.  I've seen surprising insensitivity toward people of color here.  I've seen this city, as a municipal entity, fail to weigh the perspectives of minority populations.  I haven't blogged about that to date in part because I was trying to approach the issue via the aforesaid blunt suggestion route rather than the public castigation route, but the US District Court has now sort of beat me to the punch line in that regard. 

What I've seen happen here is not racism or discrimination in an ouvert or intentional sense, but is more along the lines of pure ignorance that there might be people living in this city whose skin is not white, people whose personal histories and world views and resulting perceptions might have evolved in a very different manner from those of a stereotypical WASPy suburbanite.

Racially, we as a proverbial bedroom community don't exactly mirror the great state in which we find ourselves, but - surprise! - almost one third of this city self-identifies with some ethnicity other than Caucasian. 

Information distilled to improve readability from this US Census site.   

If you need evidence consistent with my insensitivity assertion above, just take a look at the aftermath-to-date of this present litigation.  Has League City issued any kind of usual-and-customary PR recognizing that maybe it ought to re-examine how it deals with racial minorities?  Is there a "we might need to reflect on how we do business" or "we never intended to offend any particular racial group" thread running through any of this?  Not that I can see.  I can find no such position statement on its website or in recent City-generated email blasts.  And nothing responsive in the news reporting except for this statement which I've reproduced from Chris Gonzalez's piece, a statement which appears to have been issued with respect to the potential for a legal appeal rather than as an acknowledgement of any larger principle of human decency: 

“At this point, the city’s legal counsel is still reviewing the decision and its ramification,” said League City spokeswoman Kristi Wyatt.

Surely League City can muster the depth and sensitivity to do better than that, even if they privately don't believe that they should be so obligated. 


If instead it had been some of these guys sitting on private-property wooden fences near the intersection of Main Street and Texas Avenue, sitting at the edges of public rights of way and beckoning to cars that pass by, there wouldn't likely have been any harassment by the City of League City, would there? 

This group of fence-beckoners tends to be very white, and we automatically recognize that white people have a Constitutional right to deliver their message regardless of what country they happen to be from or whether they're even in the United States legally. 

Not so much for brown people, though.  Not yet, anyway. 

Photo screengrabbed from this Wikipedia JPG. 

Ticketed for illegal sidewalk parking

Oh, you simply cannot imagine the degree to which this fantastic article was sweet music to my blogging ears...

I'm thinking of framing this and putting it up on my wall.
Screengrab from Houston Chronicle.   

The only thing that surprised me in this news piece was the degree to which some of these respondents were indignant because they got ticketed for parking on public property that does not belong to them. 

Ignorant, selfish bastards! (in my personal opinion).  They would rather see a child on a tricycle divert into the street or a mother pushing a carriage struggling to drag her baby through the hell strip simply because they, with their ridiculously-oversized air haulers, happen to be the Absolute Center of the Universe and are therefore entitled to park wherever they damned-well please.

I've said it before, and I've said it again, and I've even said it within the context of current events:  the sidewalk is a publicly-owned pedestrian resource, not a bloody personal staging area for trophy trucks. 

I've even said it with pictures.
From this previous post.

Aaaand I've said it with more pictures.  Google screengrab of an offending residence on Walnut Pointe.  Even if these folks lacked the awareness to buy a house large enough to accomodate their needs, they could have squeezed those four cars foward and largely avoided this. 

If I had all the free time in the world at my disposal, I would have attended the League City police chief candidate meet-and-greet that was held recently, in order to ask the candidates where they stood enforcement-wise on issues like this - to raise awareness if nothing else.  We've heard reports of sidewalk ticketing farther north in Clear Lake (as reported in one of the previous neighborhood newsletters) and now this latest round as reported by Chron in Fort Bend County.  I'd like to see it start happening here in Centerpointe as well, but it would be appropriate to first devote more resources to raising awareness, just in case there are residents who (for whatever reason) genuinely haven't snapped to the inconvenience that they are imposing on their neighbors by doing this. 

To that end, I encourage you to have a chat with your neighbors if you see sidewalk parking happening near you.  On our short stretch of subdivision street extending from the nearest intersection to our cul-de-sac, we have nineteen children.  Nineteen children just in this one little area, who are out running around and playing with each other on a daily basis.  If I see anyone impeding the activities of those children, including via blocking sidewalks, we are going to be having us a neighborly chat.   

A fully-avoidable horror story

How much do we value human life?  How big of a priority to we, as a local society, place upon the safety of our children?  These are the questions I encourage you to contemplate as you read this post.

A precious, irreplaceable little girl was struck and killed by a motor vehicle yesterday morning in Texas City as she waited for her school bus to arrive. 

Christina Lopez, age 11, photo screengrabbed from this Galveston County Daily News article.

The circumstances of her passing included exactly those same contributing factors related to infrastructure about which I have absolutely railed in previous blog posts.

The road was narrow and unimproved, with no sidewalk.

According to published reports, this is the approximate location where she was struck.  No sidewalks, no shoulder, just a narrow strip of blacktop over grade.  Who knows what construction standards were in force when this residential street was installed?  Whenever that occurred, the standards included absolutely no provision for pedestrians. 

Screengrab from Google street view.

The lack of essential infrastructure shown above is not rare and is certainly not limited to Texas City.  In a May 2011 blog post titled "Municipal Shame", I showed a dash cam screengrab of a young boy who d*mned-near fell under the wheels of my own car because his foot slipped off the curb as he was walking.  There was no sidewalk available at this densely-populated location in the City of Webster, and he was doing the best he could to walk in the narrow strip of grass between the street and this adjacent private property - but it almost cost him his life, and here once again is my memorable photo of that event:

See his body tipping toward the roadway as he struggled to maintain his balance. 

I was traveling 35 mph when this was taken - if he had fallen, I would have almost certainly struck and killed him because, at such close range, there would not have been time for evasive action. 

And what I spent considerable time railing against wasn't just that incident, or that boy, or that municipality.  This failure to meet the basic needs of our local pedestrian population is endemic:

I still don't have an answer to who the hell in League City approved the plans for the Sportsplex WITHOUT a sidewalk in front of it to connect with the other sidewalks that already exist in front of Star Toyota and also re-commencing at West Walker. 

How F-ing difficult is it to require sidewalks?!  This is NEW CONSTRUCTION - this should have been a no-brainer.  Which one of our municipal wizards was asleep at the approvals wheel when this particular development design was rubber-stamped? 

But of course, as I've also bitched out loud before, we can't even seem to make our own municipal complex into a walkable area!!  No sidewalks here, either, despite the fact that kids converge on the public swimming pool located within this complex!!

In this other post, called "The Bravest Leaguer", the situation was especially telling: a tiny speck of another precious little girl, wobbling down one of the miserably-unimproved streets in Old Town as she tried valiantly to learn to ride her bike.

Where is the simplest public infrastructure that would be necessary to pay even the most basic level of respect to this child's life?

Where is the sidewalk that this child should rightfully have access to? 

There's nothing.  Most of Old Town is characterized by crumbling pedestrian-unfriendly narrow strips of asphalt with nothing but deep muddy ditches on each side.

And it's not just the children who are denied basic safe pedestrian access to our outdoor areas.  Here's a very telling picture that I took just two days ago, because I was fixin' to blog again about this larger issue even before Christina was killed:

Sunday, September 23, 2012, fairly early in the morning.

Do you see that car parked at the terminus of Centerpointe Drive?

Do you ever wonder why cars are frequently parked in this location at the very back of our subdivision, especially in the mornings?

I'll tell you why cars are frequently parked there:  it's because the people driving them have no basic access to safe public infrastructure that includes sidewalks. 

Wrap your head around this, now:  Those people come from other neighborhoods so that they can avail themselves of our one isolated sidewalk segment which I nicknamed Centerpointe's "Bridge to Nowhere". 

If you pay careful attention to what's actually going on, you'll frequently see people stop here so that they can walk, jog, and/or exercise their dogs.  This one-mile segment (two miles if you do the loop) seems to be one of the few good accessible sidewalk opportunities for some League City-ers.

How does that grab you?!  How do you feel about your wider society when you contemplate the fact that some of those people who park at the end of Centerpointe Drive are doing that because that's all they've got.  That's the best they can achieve for themselves in the way of obtaining a simple, safe walk outdoors. 

A week and a half ago, military personnel apparently asleep at the wheel failed to stop a Taliban attack that cost American taxpayers $200 million.  We as a country effectively p*ss away that kind of money in the blink of an eye, and yet we can never seem to find the kind of funds that would provide the most basic public infrastructure - simple sidewalks - for our little children and adults.  It *disgusts* me. 

Those of you who are reading this who hold political positions:  Please take note of what I'm saying and the importance of it, because the decisions you make today could very well indirectly factor into the death of a child tomorrow, unless those decisions are well made.  This is not a joke or a hypothetical scenario.  Galveston County residents are needlessly put at risk of their lives for lack of basic infrastructure such as sidewalks in residential areas.  They die because, without sidewalks, they have to share the road with motor vehicles and, in a conflict for space, the motor vehicles always win.  It's not right. 

My heart goes out to the Lopez family for their incalculable loss.  I'm the mother of a daughter just a few years older than Christina was.  My daughter, too, takes a school bus each day.  My daughter has access to sidewalks now that we live in Centerpointe, a sidewalk available for her and the other subdivision children as they wait for their bus, but that was not at all the case when we lived in Old Town League City.  When we lived in Old Town, she waited on the open unprotected street pavement just as Christina did yesterday.  What happened to Christina yesterday is not right.  For the sake of our people, I hope we can each contribute something to fixing those inexcusable underlying infrastructure conditions that so obviously contributed to her unthinkable death. 

Screengrab from this post in which I talked about the phenomenally high number of people killed in our area in traffic events.  The map shows an excerpt from the ITO database of traffic fatalities, 2001-2009.  The blue ones are pedestrians.