Blight Savers' Manifesto

Friends, Citizens, Fellow Houstonians! We are under SIEGE! The Powers That Be would have us cast our votes our hopes and our lots at large with “redevelopment.” With REVITALIZATION! For flower-bedded medians and tidy concrete curbs and stadiums no end. The ghost of Eleanor Tinsley haunts the city’s halls, moaning …Beautify… Beeyoooootify…’ as the Jordie Tollets and the Randall Davises and the Dawn Shumways and the Sports Authorities and the Lee Browns toss fistfuls of paper money in her wake.

DO NOT BE FOOLED!!! Their target is “blight.” To be removed, to be renewed, to be thwarted at every turn. To be ERADICATED like a mouse nesting harmlessly in the civic stove. It is not enough for the ERADICATORS OF BLIGHT that the mouse remains quiet and out of the way, traveling forth only under cover of dark to the dis-ease of no-one. No, they must ERADICATE the mouse of blight, and THE MOUSE IS US!

Do you make less than $40,000 dollars a year? Do you have a car that doesn’t work every day? Is your house not freshly painted? Do you have crabgrass and not care? Or no yard at all? Do your dogs bite? Is your fence unmended? Your home un-re-modeled?

If so, THE MOUSE IS YOU!

And when The Powers That Be ERADICATE blight (our happy nest), where will we go to make way for the central a/c (air-conditioning) and recycling bins of advancing “revitalization”? We were long ago chased out of Montrose, and then chased out of the Heights. We have been chased out of the west end and chased out of downtown. Now we exist in quiet scattered pockets on the eastside and elsewhere, but even here, amid the industry trucks and the smell of treated sewage, we are threatened again with real estate dollars and speculating yuppies. But here we will make our stand.

Blight Savers is a grassroots guerrilla coalition of residents, activists and delinquents dedicated to preserving Houston’s dwindling stock of urban, residential, industrial and visual blight in the face of increasing pressures exerted by the urban “renewal” and “redevelopment” programs of fat-cat developers and their gentrifying followers, tight-sphinctered “neighborhood” associations and do-gooding “beautification” organizations.

We believe:

That regular trash pickup is overrated.

That some cars are happier on blocks and should be allowed to live out their days there in peace.

That “blight” is aesthetically superior to redevelopment.

That pet deposits are unconstitutional.

That chain-store merchants are inherently evil.

That “blight” is nothing but a code word for “low-income housing” and as such should never be ERADICATED!

That second-hand sofas are true and proper porch furniture, and that swings are for sissies.

That landscaping is NOT MANDATORY!