Thousands enjoy closed roads during Houston's Pilot Program. Jayme Fraser, Chron.com
A rousing success story then, huge throngs of people out in the elements taking advantage of a myriad of (taxpayer funded) entertainment options for four hours on a Sunday. And then you read the story itself....
Despite intermittent rain in the first two hours of the event, police, who were guiding traffic away from the street, reported at 1 p.m. that they had counted 2,000 people at the event so far.
That's two thousand attendees, out of approximately 6.3 Million residents in the Houston Metro Region. That's .03% of the population if you're keeping score. For this tiny slice of the pie there were enormous resources dedicated to traffic control, entertainment and public safety. While the incurious secretarial journalist at the Chronicle obviously didn't think to ask, I would be the taxpayer expenditures for this failure of a program must have reached five figures. This in a time when Houston is struggling to find enough dollars in the budget to keep all of the fire-engines and ambulances on the street.
The problem with ChronBlog, and this event, is that it's not really about growing neighborhoods or making Houston a better place, it's really about promoting an agenda set by the unproductive class. That group of people desperately wishes that Houston was more like Portland with it's coupling of high rents and impossible access keeping the poor and unenlightened out of the city core. As BlogHouston asked: Do we really want a transit system and public policy whose main goal seems to be creating play-things for the affluent?
That's the big concern, that what we're getting in Houston isn't something to help the poor and lower-middle class improve their station but rather to move them out of the way for other chosen groups. We're hiding it behind the façade of health and quality of life when the truth appears to be much less wholesome.
The next event will close down a busy section of Westheimer, one of the vital traffic conduits inside the Loop. I'm sure the weather will be nicer, and 'thousands' of people will attend. I just can't help but wonder how many of them will be poor families? After all, these programs weren't designed for them.
