Page One
Whose turf are they protecting?
Editor:
By increasing density who is denying Ms. Benson or any other homeowner of their yard space and fruit trees? (Homeowners Should Protect Their Land, March 15, 2002).
Homeowners want to protect their land? Build a fence.
Too many homeowners are under mistaken impression that not only do they have the right to determine what takes place on their own property but that they have the right to determine what can take place on their neighbors' property as well!
If they don't like it, they feel, well then it should not be allowed to be built. Sorry folks, in this country we don't have a system where one property owner or even a group of property owners (e.g., a neighborhood association) gets to determine what goes on in the surrounding neighborhood. Shock of shocks! You mean the homeowners (or even renters) are not sovereign?
Remember, we live in a representative democracy. Homeowners and the rest of us delegate our authority to our elected representatives to make decisions as to what can be undertaken or built elsewhere in the neighborhood. We, as individual or organized homeowners don't have the right to determine what can and cannot be built next door, short of a citizen's initiative. So, don't like what you're seeing? Recall your elected representatives.
Circulate a ballot imitative. Short of that? Build a fence.
Felix Richardson
Berkeley
