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Opening Arguments

Little pink houses

Officials in West Lafayette are missing a wonderful opportunity to improve the lives of city residents. Seems a landlord was informed that his rental property was "in need of aesthetic improvements." In response to that helpful reminder, city inspectors contend, he went and painted the house pink. Some in the neighborhood are outraged (not the tenants, who are college students and think it's kind of cool to tell people, "Just come to the pink house") but the city says it can't do anything:

Rick Walker, code enforcement supervisor and head of the Neighborhood Resource Team, said there aren't any city codes forbidding a particular shade of house.

A longtime neighbor who was upset at the color ("It's the worst I've ever seen on a home") wrote a letter to the neighborhood association, which was posted on the association's Web site as a way "to persuade the property owners to change the color." But some people can never be persuaded to do the right thing. That's why we need laws! What in the world were city officials thinking, blathering on about "aesthetic" improvements when they didn't even have a bad-color ban in the city code? Why, some people don't even think a house's color is anybody elses's business. Can you imagine them toeing the approved-color program without the threat of serious legal action?

What that neighborhood needs to do is go historic on that landlord -- nothing like reverence for the way people used to live to get all those rotten, selfish rneighborhood esidents to get with the program. Here in Fort Wayne, there's no end of ways the city can dismantle that silly "a persnon's home is his castle" nonsense (speaking of the way people used to live). As the West Central Neighborhood Association helpfully reminds its members:

Comments

Bob G.
Tue, 10/27/2009 - 8:42am

Leo:
I'm not going to ask, but I'd bet even money that the "other subjects" could be considered to be of the 2-legged variety...
(just a wild guess, mind you...I realize how this city likes to shake)

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