The best thing the neighborhood can do for Markham Hill is to stand together and invoke the Golden Rule in front of the council.
Who among the aldermen would want done unto them anything like what this bomb of a development will mean in shattering the middle of this neighborhood? An explosion is essentially what will happen as
massive commercial development brings with it roads, traffic, noise, masses of people, multiple activities, and hundreds of homes.

With the development’s plans, Sang on the north will be connected with Sang on the south of Markham and eventually cut on down to MLK, turning the entire hilltop's streets into busy thoroughfares from
Wedington to MLK. To think otherwise is the real fantasy here, not the homeowners’ efforts to say, “No!” and saying it loud and clear now before it happens. To not fight to save the essential heart of the neighborhood will be to allow the hill to be cut into "multiple use" pieces, a total reversal to the single family kind of neighborhood there now. Allowing Archer to build Pratt Place Inn was NOT an invitation to commercialize a residential neighborhood. It was a reluctantly given kind nod to a neighbor with decades of family connection to the land.

Keep in mind that all this change is for the benefit of one private investment company to profit at the expense of the surrounding
residents, who’ve already invested in their homes and property. What people need to be asking the city council is to not let this one business profit from that which the many have spent their money and time and hearts creating. The many will be subsidizing this one company with a loss to their quality of life, their property value, and their healthy surroundings, ironically the “location/location/location” that has made the area so appealing to the developers in the first place. The council needs to be held accountable for considering doing this to one of the most established neighborhoods in town—they need to defend such a notion.

The neighborhood had to make a deal when the first PZD was granted to Archer. Yes, the developers can build houses under that PZD “by right,” but that original PZD does not allow for a little commercial city with offices, stores, a hotel, 24 cabins, multiple activity buildings, parking lots, etc. etc. The developers gambled, when they bought the land and inn, that they could get the existing zone changed, probably banking on tempting the city with an increased tax base (not a guarantee as Archer proved). The job of the neighborhood is to say that a deal is a deal, and this zone change would mean the destruction of something more valuable. It will destroy the trust citizens have in their city’s commitment to protect established neighborhoods and destroy the security citizens must place in city planning so they, as property investors, can also plan and spend based on the value and integrity of of their properties. The neighborhood needs to realize that just because the developers bought this property, its neighbors in no way owe these new owners any or all means to make it a business success at great cost to themselves. Destruction is not progress, it’s just destruction.

The oldest trick in the book in struggles like this is to drag out the old mantras about how land owners should be able to do with their land as they wish. But that’s not really the case if we are all going to live in a town that purports to have zones that have been agreed on by the citizens through a systematic process in their local government and under which people have staked their own decisions. People defending their neighborhoods and homes are often belittled and called NIMBYS and made to feel selfish and against everything. The opposite is the actual truth—people are for quality of life, for trust in their government, for a clean healthy environment, for sticking by agreements, for their community, for having some backbone, and only against being run over.

Lisa is giving this issue her all. At the very least, the very tiny minimum least that the entire neighborhood should and can do is to join her and not give in or give up, but dig in and stand up. Or, as the old saying goes, we get what we deserve.

Fran B. Free