Some people should realize they don’t control things they don’t own.
Clay Cooley and I go way back. Not really. I met him once at a friend’s house a long time ago, before he was anyone well known in Dallas.
For all I know, I could be misremembering it and it wasn’t even him.
That’s not the point anyway.
I saw an article in the Dallas Morning News about a week ago, caterwauling about how he’s about to tear down the Mushroom House, along with a couple of other houses. Apparently he’s assembled several properties and plans to combine them into one and build a new house. To do that, you have to tear down what’s there.
The Mushroom House looked like an eyesore to me, but you know how these people are.
It’s always hard for me to get my head around the outrage. He bought the properties. Recently. On the open market.
Anyone else could have bought them too.
The people who didn’t want them torn down, the people who wanted to “protect” them, could have written a check and owned them.
They didn’t.
Instead, they want to control what happens to the property without putting up any money. They want to run to city hall or the courthouse and tell someone else what they’re allowed to do with something they paid for.
Honestly, screw that.
I get the emotional argument a little bit. People get attached to buildings. Fine. But the basic deal used to be simple. If you owned it, you could do what you wanted with it. That was the trade. You took the risk, you wrote the checks, and you lived with the outcome.
So you get architectural writers and preservation types wringing their hands, acting like this is some great injustice. I’m not sure what they’re going to do when the paper finally goes out of business, but hopefully it involves leaving other people alone or realizing that nobody cares as much as they think.
It won’t. But I guess we can hope.
Although hoping for that probably has about the same odds as hoping the Cowboys win the big one.
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