 Sorry, but the gentrification issues mean that I have to go meet with the Barra-Prasel District in about 20 minutes because our neighborhood has suddenly been raised in value and I fear that it is a virtual inflation, much as we saw in the economy in 2006 and 2007, right before the economic crash where we decided that something was worth more because it was convenient to them to say that it was worth more. There's something different about San Antonio's downtown compared to other major urban centers. There's something general, friendly, softer, more welcoming. For generations we've been called a big city with a heart of a small town, but if certain developers and planners have their way that will change. The very fabric of our downtown's residential safety cushion will be erased and undone and redone to model after other cities to become in short, less San Antonio and more Pittsburgh, Chicago, Phoenix, Detroit, wherever the developers are coming from. For more than a century our downtown businesses have been surrounded by a residential safety cushion that brings stability, safety, warmth, color, longevity to our city's heart. Neighborhoods like Tobin Hill, Monteviste, Beacon Hill, Dignavid Hill, and King William have always provided strength and uniqueness to our fiber. They have traditionally been people with a wide variety of residents, economically, ethnically, professionally, but people who by and large have felt a commitment to benefit the city. I live in that gentle safety cushion. I have lived in that gentle safety cushion now for more than 20 years all the time, but I've been back in San Antonio having grown up on the west side and having lived for a brief period of time before I left off to college also in that safety cushion. I call it a safety cushion because I think that it is important to keeping San Antonio the kind of city that we love. I live next door to a family who's been there for three generations who advised me of the fact that they watched on TV the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in my backyard. Yet within a block of my house, I developed a business trip and at 5 p.m. it entities out into a dangerous nothingness. Yet one block in, we walk the dog, we let the kids play in the front yard, we feel invested enough to think about permanence. I have not been in this neighborhood long. I came back to San Antonio in 1994 and bought a house in Montelista right before the prices went up. A year after we bought the house, we received our tax appraisal and the appraisal of the house had gone up like $100,000. I didn't do anything to make the house better. We didn't even have all our property on the rocks. But it was considered all of a sudden to be a very valuable place because people said it was going to be the next King William. That's what they're now seeing. I won't give you a blow-by-blow history of what happened among the DC problem. Let me say that the taxes went up so high that it threatened the ability of people to retire there. It became a convenient place for very mobile yuppies moving in professionally. We're going to be here for two years or three years, so I didn't need a higher price because that's the way this virtual inflation goes, this artificial inflation goes, and then they move on to some other city. We had hoped to stay there forever. It didn't work out. During one period suddenly, when everybody realized what was happening in our neighborhood, on the block we lived on, which had a few businesses, a few professional offices, and then about nine or ten residences on our block. Within 18 months, all the residents on the block, except one, had moved. We had seen 17 years of rising taxes and finally got to the point where it was impossible to deal with it. So we made a decision for our family to move out of our forever home to another home, and we realized that my family had somebody in the 90s and somebody in early elementary school and everything in between. We moved 12 blocks west, we moved across the tracks into Beacon Hill, a very nice neighborhood, if I can quote Abby Kittrell, who, when she tells people she looks in a different place, they say, ah, you really know what to do. She says, no, I have a $100,000 quest. It's a nice neighborhood for a lot of reasons, and one of those reasons is there's economic diversity, there's age diversity, there's professional diversity. It's a really wonderful neighborhood, but late last year we saw something happen, and all of a sudden there were all these rezoning requests like within five or six weeks, and as we began to see people descend almost like vultures on the neighborhood, pointing at my house, and I was like, well maybe that would be a good offer. We began to feel like we were at the target of this onslaught, this development tsunami as I call it, an unraveling of the community. They used the excuse that they were trying to make it a arts community. I am an artist, I am a writer, I am the city's first poet laureate, but I'm also a resident, and a mother, and a daughter of a senior, very senior citizen, and a person who cares about my neighborhood. We've been descended upon, and I began to ask about these all of a sudden inflations in our tax values that are not based on anything except somebody's closed door session that sent to a bunch of young investors go west, young men go west, and they did, they came, and the word is out, but this is the place to invest. All of a sudden this street that I live on, it goes for 17 blocks of front porch houses, some Victorian, some post-Victorian, some American, some just squarish, some apartment building is on the corner. All of a sudden they're talking about a tiny lot, putting in three houses sideways, like apartment complexes, and selling it at 200,000 dollars each. I could go on, I'm not going to, because I have to make the very appraisal, because you have to go on to many more important things, and I'm going to appreciate the comments that have been given here. I've got to warn us when we start thinking about 15%, when the values go up by 15%, it's not always to the values that go up by 15%, it's the piece of paper that says the values have gone up by 15%, and that piece of paper can be part of an alliance of business interests who have decided that this is the way they're going to make their money, will have their own view for what will happen to the future of that area, or they're just to make their money and move out. I'm glad that Hemisphere was mentioned, because Hemisphere introduced to many of us an urban renewal, which then became very important, because we began to think that this urban renewal, which is what was happening, people in the houses and the historicity were being removed. I just feel that gentrification is such a major issue that it is probably the next civil rights, major civil rights issue of this nation. The displacement of the individual homeowner by the large alliances of investors and business interests who are interested, not in permanence, not in the future, but in their own profit, after which they're free to move on. I have to tell you, I have testified in front of the Zoning Commission, and it was amazing to watch the reaction of the council of people who the minute someone came to the front, said they were from a business, got full attention. But the minute they said they were a resident, they zoned out. As if residents don't count. As if that safety cushion, which makes our city a good place to live, all of a sudden loses importance, loses status, loses power. I was one of the people testifying in the minute I said resident, I could see them going back to checking their notes and reading their email and whatever. And the only thing that stayed with them after my entire testimony was when one of the people who again voted to go ahead and breeze on anyway, there's no problem. She said, I feel sorry for that, that mom who had a child who talked about her child. That was me. She was talking about, but that's all that it counted for. Just a mom, just a resident, just somebody, the child. What is the future of our city? We're here to hope that there's a different kind of voice and the voice that doesn't require $75 to get or $90 to get into the event in order to make a difference on the future of our city. Thank you for your attention.