42 THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • Fall 2018 TheCoastalBend.com lowed by City zoning and which would require another 75% vote by homeowners to change restrictions—but when you consider both La Palmera and Lamar Park Center equally as “shopping malls,” then the freedom to lie about a potential shopping mall is uninhibited. They say that Jeff Blackard is in talks with Tex- as A&M Corpus Christi to turn Barisi into a student village, complete with loud rock concerts, sporting events, and presumably hoards of drunken college stu- dents crawling into backyards and menacing terrified homeowners. They also imply that student apartment buildings—like those overlooking their backyards now on the north side of Pharaoh Valley, will soar fifty feet above existing homes, providing Islanders the high perch they need to spy on your wife making meatloaf, while chucking their beer bottles into your swim spa. Of course, the propagandists divert from the real- ity that Blackard Global has specifically committed to a 100-foot greenbelt between adjacent properties and new structures, and that those buildings closest to the greenbelt will rise no more than two stories (like the house next door, 20 feet away), followed by structures that may rise as high as four stories. The sightline from any backyard of an existing adjacent home would in- clude nothing taller than two stories, 100 feet away. Inevitably, the opposition to Barisi Village is bound to lose. It will either end in state appeals court next year, or it will end at the Texas Supreme Court following that. The bill that allowed Pharaoh Valley homeowners to vote on their own fate was passed unanimously by the state legislature, and the Supreme Court, an elected body, is not likely to blatantly defy the will of the people. Furthermore, the opposition is heavily out-lawyered—they have been soundly defeated in federal and state court, and even if they employed top-notch attorneys, again, the facts are not on their side nor is the common-sense filter of what is right and wrong. Without a determined and persistent developer, however, it would have been over years ago, and the hope that came with a potential, game-changing step forward in the history of the Coastal Bend would have been killed in the crib like so many before Barisi Vil- lage. The cabal of Ocean Drive Conspirators would have gotten away with it once again—that no one from out of town gets to make a dime here without paying tribute to the city’s birthright powerbrokers. Jeff Blackard has made an adopted family in Pha- raoh Valley. They appreciate his not giving up on them. They appreciate what he wants to do to improve their neighborhood, which has fallen so far into decay, and they appreciate his concern over their property value and what those good homeowners will be able to pass on to their kids and grandkids. And guess what? They don’t mind if he makes a few bucks in the process. That’s called freedom. That’s called fair, American capitalism, and the right of prop- erty owners to organize for the good of their neighbor- hood is as American as it gets.