If you drive by the corner of University Avenue and 17th Street, you will now see the new development there proudly boasting the arrival of Five Below this summer. That’s right: The junky discount store, which we already have in Butler Plaza, will open a new location and occupy the space that formerly housed one of the most iconic college sports bars in the country, The Swamp Restaurant. Midtown is over.    

The developers hoodwinked the public into believing there would be a similar trendy restaurant occupying the ground floor. Why is the City Commission not holding developers accountable to deliver on their promises?

The University Avenue area around the campus once had some of the most unique and vibrant businesses in the city. These places can never exist there today under the current rule of the rapacious developers and their allies on the commission. The developers are demanding exorbitant rents and are unwilling to compromise for the sake of any local culture.

Generic chain stores that can be found anywhere, or in Butler Plaza already.  At some point the public needs to wake up and realize that either the city doesn’t care enough about what the citizens want, or they are complicit themselves in this fleecing of our city.

Readers comment on East Gainesville health care, the Jan. 6 committee and more

Readers comment on the Greyhound station, proposed apartments and more

Readers offer their opinions on housing issues in Gainesville

What is the matter with people? Why have people gotten so vicious? For years and years, it was gays and lesbians who were picked on, bullied, arrested and fired from their jobs. They were an ostracized minority. Now it is transgender people who are being ostracized, except that it is much worse for them. 

Gays and lesbians could hide simply by “staying in the closet,” hiding and not admitting who they were. Transgender individuals do not have that luxury and they are being treated viciously. Their right to be who they are is nobody’s business but their own, but it is being take away by obscene laws passed by conservative governments everywhere. 

Not only taking away their rights to be who they are, but taking away their necessary health care, making it a felony to receive care. Can you imagine: a felony to receive necessary health care? 

Gay people were not going away and were eventually accepted by society (still in process). Transgender individuals are not going anywhere either and yes, they will eventually be accepted by society. But how long will that take and how much pain must they endure to achieve that acceptance? 

While I do compost at the Haile Farmers Market (at Two Farms, One Dream). "no-waste stock” is comprised of tops of celery, stems of herbs, outside leaves of cabbage, carrot tops, tops of scallions or leeks, broccoli stalks and ends of asparagus, tops of fennel and any other vegetables you have in your kitchen. 

Put the veggies in a slow cooker and add a bit of salt. Cover it with water and cook for 5-6 hours, then drain the veggies and put them in your compost container. Enjoy the stock by cooking rice or barley, or make a vegetable soup.

The folks who want more laws are wrong. Laws are useless for controlling those who are lawless. Eleven kids die every day texting while driving. We don’t ban phones, ban cars, nor raise the age limit to purchase a phone. 

Every week kids die in cities where guns are outlawed. Chicago has strict gun laws, and we grow numb to the weekly shootings, which law enforcement can’t stop.   

Rhetoric gets nowhere. Until the real issue of mental illness, the actual value of all human life, and correcting the poisoning of hearts and minds with degrading morals, nothing will change. 

Only serious people should speak. Those using this topic for political gain lose all credibility as many in the left currently are doing. Shameful.

I was raised around guns and remember, as a child, a policeman stopping at our house and telling my father that he was right to teach me how to be a responsible gun owner.  I belonged to the National Rifle Association when it seemed to be about gun safety. 

The Second Amendment was passed in 1781 when the state-of-the-art gun was a single-shot musket. Good grief, how could a kid in Texas buy an assault weapon without any training? Civilization here is still just a dream that some of us have. 

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