Sometimes you can’t see the city for the houses.

Does that sound like gibberish?

Not really. It’s an update to the old school idiom, “you can’t see the forest for the trees.”

It means you can’t see the big picture because you’re focused on details.

And perhaps there is no time that it is as true as when we buy a house.

In my case, it was when we bought our house on Pine Street in 1993.

We were instantly smitten when we pulled up to the curb and continued to be so when we stepped through the door.

Even though it was in the dead of winter and we drove by numerous times after making an offer, we never noticed that the two large Modesto ash trees on the Raylow Avenue side of the house were almost entirely choked with mistletoe.

Two months after moving in and after two weekends of work, we ended using a U-Haul truck that we rented to help our daughter move to make two trips to the Lovelace Transfer Station transporting nothing but mistletoe and parts of branches.

It was right in front of us and we didn’t see it.

The same failure to get the big picture apparently is why there are more than a few people near Pillsbury Road and Woodward Avenue who feel betrayed the city is willing to “allow” a gas station and convenience store to be built on a vacant parcel zoned to accommodate such commercial uses near their homes.

The land has been zoned for such uses for years just like the land where their homes are was zoned for residential long before a single home was built.

Debate all you want whether it is bad planning, but it never was an issue when people bought because they assumed it would be residential as well or would never be developed.

You might point out they never thought about the vacant land because they were either too focused on buying their home or that they shouldn’t be expected to be thorough in getting a good grasp of what their part of Manteca was designed for in terms of development before signing a 30-year mortgage.

It’s in the same league as buyers of a new home 20 years ago in the nearby Tesoro neighborhood that were displeased to find out beyond the sound wall that was in their backyard, the four-lane Atherton Drive, a landscaped area and other sound wall was a railroad track.

It was a railroad line that has 30 to 40 trains daily traveling it from the first day they moved into the house.

They ended up repeatedly demanding the city do something about the train.

Again, if they weren’t so focused on buying the house they might have been able to see the bigger picture of what existed near their future neighborhood.

Drive down South Main to the southwest corner of where it intersects with Raymus Parkway.

There you will see a large parcel for sale that backs up to a new neighborhood KB Homes is building.

It is zoned neighborhood commercial just like the parcel on Pillsbury and Woodward.

Any bets when the time comes years from now, when a proposal is submitted to actually develop commercial there as allowed by the zoning that those in the neighborhood will be demanding the city stop it from happening?

Over the years some of the buyers of new homes that backed up to working farms — mostly almond orchards— were upset that farming actually was taking place and it wasn’t an idyllic nature preserve.

Almost to the last person complaining, the realization that a working farm was behind them came up during the harvest reason.

They were irked by the noise and the dust.

And when work took place after dark, they had a cow.

Forget the fact when you close escrow on a house in Manteca, the document you sign with the largest type by far is a brief and concise statement that Manteca is a right to farm community and that acceptable agricultural practices are allowed.

Unless the neighbors of the Pillsbury-Woodward project are willing to pool all of their resources and make the property owner an offer to sell that they can’t refuse, they’d be better off directing their energies into a strategy that gets the best possible realistic outcome.

They should push to make sure the gas station/convenience store is located as far away from homes as possible, operating hours are limited, robust sound-buffering is put in place along sound walls as the new Atherton Drive bowling alley/family entertainment center and banquet hall is doing with Italian cypress, and assuring light pollution is addressed.

The commercial zoning is part of the forest and the houses the trees in the overall picture called Manteca.