The Chapel Hill News, as it happens, has a front-row seat to the Greenbridge development; its towers are going up -- and up and up -- directly outside our front windows.

Every day we watch the enormous cranes swing slowly back and forth and the orange-vested workers clamber over the girders as they erect the project's skeleton. Day by day, the project's two massive buildings inch ever higher.

From where we sit, Greenbridge is a good project in the wrong place. It's way too big for the neighborhood, which is otherwise populated by the small houses of the Northside neighborhood and by small businesses in humble buildings no more than two stories tall. Greenbridge already dwarfs everything around it, and it appears to be only about a third of the way toward its planned 10 stories.

Along with the buildings themselves, in recent weeks an increasingly vocal opposition has been growing.

Some of those voices have been strong but measured. Others -- some in the form of graffiti -- have been bluntly militant, calling the project and its future residents "racist" and calling for it to be burned to the ground.

There certainly are legitimate issues surrounding Greenbridge, its location and its potential impact on the surrounding neighborhood.

But, with the buildings well under construction, it's a little late to be heading for the battlements. Where was all this outrage two years ago, when the Chapel Hill Town Council heard barely a peep of opposition before approving Greenbridge by a 9-0 vote? At the public hearing in January 2007, no more than two or three of the nearly 20 speakers opposed the project.

Now that it's real, people are raising their hands and crying, "Whoa!" The same thing happened with the East 54 project near Meadowmont. When it was a proposal being considered, the developer and Town Council heard nary a complaint. Now that we can see it, we hear expressions of dismay.

Perhaps people didn't speak up then because they felt their voices wouldn't matter. Perhaps they weren't able to fully visualize the projects while the buildings were just theoretical; it's difficult to truly gauge a proposal's impact until it is actually there, in steel and cement, casting a shadow and blocking the view.

But that's what we have to do if we don't want to keep finding ourselves surprised at what has arisen while we weren't paying attention. Plans that are now just proposals on paper and Powerpoint presentations will eventually come to be brick and asphalt. And by then, it'll be too late.

So it's wise to get in the game while you can still make a difference. There are a number of important projects in the planning stages now, not the least of which is Carolina North, the scale of which will make Greenbridge look puny by comparison.

Decisions, it is said, are made by those who show up. It so happens that there's a chance to show up today -- a public meeting is set for 4 to 6 p.m. at the Homestead Community Center to explore Carolina North's potential effect on traffic. Years from now, when you're stuck in a line of cars on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, you may wish you'd gone.