The Loyal Heights Community Council was recently given official status as a neighborhood group. It looked substantial last Tuesday night, when 26 people got together to talk about what are and should be neighborhood concerns.

The group officers were well planned, not only with coffee and easels, but statistics about the neighborhood itself, and a stab at the tricky business of defining where, geographically, Loyal Heights exists.

While demographics and maps make for interesting reading, the real weight of the Loyal Heights Community Council is in neighbors taking the time to meet. A community working together has a better shot - orders of magnitude better - at accomplishing its goals than does the lone civic hero, who can easily be discounted as a self-aggrandizing blowhard with too much time on his hands.

That's not to say the Loyal Heights crowd planned anything heroic. There was talk about a number of issues, and a good deal of talk about the meta-issue of defining "issue". But the sum of the discussions builds a community's face. And it's a face whose frown gets noticed - especially by elected leaders - even in a crowd.

According to the council, over 8000 people live in Loyal Heights, more than half of them married. 12 percent of these people are 65 or older, and 17 percent 18 or younger. Of the 3800 housing units, two thirds are occupied by their owners.

Loyal Height's boundaries, again according to the council, are between NW 85th Street and NW 65th Street to the north and south, and 15th Avenue NW and 28th Avenue NW to the east and west. Admittedly, it is a fluid boundary, subject to the perception of each neighborhood, and the officers of the council said no one would be turned away.

The beginnings of the community group were in conflict. Conflict is a traditional starting fluid for identities - evidence the groups who grew out of the rubble of the old Ballard Bowl - and for Loyal Heights' conflicts were over the possible construction of a gas station along 15th Avenue NW by a grocery store, and the Loyal Heights Playfield, slated for controversial changes.

As the community council grows, its docket will bulge with other issues. Traffic calming strategies, vagrancy at Salmon Bay Park and crime were just three of several mentioned on Tuesday night. The council's advocacy, opposition or indifference to these issues will shape the community. And there's no point in hoping for a return of the status quo. The council will contribute or, if neighbors choose instead to slumber, Safeway, the Seattle Parks Department and other interests will do the shaping themselves.

Elected leaders play their part to be sure, in contributing to the neighborhood. But that contribution is a broad, general policy. To carry out that policy, and where vacuums exist make their own policy, sit municipal bureaucracies and private companies, energetic individuals, and other interest groups. Loyal Heights is beginning to make its neighborhood interests known. Good for them.