In response to your recent guest columnist regarding the unmitigated growth in Ballard: the Fauntleroy community understands your angst and grieves with you the loss of your community.

The Fauntleroy community is under the same attack as the Ballard community. Existing zoning has allowed massive building projects involving teardowns of existing single-family homes and low-lying duplexes into mammoth triplexes and condo's. Concurrently, single- family homes are being purchased by builders and "remodeled" into mega-homes built lot line to lot line. Long time views are being obliterated unnecessarily. Construction is sub-standard and shoddy. Parking in the streets has exploded to unmanageable levels as existing codes allow parking garages to be built in such a way as they are not used secondary to the impossible navigation of accessing the garages.

The quiet, beautiful community of Fauntleroy is under attack by quick profit developers and at the mercy of an unresponsive and uncaring city government. Come visit the two-block corridor along 45th Avenue Southwest and Director Street for an example of this unrelieved blight.

Builders have hired "expeditors" whose sole function is to navigate the City of Seattle's permitting process. These expeditors know how to work the system in a speedy and unscrupulous manner. This has been allowed and seemingly encouraged by Mayor Greg Nickels. I thought, in voting for Mayor Nickels that I was voting for someone who was vested in neighborhoods as his campaigning message clearly indicated. His office and the Department of Planning and Development have been completely unresponsive to the letters and calls seeking help in preserving the good qualities of the Fauntleroy community.

Citizens of the City of Seattle must ask themselves what they will do when their neighborhood is targeted next.

Kim Petram

Fauntleroy