An open letter to the Seattle City Council:

I'm Audrey Turpaud and my husband is Robert Turpaud. We have a little boy who is 5-years old in December and a little girl who is 3-years old in December. Our family moved from Lake City to High Point Neighborhood (last) January.

We moved to High Point because we really like the beautiful nature view in this neighborhood. Especially when we knew all houses here are built green, energy efficient and environmentally friendly. The management also tried to make sure we don't destroy our precious nature very much.

But even before we moved to this neighborhood, we found this place is actually in the middle of nowhere. There are two Safeway's in West Seattle. One is in Westwood Village, another in Alaska Junction. Both are too far for those seniors and moms with children to walk. There is Thriftway on California Street. It's also far enough to drive a car and what's more, all things there are very expensive. We call it Expensiveway.

We don't think people living in these government subsidized houses can afford it. In brief, there are no grocery stores, no supermarkets, no affordable healthy restaurants, no post office, no banks, etc, within walkable distance. Everywhere we go, we have to drive the car and pollute the air. That's really against the mission of protecting our environment. After we moved here, we found this really inconvenient and we have to drive our car more than ever.

There is a piece of empty land in this neighborhood. That really gives us some hope that the property management will build a compact shopping center so that we don't have to drive around. But so far, it seems that empty land will be empty forever.

We are still waiting and hoping that piece of empty land can make our life easier and can minimize our driving in this neighborhood. To stop global warming we must start today and from our High Point neighborhood.

Audrey Turpaud

High Point