Josh Levin’s article on Tenleytown (“Wisconsin Badgers,” 7/4) captures the good side of living in the neighborhood, but then dismisses it to get to his real point: The neighborhood would be better off if we would just get some big apartment buildings. Then, presumably, we would have sufficient residents to support all the upscale retail that Levin believes the community is begging for.

Go off of Wisconsin Avenue and Tenleytown is a residential neighborhood—a community where the neighbors speak to each other when they pass on the streets, kids play on the sidewalks, and seniors walk to the stores. As Beth Kravetz said in the article, it’s really nice to live here. While many of us realize that the neighborhood is going to change over time, as new developments come and go, we want to ensure that the qualities that make this a great neighborhood to live in aren’t lost.

I don’t buy into Levin’s opinion that Tenleytowners should travel down to Cleveland Park to see how it’s done. Take off the rose-colored glasses and it sure looks tougher to balance the residential and retail relationship in Cleveland Park than Levin makes it sound—witness the article, just two months ago, that the Washington City Paper ran about the residential parking space just off the Cleveland Park commercial strip on sale for $25,000 (Parallel Universe, “The $25,000 Rectangle” 5/9).

Asking developers to stick to established zoning regulations, working to protect our neighborhood from cut-through traffic, and trying to keep our neighborhood streets from becoming a parking nightmare—many of us in the Tenleytown and American University Park neighborhoods think these are good things. What’s wrong with wanting to preserve some of the qualities that make this community a great place to live?

Tenleytown