What is your point in "No Way Out?" (June 25). To spread fear among suburbanites? They can do that themselves. To scare women like myself out of the city?

I found your article on elderly women in Rochester disturbing and disappointing, and the emphasis on white women unjustified within the article. Nowhere in the article do you present any evidence that elderly white women are more at risk of burglary or violence than elderly women of color in the same neighborhoods. Nor is there an analysis of how degree of isolation from neighbors figures into vulnerability. ("I don't bother that much with them," Chwiecko says. "Most of the neighbors here are Puerto Rican. Some are from Cuba.")

In addition, the article shows a wholesale lack of historical perspective that is unworthy of a newspaper called "City." The neighborhood deteriorated because at the same time that many white neighbors abandoned them, the banks redlined them (as a former banker cheerfully admitted to me), refusing loans to anyone seeking to buy in those areas.

People who did not want to be landlords were unable to sell their houses to the new "immigrants" and thus became unenthusiastic landlords. People of color who would have rather owned their houses were forced to rent. House values declined where the rental-to-ownership ratio climbed.

New residents were unable to buy or rent in the burgeoning suburbs due to discrimination in housing (and to poverty from discrimination in education and in employment).

We reap the sorry fruit of this institutional and community abandonment of the beautiful neighborhoods - built so lovingly by our forefathers - in suburban sprawl, car culture, and destruction of many stable owner-occupied urban neighborhoods of the past.

So much has fallen victim to this betrayal.

WENDY LOW, ROCHESTER