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| | Setha Low |
Gated communities are transforming the Western United States.
One third of all houses built in the greater Los Angeles area are now in secured-access developments.
The metropolitan area alone has over one million walled residential units. Even as gated communities spread rapidly throughout the United States — over seven million households according to the American Housing Survey of 2001 — the largest number, 11%, are located in the West. Southern California gated communities have become American icons with their southwestern architecture and their locale names exported throughout the world. Their symbolism is so popular that there are now faux gated communities called "neighborhood entry identities" with all the visible signs of gating, but no locked gates or guards.
Gated residential communities in the United States first originated for year round living on family estates and in wealthy communities such as Llewellyn Park in Eagle Ridge, and New Jersey in the 1850s; and resorts exemplified by New York's Tuxedo Park, developed in 1886, as hunting and fishing retreats with a barbed wire fence eight feet high and 24 miles long. Planned retirement communities such as Leisure World built in the 1960s and 1970s, however, were the first places where middle class Americans walled themselves off. Gates then spread to resort and country club developments, and finally, to suburban subdivisions. In the 1980s, real estate speculation accelerated the building of gated communities around golf courses designed for exclusivity and prestige. By 2000, of the 219 gated enclaves identified in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area, only half were located in the wealthiest areas, a third were in middle income white suburbs, and another fifth were in middle and low income Hispanic or Asian neighborhoods. Gated communities have become a version of the American dream of owning your own suburban home — with gates and guards added to the open green spaces.
During eight years of ethnographic research in these communities, I interviewed residents in restricted-access enclaves. I found that the nationwide drop in crime notwithstanding, people were moving because of a desire for safety and security as well as for community and a nice place to live. These desires are often expressed as a wish to live near people like themselves because of a fear of "others." However, there is little evidence that gated communities are any safer than the surrounding suburban communities where they are built, nor that they encourage community. Residents often told me that they felt safer and more secure, but then they themselves added that it was a "false sense of security" and they worried about the construction workers, domestics, and private guards that enter every day.
Most people who move to gated communities are not aware of what they lose in this quest for safety and privacy. Growing up with an implicit fortress mentality, many children may experience more, not less, fear of people outside the gates. Gated communities have homeowners' associations and strict covenants, contracts, and deed restrictions (CC&R's) that regulate most aspects of their houses and environment. And while homeowners associations can assure residents that the physical environment will be well maintained, many people find the restrictions that entails difficult to live with.
The unintended consequences of gating are even more serious for the wider community and region. Gated communities contribute to an overall shortage of public space and generate a sense of exclusion and social segregation. They are frequently thought to reduce the fiscal responsibilities of municipalities in which they are located, but can actually increase municipal expenses, when failing gated communities cede their private streets and utilities, because they do not have funds to keep up with repairs. Gated communities lead to privatization of government responsibilities, removing all accountability from publicly elected officials. This dependence on the private sector for new residential development and governance further erodes locally elected government and the public sector.
One of the striking features of the world today is that large numbers of people feel increasingly insecure. Whether attributed to globalization and economic restructuring, or to the breakdown of traditional institutions of social control, it has become imperative that neighborhoods and governments respond with free exchange of ideas. Yet to date, the only solutions offered have been increased policing in the public sector, and gating, surveillance technology, and armed guards in the private sector, creating myriad landscapes of fear. Fear cuts us off from one another and from ideas that could ameliorate our problems. To change course, we must recognize that this fear is not simply about crime and "others," but a reflection of the inherent insecurities of modern life. Gates close us off from a world of ideas that could actually make us feel more secure. |
Setha Low is author of Behind the Gates: Life, Security and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America (Routledge 2003), Professor of Environmental Psychology and Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. |
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