Gated communities are residential areas with restricted access such that normally public spaces have been privatized. We have no definitive numbers on their extent, but estimate that at least three or four million and potentially many more Americans are seeking this new refuge from the problems of urbanization. A 1991 poll of the Los Angeles metropolitan area found 16 percent of respondents living in some form of secured access environment (Walters, 1991). While many of these are traditional security apartment buildings, a conservative estimate that one-third are gated communities provides a rough figure of 530,000 residents, with many more such developments having been built since then. Data from Orange County, California found 43,000 units in gated communities in 1989. (Kershner,1991) Given that gated communities are proliferating in the Central Valley, San Diego, the Imperial and Coachella Valleys, and exist as well in northern California, over 1.0 million Californians already live inside walls. California leads the nation in gated developments, but they are found across the country and are very common in Florida, Arizona, Texas, and New York. Oscar Newman estimates that there are 30,000 gated communities nationwide.(Pertman,1994). If he is correct, and we combine our own analysis, close to 4 million people are living in walled security compounds.
Thus far, the issues surrounding walled communities have been left mostly to journalists with almost no discussion form planners. Yet the underlying urban planning issues associated with this pattern need more penetrating analysis. It is clear, for example, that such planning tools as street patterns, environmental regulations, and zoning and density controls are at times used in place of actual gates and walls to limit economic, or even physical, access to suburban developments.
The forting up phenomenon also has enormous policy consequences. By allowing some citizens to internalize and to exclude others from sharing in their economic privilege, it aims directly at the conceptual base of community and citizenship in America. The old notions of community mobility are torn apart by these changes in community patterns. What is the measure of nationhood when the divisions between neighborhoods require armed patrols and electric fencing to keep out other citizens? When public services and even local government are privatized, when the community of responsibility stops at the subdivision gates, what happens to the function and the very idea of democracy? In short, can this nation fulfill its social contract in the absence of social contact?
Clearly, walled communities are not new, but have their lineage as far back as the Middle Ages. To some extent, the violence and terror which created the rationale for these settlements then is again unleashed in a more modern and lethal world. Walled communities represent more than security zones. They are lifestyle choices. It is this ingredient in their current manifestation that is the primary concern of this research effort.
Gated, fenced compounds were built for the East Coast and Hollywood aristocracy in the early decades of the twentieth century. Gated communities were becoming more common, but there was nothing common about them until the advent of the retirement developments of the 60s and 70s. Communities like Leisure World built self-contained cities surrounded by walls, accessible to middle class older Americans. In the 1980s, upscale real estate speculation and the trend to conspicuous consumption saw the proliferation of gated communities built around golf courses, and designed for exclusivity, prestige and leisure. The decade also marked the emergence of gated communities built primarily out of fear, as the public became increasingly preoccupied with violent crime. Gates became available in developments from suburban single family tracts to high density infill apartment complexes. Since the late 80s, gates have become ubiquitous in many areas of the country, and now new towns are routinely built with gated villages, and entire incorporated cities feature guarded entrances.
There is no doubt that Americans have given up on the old styles of urban living for the large private spaces and small public spaces of the suburbs.(Garreau,1991) A majority of people now live in suburbs. The old central cities are losing their position as the most powerful place in the metropolitan hierarchy, as not just residency but industry, commerce, and retail shift their balance to the suburbs.(Landis,1988) Driven by lower costs and avoidance of crime and other urban problems, the expansion of the suburbs is likely to accelerate in the 90s as development moves ever farther out, supported by and leapfrogging beyond the new economic centers of the edge cities.
Along with the trend toward gating in new residential developments, existing neighborhoods are using barricades and gates with increasing frequency to seal themselves off. Since the 50s, there has been a constant move away from the traditional city grid pattern to suburban cul-de-sacs and non-connecting streets. Street closures are efforts to recreate this suburban pattern in the older grid, altering access and the ability of outsiders to penetrate. The move away from the grid is an intentional device similar to the gate. It limits access and controls who might come into the area by acting as a deterrent to casual visitors, criminals and those who have little or no reason to be in the area. Further, the less accessible pattern provides a physical design that promotes neighborliness since the people one sees are usually persons who live within the subdivision.
Gated communities are part of the trend of suburbanization, and their roots lie in the same urban design tradition. The history of the design of new towns and suburbs, from Ebenezer Howard s Garden Cities to the planned communities of the United States, is centered on the idea of landscape and street design as an integral element of the total development. People like Frederick Law Olmstead and Frank Lloyd Wright designed thoroughly planned environments around curvilinear or cul-de-sac streets, creating self-contained, separate communities with carefully constructed identities. (Stern, 1988) The neotraditional communities designed by Andres Duany and Peter Calthorpe are the most recent additions to this history. Designed to recreate an ideal urban village of times past, the neotraditional communities nevertheless are less diverse in their income and social mix than existing development.(Handy,1991)
While early gated communities were restricted to retirement villages and the compounds of the super rich, the majority found today are middle to upper middle class. Higher end tracts within planned communities are now commonly gated. They seem to be more common in larger tracts, as there are more units over which to spread the cost of walling, gating, and constructing and staffing guardhouses. For similar reasons, they also are common in multifamily and higher density developments, where unit costs are often low enough to place gates within the reach of the middle class. It is estimated that one-third of the communities developed with gates are luxury developments for the upper and upper-middle class, and over one-third are retirement-oriented. The remainder are mostly for the middle-class, with some working-class communities.(Krohe,1993)
In 1988, one third of the 140 projects in development in Orange County, California were gated, compared to only 15 percent in 1983.(Carlton, 1989) A construction company in the area reported demand for gated communities at 3-to-1 over non-gated communities in 1989. In neighboring San Fernando Valley, there were around 100 gated communities in existence by the end of the 80s, nearly all built since 1979. A 1990 survey of Southern California home shoppers found that 54 percent wanted a home in a gated, walled development; the question was not even asked a handful of years ago.(Myers, 1990) On Long Island, gated communities were rare just 10 years ago but are now becoming common, with a gatehouse included in almost every condominium development over 50 units. Chicago and suburban Atlanta report similar trends.
Gating is not a universal American phenomenon. It is very geographic. It is a metropolitan phenomenon, and a southwestern, southern, and southeastern phenomenon. It is less a midwestern, northeastern and northern phenomenon. But even in these regions, gated communities are emerging around big cities. In terms of absolute numbers, California is home to the most gated communities, with Florida ranking second. Texas runs a distant third. Gated communities are also very common in metropolitan New York, Chicago, Phoenix and in Miami and other Southern seaboard cities. They are found nearly everywhere in the country, however, in Oregon, Washington, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Kansas, the DC metropolitan area, Missouri, Michigan and Nevada. Few have been found in the deep South, and none in New England outside of Massachusetts. They remain rarities in the Midwest except around large cities like Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit.
The data suggest that gated communities are most often found in areas with certain characteristics: metropolitan regions; areas with high levels of demographic change, especially large amounts of foreign immigration; areas with high median income levels; regions with extreme residential segregation patterns or without a clearly dominant white majority; areas with high crime rates and high levels of fear; and areas to which whites are moving, either for retirement or because of white flight, as in Californian migrants to Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon.
The developers of gated communities also see themselves as providing security, especially to certain submarkets. The elderly have been targeted with gated communities since the 70s, and gated second home complexes are also well established, but those seen in need of walls now also include empty-nesters, who are likely to be away on long vacations frequently, and young double-income families, in which no one is home during the day. Security is viewed as freedom not just from crime, but also from such annoyances as solicitors and canvassers, mischievous teenagers, and strangers of any kind, malicious or not.
Developers do not, however, prominently advertise security or safety, nor do they promise it in their promotional brochures. Even the most high tech security systems cannot guarantee a crime-free community, and developers are fearful of liability if they make such claims.
Redwood Shores in Redwood City, California, is a planned community of apartments, townhouses, and single family homes on the wetlands of San Francisco Bay. Wide divided streets pass mirrored midrise office towers to the residential developments built around streams and canals. Two of Redwood Shores subdivisions are gated. Shorebird Island is a luxury type, completely surrounded by water, its single family homes accessible only by a private gated bridge. At the mid-price urban village condominium of Lakeshore Villas, an exiting resident called out the access code to the researcher standing at the electronic entrance keypad. (Site Visit, 1994) Green Valley, outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, is a master-planned community which will have 60,000 residents by the year 2005. Walls are everywhere in Green Valley, with elaborate specifications in the master plan for their composition, height, and design. The CC&Rs prohibit homeowners from changing them in any way, including a ban on any openings in backyard walls. A marketing agent explains the appeal: "It's safe here. And clean. And nice. The schools are good and the crime rate is low. It s what buyers are looking for." (Guterson, 1993)
The high end tracts of Green Valley have gates as well as walls. Yet, these barriers do not keep out the world. A 10-year old resident complained that his friends could not get in to see him without a call being made to the policeman in the guardhouse. But the walls of Green Valley cannot keep it completely safe; in recent years the community has dealt with a serial rapist, robberies, domestic murder, drugs in the schools, and a toxic cloud of chlorine gas released from a nearby chemical plant.(Guterson, 1993)
Another illustration is Silver Creek Valley Country Club, in San Jose, California. It is the epitome of the new style of self-contained new town. Planned for over 1500 units, it includes a host of amenities behind a 24-hour gatehouse. Eventually , it will have a public elementary school and some commercial development on site, with separate entrances for those outside the development. Its marketing never mentions gates or security, but emphasizes leisure amenities. Equity memberships in its golf course, tennis club, and country club are available only to residents. Tracts range from $300,000 townhouses through $500-700,000 estate homes to custom home sites where final cost is expected to top one million. Two of the subdivisions have their own interior gates, and perimeter fences are likewise found around individual tracts as well as the entire development. Security is tight even now, with only a few dozen homes occupied home-shoppers must register at the Information Pavilion outside and carry a pass at all times while inside the gates. (Site visit, March, 1994.)
In affluent Pacific Palisades, located in the wooded slopes above the ocean north of Los Angeles, gated communities are common. A resident of one of the newer developments noted, "We knew that [the guardhouse] was going to be here, and it was a factor. It just made it that much more exciting not only does it give you security but it also there's a certain amount of prestige to go with it." (Jaffe,1992)
Marketing brochures and advertisements rarely mention gates specifically. Instead, code words such as private and exclusive are found over and over again. Older communities seeking the same privacy install gates on their own initiative; one community in Southern California, Hidden Valley, went so far as to spend $50,000 on an electronic antiterrorist bollard of the type used to protect embassies and the Vice President s mansion. The device has impaled several cars that dared to enter without authorization.
Gated residential developments are now available to the middle class as well. Sold as executive residences, they usually offer no amenities beyond a gated entry, perimeter fence, or perhaps a pool or tennis court. Home to young professionals and middle managers, they provide the cachet of exclusive living to those with non-exclusive incomes. Many have electronic gates, and others have guardhouses at the main entrance. Guards, however, are sometimes never hired by the homeowners association because of the high ongoing cost, and the gatehouse stands as solely a psychological deterrent to outsiders. Individual home security systems are common, and the more sophisticated include video monitors which allow residents to view motorists requesting admittance at the main gate or even to observe the comings and goings of their neighbors by means of cameras placed throughout the development.
In a suburb of St. Louis, University Place was built with just this market segment in mind. A high-density development of 100 townhouses and single family homes which sold for $170,000 to $235,000, University Place has a small green and a toddler playground. In seeming contrast to these modest amenities for the young families the developers hoped to attract, the subdivision's main entrance boasts not just a gate but a large monument.
A resident of Mar Vista Gardens, a 43-acre public housing complex in Los Angeles with a similar systems of gates and fences, explained that many residents want a gated community for the same reasons rich people want to live in gated communities to cut down on crime. Yet, while it makes surface sense that the poor should have access to the same security amenities as the rich, some question the wisdom of fencing off public housing projects and poor neighborhoods. According to Mark Baldassare, "These gated communities discourage residents from interacting with the outside world. ... The wealthy want that, but the poor don't. The poor need to link up with the community outside their walls because they need the jobs, the contacts, the resources. ... Putting a housing project in a fortress-like setting further stigmatizes the residents." (Miles, 1992)
Athens Heights, in South Central Los Angeles, is just a few blocks from Normandy and Florence, the epicenter of the LA riots. It contains some grand old houses and more modest stucco bungalows, mostly built in the 1950s, all with carefully tended lawns and gardens. Surrounding the neighborhood are some of the poorest, most crime-plagued blocks in Los Angeles. The Athens Heights homeowners began seeking approval to gate their streets in 1987, and finally installed one permanent iron gate and several temporary wooden barricades in 1991. The original plan called for 10 iron gates, leaving only a single open street into the neighborhood. Residents say crime decreased after the gating.
A resident of Athens Heights, expressing the isolation and loss of community the gates have brought, says, "[T]he children going back and forth to school, the way that they now have to go (they see) a lot of graffiti, and I think if they walked through here, they'd see a lot of beauty instead. . . . [I]t s regrettable that they're now precluded from seeing that, and there's nothing like seeing a child growing up and going to school . . . and then after about 12 years, you no longer see that child, and you know . . .they've gone on to adulthood or they've gone on to college perhaps. Hopefully, one of these days, we'll be able to allow the children to return.(Jaffe, 1992)
Homeowners of the burb traps are trying to cling to their place in the social and economic hierarchy in the face of dramatic changes already transforming their once peaceful and homogenous inner ring suburbs. They are gating themselves off, closing public streets with concrete or landscaped barriers, limiting entrance to just one or two electronically controlled gates.
Real estate market analyst Sanford Godkin, in a report to the National Association of Home Builders, agrees that insecurity is becoming a powerful motivator for exclusionary measures. He predicts that rising crime in the cities will spur strong growth in gated communities and the installation of home security systems in the 90s. People are feeling insecure. They want their home to be a fortress.(McMillan, 1992)
Crime is the number one value and walls are the perceived method of security against criminality. The dramatic growth of the security industry is indicative of this trend. A National Institute of Justice study found that three times as many people now work in the security field, from equipment manufacturers to armored car drivers, as are employed by official law enforcement agencies. The number of security guards has doubled in the last decade and now surpasses the number of police. Private security outspends public law enforcement by 73 percent, and is now clearly the nation s primary protective resource. Security is the driving force for all gated communities.
As the middle class homeowner of older urban and inner suburban neighborhoods seek to protect their investments, they are turning not just to hired security patrols and Neighborhood Watch groups, but to barricades and iron gates blocking access to their streets. The fortress mentality is perhaps clearest here, where groups of people are taking the initiative to shut out their neighbors. Streets have been closed in Los Angeles, Miami, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Texas, Ohio, New Jersey, Arizona and elsewhere. In Florida, the state s Safe Neighborhood Act allows communities to negotiate with their local governments to close, privatize, or modify the right-of-way on public streets.
In Los Angeles, dozens of neighborhoods, Black, Anglo, and Latino, rich, poor, and middle class, have petitioned the city to privatize their streets since the 1992 riots, and about a half dozen did so. A suit brought by apartment dwellers living beneath the newly installed gate to wealthy Whitley Heights sought to stop the gatings on the grounds that it violated the state Vehicle Code regulations on the use of public streets. The Citizens Against Gated Enclaves won the suit, and the state Supreme Court upheld the ruling in March of 1994. Whitley Heights continues to appeal, and two dozen previously approved gating proposals remain pending awaiting the result. Meanwhile, applications for street closures continue to be made, with over 60 proposals submitted in the first quarter of 1994.
The race to lock in position and equity makes sense for those who get their gates, but the results affect their nearby neighbors as well. It is common sense that excluding crime from one area will merely displace most, if not all, of it to nearby areas, and the experience of places like Shorecrest in Miami demonstrate this. Gating also reduces traffic in a neighborhood, but cars too are merely diverted to other streets. In addition, the simple daily uses of public streets, from parking to afternoon walks, are denied to all but those who own property behind the gates. The respondents to our survey are typical in finding about as much community behind walls as they might elsewhere but their perceptions and expectations are that the gates make a difference.
A less tangible but equally exclusionary aspect of the movement toward forting up are no-growth policies and regulations. The growing fear of the loss of house wealth is recasting land use planning tools and giving rise to a new surge of land management efforts aimed at retarding growth. Over 300 of California s 415 municipal jurisdictions have initiated no-growth legislation. Most are suburban and outer-ring communities that have taken these actions to stem the tide of minorities moving out of the cities. No-growth is not merely a land use regime but a bundle of policies that have remarkably little impact on growth but strong impacts on community composition. There is clear evidence that local groups who prompt no-growth policies recognize their intrinsic capacity to limit the movement of minorities out of the inner city.
As Rabin says, local government land use regulations; segregative policies and practices of housing authorities; the failure to enforce civil rights laws; severe federal funding reductions. . . . These diverse policies and activities differ widely in the nature and intensity of their impacts on isolation. Some exert powerful influences on the spatial distribution of development; some influence the nature of development; while other establish conditions of access to the benefits of development. It is important to recognize those public policies that disproportionately increase the opportunity for whites to leave the central city. (Rabin, 1991)
These turf wars, while most dramatically manifested by the gated community, are a troubling trend for land use planning. As citizens separate themselves into homogenous, independent cells, their ties to the greater polity and society become attenuated, increasing resistance to efforts to resolve municipal, let alone regional, problems.
Privatization of a wide range of normally public goods and services is fueled in part by the declining levels of services provided by localities across the country. In areas where citizens feel let down by local government, it is not surprising that those who can afford it are turning to private service provision. Even in the most affluent suburbs, however, where crime is nearly nonexistent, where libraries are high tech and open all week, and where street repairs occur promptly, Americans are turning to self-provision of services, privatizing their streets and buying security, maintenance and other services on the private market. Here the issue is less one of replacing failing city services than controlling the residential space. In a gated community, the swimming pool, the street, and the tot lot is private, used only by the residents and their invited guests, fully under their control.
Inside and outside of gated developments, bond issues and special assessment districts allow more affluent groups to maintain a higher level of services than local government is able to offer, tailoring service delivery to their preferences through self-taxation. These entities, sometimes known as Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) or Special Service Areas (SSAs) may be formed when a majority of property or business owners in an area agree to assess themselves to augment or replace city services. They are common from downtown shopping districts to the newest suburbs. According to the US Census Bureau, the number of BIDs grew by 12 percent from 1987 to 1992, with over 33,000 across the country.
Privatization comes with a cost, however, and sometimes communities regret biting off more than they can chew. In Arizona, communities which privatized their streets have asked their city governments to reassume responsibility for maintenance when big bills came due.
Residents of gated communities are in essence taxed twice, once through local property taxes, and again through homeowner association fees. A few communities are revolting against this double taxation, asking for rebates on the cost of the public works and public safety services they provide for themselves, despite the fact that they volunteered for it when they bought their property or gated their streets. They re taking care of themselves, they say, and have no desire to contribute to the common pool serving their neighbors in the rest of the city. In areas where gated communities are the norm, not the exception, this perspective has the potential for severe impacts on the common welfare.
Community associations have been called shadow governments. In the case of gated communities, they take on a y national governmental role in the form of border security and defense. In a disturbing parallel, local government entities in at least one area are actually taking on this function, acting to bar unapproved nonresidents from entry. In California s Central Valley, isolated communities that have Community Services Districts to provide water, sewer, fire protection and other public services have been petitioning to Sacramento for legislation to allow them to restrict access with gates, fences, and guards. Large-lot zoning and other land use policy tools have been used by many jurisdictions to discourage or prevent unwanted people from taking up residence in their town, but these laws seek to prevent them from even visiting.
Unhappy with public services and unwilling to contribute to the general pool to pay for services provided to their fellow citizens, the residents of gated communities take their secession from the civic order to the extreme by incorporating. At least five gated communities are fully independent, incorporated towns. Hidden Hills, population 1,812; Rolling Hills, population 2,076; and Canyon Lake, population 13,000, are all located in Southern California. Tiny Golf, with 114 residents, and Golden Beach, population 612, are near Miami, Florida. Others in California, such as 21,000-resident Leisure World Laguna Hills, and Heritage Ranch in San Luis Obispo County have considered incorporation. Voters in Indian Wells, near Palm Springs, approved a plan in 1983 that will eventually wall off the few remaining ungated areas of the city, which has the highest per capita income in California. A long time resident explained the motivation: "think the protection is well worth the cost. At least the gates will deter some of these people from burglarizing us. Plus I feel property values will go up about 25 percent. (New York Times, 1983)
The largest of the walled incorporated cities is Canyon Lake, which was developed in the 70s in Riverside County east of Los Angeles. Fully walled off, with only a small shopping center outside the city gates, the large affluent community recently incorporated after annexation threats by the neighboring towns of Perris and Lake Elsinore. Both Perris and Lake Elsinore are poor cities, and Lake Elsinore has highest crime rate in the county. Like most of the incorporated walled cities, Canyon Lake has really only added independence to the already established governmental characteristics of its homeowner association. Most of the town s revenue comes from the assessed dues. The city budget of $1.3 million pays for a city manager, an administrative staff, and the police force contracted from Perris. The homeowners association handles everything else, from public works to garbage collection, with its budget of nearly $6 million. Government in this situation is by the few.
Gated communities are themselves a microcosm of the larger spatial pattern of segmentation and separation. The growing divisions between city and suburb and rich and poor are creating new patterns which reinforce the costs that isolation and exclusion impose on some at the same time that they benefit others. Suburbanization has been instrumental in dividing up gains and losses of economic restructuring, allowing the winners to protect their position through geographic separation and further exacerbating differentials in income and wealth.
Mike Davis has documented the social polarization in Los Angeles and the fantastic high tech measures being taken from the redeveloped downtown to the outer suburbs to divide the privileged from the poor, the young, and nonwhite. (Davis, 1990) As the ubiquitous gated communities of the suburbs are coming to look like a fortified honeycomb, with each residential neighborhood now encased in its own. Can a nation so divided long survive? America's destiny is in our communities, and if they are divided so is our destiny.
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Edward J. Blakley, Dean and Lusk Professor, University of Southern California
School of Urban and Regional Planning
Univeristy of Southern California
351 Von Keeinsmid Ctr.
Los Angeles, CA 90089
Mary Gail Snyder, Doctoral Student at the University of California at Berkeley