Planning magazine — June 1994

Fortress America

More and more of us are living behind locked gates.

By David Dillon

One of the most familiar sounds in the U.S. these days is the clanging gate. Not the garden gate, or the alley gate, but the gate that closes off the street, the block, and increasingly the entire neighborhood. An estimated one-third of all new communities in Southern California are now gated. The percentages are similar around Phoenix, the suburbs of Washington, and in many parts of Florida.

New home sales in master-planned communities, which are usually walled and often gated, rose 17 percent in 1992, according to a June 1993 survey by consultants Arthur Andersen. But gates and guardhouses are also popping up in established neighborhoods—poor ones as well as rich. In Los Angeles, walls and gates have been erected around two public housing projects to keep out gangs and drug dealers. "We want the same protection as white folks," a resident of Mar Vista Gardens told a Los Angeles Times reporter in March 1992.

Terrified of crime and worried about property values, Americans are flocking to gated enclaves in what experts call a fundamental reorganization of community life. "There is no doubt that for the near future this will be the trend," says Dallas security consultant Tony Cooper, whose firm, Nuevevidas International, advises public and corporate clients nationwide. "People like to live within walls because they give the illusion of security. And it has acquired a certain social connotation as well. It's become the thing to do, like having a doorman or a chauffeur."

Walls are only the beginning. Inside may be surveillance cameras, infrared sensors, motion detectors, and sometimes armed guards. St. Andrews, a gated community in Boca Raton, Florida, spends over $ 1 million a year on helicopters and canine patrols. Hidden Valley, a private community north of Los Angeles, installed anti-terrorist bollards two years ago to keep nonresidents at bay. Used mainly to protect embassies and airports, the bollards rise up to impale vehicles that try to defy them. The tally so far: 25 cars and four trucks.

Such drastic measures have sparked protests, lawsuits, and pleas for restraint. "These walls and gates are leading to more segregation and more isolation, and the outcome is going to be tragic for all of us," warns Norman Krumholz, AICP, professor of urban planning at Cleveland State University. "We're all Americans together, and have to learn to live in a culturally diverse place."

Dallas loves them

The Dallas area now contains approximately 25 gated communities, not counting the dozens of gated apartment complexes scattered across the city. Not yet as common as in Palm Springs or Fort Lauderdale, they nevertheless represent a dramatic shift in local development patterns.

At least six new gated complexes have been announced in the last few months, ranging from portions of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones's 550-acre development in Frisco, north of Dallas, to tiny (13 acres, 10 houses) Oakbrook Estates in suburban Piano, where developer Jeff Blackard is adding walls and gates and a guardhouse to make his upper middle-class residents feel secure. "People are scared to death of letting their kids play in the front yard or walk next door," he explains. "We're all paranoid, but maybe for the right reasons."

Ironically, the rush to gated communities coincides with widely reported decreases in violent crime statistics. The latest Dallas police department statistics, for example, show violent crime in the city decreasing for 25 consecutive months.

From 1991 to 1993 the city's overall crime rate fell 34 percent. Yet a May citizen survey also revealed that 62 percent of Dallasites are still afraid to walk around their neighborhoods at night.

"It's not that there is necessarily more crime," says Rice University sociologist Stephen Klineberg, "but that it has become so much more random and haphazard. It used to be that if you stayed out of bad neighborhoods you'd be OK. That no longer works. It's hard to find safe havens anymore."

Developers of gated communities exploit this anxiety by marketing their projects as safer, friendlier, and more economically stable than traditional urban, or even suburban, neighborhoods. Their ads and brochures are sprinkled with words like "village," "community," and "cozy" to suggest a friendliness and manageable scale that is supposedly missing outside.

The Downs of Hillcrest in north Dallas presents itself as "secluded from the world at large, yet close to all the finer things of life. Set apart from the rush of the city, The Downs offers peace of mind." The pitch seems to be working; 58 of the development's 114 lots were sold in the last 10 months.

Stonebriar, a growing gated community in Frisco, goes further by asking prospective residents to imagine a "perfect place to live ... outside the pandemonium of the city," where there can be "a return to simpler times, when you knew you were secure within the boundaries of your own neighborhood ... [and] where children could play unattended and be safe after dark."

Gated communities regard the outside world as a threat, says Edward Blakely, newly appointed dean of the urban studies school at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Blakely is working on a major report on the phenomenon. "Other people are the enemy, and they'll do whatever they have to to keep them out," he says. "This squeezes public officials from both directions. They get a lot of applications for gates; then there's a big rush to stop them as anti-democratic."

Yet experts say that fear of crime only partially accounts for the proliferation of walled and gated communities. Equally important, according to a 1993 survey by the Community Associations Institute of Alexandria, Virginia, is the desire "to protect and enhance housing values."

In fact, during the real estate bust of the 1980s, houses in gated communities held their value far better than those in non-gated subdivisions. Sales in Glen Lakes, a gated community just north of downtown Dallas, ranged from $8 million to $ 11 million annually from 1987 to 1989, far ahead of the sluggish real estate market. The large master-planned communities around Houston reported similar gains. Piano developer Jeff Blackard estimates that the value of his lots increased 20 percent the day he announced gates. Estimates in California often run 30 percent.

More going on

Gated communities are part of a broader privatization movement, which in turn is linked to a growing skepticism about government's ability to police streets, stabilize neighborhoods and property values, and generally look after the public realm. Between 1980 and 1990, federal funding to cities and states slipped from 25 percent of total revenues to 17 percent. In Dallas, to cite just one example, federal support fell from 12.3 percent to 6.3 percent in 1990, at a time when the city's tax base was also plummeting.

People are responding by taking matters into their own hands. According to the 1990 Hallcrest Report II, commissioned by the National Institute of Justice in Washington, private security guards now outnumber public police three to one, while private businesses and private communities spend nearly twice as much on security as city governments.

Eighteen Dallas neighborhoods now hire off-duty police to patrol their streets and parks, using cruisers rented from the city. And some cities are experimenting with private police forces, which work on contract just like trash collectors and ambulance services. Meanwhile, neighborhoods that can't afford off-duty police are turning to bollards and barriers to keep nonresident traffic off their streets.

George Washington University sociology professor Amitai Etzioni, founder of the "communitarian movement" and author of a new book, The Spirit of Community, says such privatization may be a reasonable response to a growing public crisis. "I don't approve of setting up gates and barriers for class purposes," he says, and "in the best of all possible worlds, with no crime, I might say, take down the gates. But in the world we live in, upper middle-class people don't want to rub shoulders with other classes of people. They haven't wanted to for 200 years."

Even critics of gating admit that the desire to protect home and family is understandable. "Those are perfectly good individual motives, right and honorable," says Rice's Stephen Klineberg. "The problem with enclaving is that it leads to the deterioration of any sense of connectedness to the larger community. If I'm making it, it's not my responsibility to look after others. That's the direction American society seems to be going, and it's ominous. It will destroy us in the end."

Drawbridge mentality

Gating is hardly a new phenomenon. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, kings and princes routinely provided gated enclaves for their families and loyal retainers in times of siege and pestilence. Fortified with towers, moats, and drawbridges, they stood as formidable reminders of class distinctions.

St. Louis developed a sizeable network of private gated streets for its beer barons in the late 19th century, and most of them still exist. And there always have been gated compounds in resorts like the Hamptons and Bar Harbor, where the superrich can turn their backs on the working world.

Today, the popularity of gated preserves cuts across economic lines, as aspiring middle-class families migrate to walled communities in far-distant suburbs, and inner-city residents like those documented by New York photographer Camilo Vergara armor themselves against intruders.

But no matter who builds them, gated and walled communities are intended as private havens. And it is this separateness that has attracted criticism. "Gating is an outgrowth of not wanting anything in our backyard that is different from us," says consultant Daniel Lauber, AICP, of River Forest, Illinois. "A black person who shows up in one of these places is likely to get busted. They reinforce the tendency to categorize people by race and sex, which only intensifies our social problems."

Yet money seems to count more than race. In the Dallas area, for instance, many black sports stars live in the various gated communities that are part of Las Colinas, the new town in Irving. And black businessman Frank Simmons recently moved into Regent's Park in DeSoto, a small gated community where houses start at $350,000 and the security is presidential. "I grew up poor, one of 15 kids," he says. "I wanted to have a nice house in a nice neighborhood, where my kids could go to a good school."

Guarding the gate

The chief guardians of real estate values in these new complexes are the community associations, made up of residents, builders, and representatives of the developers. Operating like shadow governments, they collect assessments, hire police, maintain streets and parks, and enforce design guidelines covering everything from the square footage of houses to the color of mailboxes. In states like Texas where zoning is nominal, they draw up ordinances. Some of the larger associations— in Columbia, Maryland, for example-are authorized to issue bonds.

According to the Community Associations Institute, 32 million Americans now belong to some form of community association, a number expected to double by the end of the century. Strapped local governments embrace the associations because they relieve community pressure to build and maintain new parks, playgrounds, and other facilities. Developers like them because they give their projects credibility. Even if the builder goes bust, the existence of a strong community association gives some assurance that the development will survive.

"In Phoenix you can't start a new development without a community association," says Brent Herrington of Capital Consultants Management Corporation, which manages of planned communities around the country. "Houston is like that, and Dallas is getting that way."

Questions remain

Still unresolved are the legal ramifications of closing off streets to the public. In 1991, a group called Citizens Against Gated Enclaves sued the city of Los Angeles for allowing the residents of fashionable Whitley Heights, near the Hollywood Bowl, to gate public streets against outsiders. In January 1993, a superior court judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, saying that "the city owes a duty to the public not to allow gates on public streets." The ruling was upheld on appeal, throwing the city's approximately 200 pending applications for gates into legal limbo.

Generally, local governments have little control over gated communities, except to ensure that their private streets meet public standards and are accessible to emergency vehicles. Many times the gates go up after the fact, with no public review.

But Plano, a mostly white, middle-class suburb of Dallas, is now taking a second look at gating. After approving four gated communities in the last three years, the city recently declared a moratorium on new ones until it can develop guidelines.

Developers argue that they are simply responding to the market, and that if Plano bans gated communities, customers will go elsewhere. But opponents, led by black city council member David Perry, argue that more gates mean more segregation and more fragmentation. "We should have an open community," Perry says. "When people move here, they should have Plano as a whole as their focus, not their own private utopias."

Plano's planning director, Frank Turner, AICP, has urged the city council to be cautious in approving more gated communities. "We have one of the lowest crime rates for cities our size in the state," he says. "I see no compelling reason to create them for reasons of security, or to promote them that way."

While experts generally agree that gates and walls keep down petty offenses — peeping toms and hubcap thieves — they are less confident about their ability to reduce more serious crime. Tony Cooper emphasizes that security is only as good as the people providing it. "Finding a good security company these days is like looking for a diamond in a garbage dump," he says. Many companies pay guards little over the minimum wage and regularly suffer turnover of 200 percent or more.

As in most businesses, the better security companies charge more, and therefore cater to affluent clients. At $ 10 an hour, a low figure, the annual cost for 24-hour security covering one gate and one guard is $87,000. Each homeowner is assessed a portion of this cost. More gates, guards, and services — canine patrols, escorts, cameras-mean dramatically higher costs, which is why guardhouses are often unmanned at night, and dummy cameras and warning signs take the place of patrols.

Even developers express reservations. "If a professional thief wants to break in, he'll find a way," says Frank Zaccanelli, executive vice-president of the Perot Group's Hillwood Development Corporation, developers of The Enclave. But then comes the kicker. "People perceive gated communities to be more secure, and from a developer's point of view that's a marketable commodity."

Even when the cities and neighborhoods are tranquil, that perception counts for a lot. Victor Arias and his family moved from suburban Chicago to Hackberry Creek in Irving, one of the largest gated communities in the area, because, he says, "it seems like a secure, established neighborhood where our kids can run around without having to worry about traffic." Arias says he considered several up-scale city neighborhoods, "but you never know what's going to happen there. In a gated community you can control some of that."

This desire for control could have dangerous consequences for American cities — and for the world, says urban critic Jane Jacobs, now a resident of Toronto "It's a gang way of looking at life, the institutionalization of turf. And if it goes on indefinitely, and gets intensified, it practically means the end of civilization."

Jacobs sees gated communities as expressions of a new brand of urban tribalism that will pit races and ethnic groups against one another, and that won't achieve any more than tribalism does in the rest of the world.

"We know from reading about Bosnia how terrible things can get when the gulf [between ethnic and social groups] grows, and how fast it can grow," she says. "What a miraculous thing it is when you have a body politic, with all kinds of different people, that works and that nearly everyone has a stake in improving. And how fragile that is too."

David Dillon is the architecture critic for the Dallas Morning News.