Gated communities tagged as 'cash cows'

March 25, 2005
By PHILLIP GOMEZ
PVT

Gated communities leave a lot of unanswered questions behind their walls about the hidden costs to a community, according to at least one expert on the subject.

Fulbright scholar Renaud Le Goix, Ph.D., describes gated communities as a development of post-industrial societal changes marked by increasing social fragmentation, individualism and the modification of urban public spaces. Goix, who calls gated communities "an urban pathology," explains the phenomenon as one involving the collusion of government, developers, the homebuilding industry and security businesses.

The trend toward gated communities represents "a shift from a city with public spaces towards an urbanization built of private enclaves ... opposed to the welfare redistribution system," Goix writes in a 2003 article found on the University of California at Los Angeles' Web site www.international.ucla.edu/article.

In recent years sci-fi novels have portrayed urban fears of crime with themes of quasi-civil war existing between rich, gated neighborhoods and the rest of the city. Movies such as "The Truman Show" (1999) have developed themes of social paranoia and segregation.

Other films have depicted buzzing surveillance helicopters employed by the homeowners' association and paramilitary squadrons patrolling upper-scale neighborhoods ensconced behind concrete walls topped with barbed wire and broken glass.

"Gated communities represent a form of urbanism where public space is privatized," Goix says. "They differ from condominiums and secured apartment complexes because they include public infrastructures and spaces behind the gates, which can otherwise be used by everyone, such as streets, parks, sidewalks and beaches."

The promotion of these real estate communities highlights their exclusiveness, their vaunted protection of families in secluded environments and leisure amenities, such as golf courses, private parks and horseback riding trails.

These benefits come at a cost to the up-scale homeowner able to afford to live there, and public authorities like having wealthy taxpayers who maintain their neighborhood infrastructures at their own expense. Local governments consider gated communities as "cash cows," Goix says. Gating favors property values and increases the property tax base of the community.

But as a consequence gating does not address the common interest development lost behind the gate.

"The gating, acting as a territorial boundary, can ... be analyzed as a border between two systems: the public realm of the city as a whole versus the territory of the gated enclave," he writes.

The real downside of gated communities is their "social spillover effect." In what Goix calls "minimal cities," where towns contract for most of their services with different public entities, the town can become an extension of the private homeowners' association.

As a legal corporation, the association partners with local government playing "a local game where the gated community has a utility for the public authority, whilst the property owners' association is granted a certain autonomy in local governance, and especially in financing the maintenance of the urban infrastructure."

More sinister, the public-private partnership of many gated communities has detrimental effects on the immediate neighbors. According to Goix, empirical data has demonstrated that "gating leads to a relocation of crime outside the gates and within adjacent non-gated communities."

Goix adds that the most well known effect of gating is its negative impact on property values in non-gated adjacent neighborhoods. The presence of a gated community may lead to "a preventative proliferation of gating in the neighborhood, and former non-gated communities may have to retrofit with gates if they wish to maintain their property values and avoid crime redistributions."

In the case of Southern California, the most important economic "externality," or socially borne cost of the gated community, was in "the net increase of social segregation. ... When gated communities are present, local socio-economic segregation is globally multiplied by 1.4 times the average socio-economic segregation level evaluated in the Los Angeles area. Age-based segregation created by gated communities is 2.7 times higher than its average level in the area."

http://www.pahrumpvalleytimes.com/2005/03/25/news/gated.html