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Document 10 of 161.

March 1, 1998, Sunday, VALLEY EDITION

SECTION: VIEWPOINT, Pg. V1

LENGTH: 679 words

HEADLINE: AM I MY BROTHER'S GATEKEEPER?; THE FORTRESSING OF PRIVATE COMMUNITIES CONTRIBUTES TO THE INCREASING FRAGMENTATION OF AMERICAN SOCIETY

BYLINE: Edward J. Blakely

BODY:

IT has been more than three decades since this nation legally outlawed all forms of public discrimination - in housing, education, public transportation and public accommodations. Only one year ago the state passed Proposition 209, banning affirmative action and quotas on the basis that our state needs only equal protection under the law.

Yet in the last decade we are seeing one of the visible forms of discrimination - the gated, walled, private community. Californians are increasingly electing to live behind walls with active security mechanisms to prevent intrusion into their private domains.

In every part of our state, a frightened middle class that moved to escape school integration, to secure appreciating housing values, now must move to maintain its economic advantage. California's middle class is fortressing up.

Many gated communities are residential areas with restricted access such that normally public spaces have been privatized. More than 1 million of our fellow Californians 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.

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 found 43,000 units in gated communities in 1989. Given that gated communities are proliferating in the Central Valley, San Diego, the Imperial and Coachella valleys, and exist as well in Northern California, more than 40 percent of all new housing developments in our state are 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. I have estimated that there are 30,000 gated communities nationwide, or close to 4 million people living in walled security compounds.

Economic segregation is scarcely new. In fact, zoning and city planning were designed in part to preserve the position of the privileged by subtle variances in building and density codes.

But the gated communities go further in several respects. They create physical barriers to access and privatize community space, not merely individual space.

Many of these communities also privatize civic responsibilities such as police protection and communal services such as schools, recreation and entertainment. The new developments create a private world that shares little with its neighbors or the larger political system.

This fragmentation undermines the very concept of civitas - organized community life.

The fortressing phenomenon also has enormous policy consequences for all Californians. By allowing some residents 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 potential for our melting pot of a state to realize the dream of social and economic equality is 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 residents? By gating our neighborhoods, are we just carrying the street-gang mentality to its fullest extent - that is, adults marking their territory and hiring people to protect it? 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 California develop and fulfill its social contract in the absence of social contact? Will we develop a new and frightening form of geographic segregation that destroys the paradise that we all came here - regardless of race or national origin - to seek? Surely the sunshine will not be enough to keep the Golden State together in the next century.

NOTES:
Edward J. Blakely is co-author with Mary Gail Snyder of a new book, ''Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States,'' Brookings Press, Washington, D.C., 1997. He is a professor in the School of Urban Planning and Development at the University of Southern California.

GRAPHIC: Photo;

Photo: (Color) no caption (Private community);

Myung J. Chun/Daily News

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

LOAD-DATE: March 5, 1998