Document 12 of 43.


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The Nation

December 8, 1997

SECTION: No. 19, Vol. 265; Pg. 28; ISSN: 0027-8378

IAC-ACC-NO: 20097722

LENGTH: 1896 words

HEADLINE: Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States; book reviews

BYLINE: Schrag, Peter

BODY:
    Observations about the decline of community in America are hardly news. From Robert Bellah's work about hyper-individualism to Amitai Etzioni's pleas for a revitalization of communitarianism to the social significance of bowling alone, the parlous state of the country's sense of polity, community and civility has been a ritual of political commentary for the better part of a generation. The very word "individualism" was invented for us, but rarely has the sensibility and its politics, not just the word, seemed as virulent as now.

Still, and maybe inevitably, given the subject's ambiguity, evidence has been too anecdotal or peripheral to make the broad conclusions altogether comfortable. Even in what was once a nation of joiners -- another of our national traits first noted by de Tocqueville -- the decline of bowling leagues is hardly the last word. And that is what makes the sterner stuff that Edward Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder deal with in Fortress America so significant.

Not that barricaded exclusivity, whether moats and city walls or gates and guardhouses, is in any way new, even in America. As Blakely, dean of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at U.S.C., and Snyder, of the Department of City and Regional Planning at Berkeley, point out, the toffs of Tuxedo Park, New York, began living behind gates and barbed wire, complete with a homeowners' association "to control the social fabric and the character of the architecture," in 1885.

But never before in America has what they call "forting up" been as widespread, and not just among the rich. Some 3 million residences with some 8.4 million people are now situated behind gates, some of them staffed with twenty-four-hour guards and patrolled by private security forces, some relying on electronically operated gates. More significant, demand for homes in gated communities is soaring, although real numbers are hard to come by. In one survey of Southern California house buyers in 1990, "54 percent wanted a home in a gated, walled development; the question had not even been asked [a few] years earlier." And, as might be expected, California, followed by other Sunbelt states, is leading the nation through the gates.

Although Blakely and Snyder divide their communities according to the basic objectives of residents and/or developers -- prestige, lifestyle (golf, tennis, retirement leisure), security, control, even a search for "community" -- all share certain characteristics: "They create physical barriers to access. They ... privatize community space, not merely individual space. Many gated areas also privatize civic responsibilities like police protection and communal services such as street maintenance, recreation, and entertainment." Blakely and Snyder are deeply concerned about the effect on the larger society of this widespread withdrawal -- a concern that's shared not just by the residents and government officials of adjacent communities but, in some instances, by the residents of the enclaves themselves. And yet the concern, like the phenomenon itself, begs a larger question: Which came first, withdrawal behind gates or the decay of a sense of community?

Many of the residents of gated communities that Blakely and Snyder interviewed, either in focus groups or other settings, made clear that they were not just running from crime but from a larger sense of disorder and the loss of control -- over traffic, noise, incivility -- that seemed to come with it. And while some seemed to be troubled by the anticommunitarian implications of their withdrawal, many others defiantly defended their right to privacy and to live how -- and among whom -- they chose.

The rise of what might be called the "fee ethic" in public life -- the sharp increase in the belief among middle-class and affluent taxpayers that those who receive a disproportionate share of the immediate benefits of a public service like education or recreation should pay a disproportionate share of the cost -- goes back at least to the passage of California's Proposition 13 in 1978, the election of Reagan in 1980 and what seems now like the permanently institutionalized tax revolt they brought with them. In California, and to a considerable extent elsewhere, the residents of new developments pay an increasing share of the cost of infrastructure -- including new schools -- that they need, while the larger community expects to pay less and less. Under such circumstances, the impulse to secede and to control the services and facilities a homeowner feels he is paying for -- and perhaps feels he is paying more than his share of -- becomes increasingly understandable. In the absence of any larger compelling communitarian ethic, it seems almost inevitable.

Unfortunately, Blakely and Snyder don't deal with the relationship of forting up to the social and fiscal conservatism of the tax revolt, or to any larger context; they look to nothing more remote than what the residents themselves describe: the search for exclusivity and prestige or, more commonly, fear of crime, or, where existing developments attempt to erect barriers and gates, the need to control the incursion of traffic or gangs, or people dumping trash in what had once been pristine streets. That's happening even in poor neighborhoods with small apartments, where drugs and rising rates of violence have prompted people on welfare to beg city hall for their own gates and fences. And who can blame them?

But if the authors keep their focus narrow, there is no shortage of clues in the larger social demoralization. Restrictions on government services and the tax distortions that followed in the wake of Proposition 13 brought a wave of attempts to secede from existing political jurisdictions, either through the incorporation of new "cities" in cash-strapped counties that could no longer provide adequate services -- police protection in particular -- or through attempts of portions of existing cities to secede and to form themselves into new "cities." The word is used in quotes because in California municipal services are delivered by such a hodgepodge of independent districts and agencies -- fire districts, park districts, water districts, sewer districts, each with its own elected board -- that incorporation of a city within a county may entail little more than a shift of a portion of what's left of the property tax, together with jurisdiction for zoning, planning, building inspections and (maybe) police protection. Given those arrangements, the sense of community even before any gates went up was a little dicey.

Still, the secessionist impulse remains strong. Just as Fortress America was being published, Governor Pete Wilson was signing legislation to make it easier for the entire San Fernando Valley, an aggregation of mini-cities and suburbs totaling some 1.3 million people, to break away from the City of Los Angeles. Not that those suburbs -- Van Nuys, Pacoima, Chatsworth, Tarzana, Stadio City, North Hollywood, Canoga Park -- have much in common other than nervousness about the social conditions, and restiveness with the politicians downtown. Not that there is any great chance that the secession will ever take place: The tangle of assets and liabilities -- from water rights to bonded debts -- is simply too great to unsnarl. But the bill, produced after more than three years of political maneuvering, and the movements in other California cities eyeing the possibilities the law creates are indications that the desire to escape the messiness of the larger community is not limited to people looking for walls and gates.

"It's an artificial setting here," one resident of a gated development told the authors. "But you're creating that environment, which duplicates what. Middle America used to be back when you had small towns." But there are no small towns in America -- none in the America that "used to be," none now -- where no one is allowed to wander the streets who hasn't been specifically invited by a resident, no Girl Scout may sell cookies, no canvasser may hand out literature and no resident may put up a sign on his lawn without permission of the homeowners' association. There is no place in that America of nostalgia that was ever that hermetically sealed.

As Blakely and Snyder point out, developers of large-scale planned neighborhoods sell their projects as complete packages -- "commodified communities" -- and in some, people go out of their way to try to create some neighborliness, if not anything resembling a real community. But in many more, the covenants, conditions and restrictions written into property deeds (on what color you may paint your house, or how tall shrubs may be), the rules set by the homeowners' association and the hired security and maintenance contractors, become surrogates for a community that residents are too busy to bother with. What the gates do, of course, is divide: those inside, those beyond the pale. The residents within identify only with the "community" inside the gate." "Their homeowner association ideas are like taxes; and their responsibility to their community, such as it is, ends at that gate."

What are the alternatives? Blakely and Snyder, following the ideas of innovative designers like Peter Calthorpe, make some promising proposals. Instead of the sterility and false sense of security promoted by gates, redevelop a sense of interdependence without gates and walls -- arrange windows, fences and lighting and organize neighborhood watch groups to deter crime. Lay out streets with sharper corners and speed bumps, even pave them with brick or cobblestone, to reduce traffic and slow it down. Create public spaces and encourage mixed uses that bring people together; reduce restrictions on use of property to permit greater flexibility over time.

And when it comes to nostalgia about the small town: Put the garage next to the house, or behind it, and bring back the front lawn and porch so that neighbors can meet. As Calthorpe said, "Socially, the house fortress represents a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more isolated people become and the less they share with others unlike themselves, the more they do have to fear."

Statements like that implicitly recognize that the remedy for the social divisiveness that enclaves both symbolize and exacerbate lies outside the gates, just as the impulse (self-evidently) began outside. But while urban design is surely an important consideration here, so are a great many other things that Blakely and Snyder, as students of urban planning and design, hardly address at all. Seen in the larger political and social context, the phenomenon is one of the saddest and most worrisome anticommunitarian consequences of the Reagan-era celebration of the market as the ultimate arbiter in all things and of the looking-out-for-number-one fee ethic as the most noble and moral of social principles. There is a lot more awry than fear of crime and misconceived urban planning.

Still, Fortress America is an important book, attempting for the first time to describe and understand a large and growing force in American society. Gated enclaves are a disturbing measure -- in fear, in isolation -- of where the excesses of economic privatization lead us. It is not just the working poor who are suffering the damage.

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

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