write one page summery

Fortress America

Separate and Not Equal

Edward J. Blakely
It says “stay out” and it also says, “We are wealthy and you guys are not, and

this gate shall establish the difference.” J 1992 What attracts people, most, it would appear, is other people . . . urban spaces

are being designed, as though the opposite were true. W 1978, 16

The ability to exclude is a new hallmark for the new public space in the United States. Fear created by a rising tide of immigrants and random violence ranging from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to the snipers in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in 2002 has transformed public areas with an explosion of pub- lic space privatization.

Gated communities are clear indicators of the spatial division of the nation by race and class. In the 1960s, suburban exclusionary zoning to achieve this result was challenged and, to some degree, rejected through judicial or legislative open housing laws. De facto residential exclusivity has since been pursued through the private housing market, which has built hundreds of gated communities since the 1980s under the rubric of “security” from threats to homes and their inhabitants. These private enclaves, of course, may not explicitly be marketed as racist—racial restrictive covenants are unenforceable—but high prices and marketing practices ensure that they will largely be occupied by upper-middle-class whites.

William H. Whyte had a great deal to say about this emerging form of develop- ment that excludes rather than includes. What Whyte opposed was the design of space that reduces human interaction. The new fortress developments are aimed, at least on the surface, at reducing opportunity for social contact with strangers and even among neighbors. If there is little contact, then where is the social con- tract? If there is no social contract, then who will support the “public” needs of society, affordable housing, parks, health care, education, and so on?

Whyte emphasized in his studies that people may say they want to get away from other people, but their behavior indicates that their real desire is for quality human contact in open settings. “Urbanity,” Whyte wrote speaking of community living, “is not something that can be lacquered on (like a gate); it is the quality produced by the concentration of diverse functions . . . the fundamental contradiction in the new town (gated community) concept of self containment” (Whyte 1968, 234).

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Redefining the City as Walled Common

Gated communities are a new form of residential space with restricted access such that normally public spaces have been privatized. They are intentionally designed security communities with designated perimeters, usually walls or fences, and en- trances controlled by gates and sometimes guards. They include both new subur- ban housing arrangements and older inner-city areas retrofitted with barricades and fences. They represent a different phenomenon than apartment or condo- minium buildings with security systems or doormen so familiar to Whyte who lived in Manhattan. There, a doorman precludes public access only to a lobby or hallways, common space within a building. Gated communities preclude public access to roads, sidewalks, parks, open space, playgrounds, in other words, to all resources that in earlier eras would have been open and accessible to all citizens of a locality. And, because these amenities are maintained privately through home- owner or condo fees, the willingness to support parallel facilities for the rest of the populace through taxes is accordingly diminished. As many as eight million Amer- icans have already sought out this new refuge from the problems of urbanization, and their numbers are growing.1

Gated communities are proliferating, as are other elite forms of residential de- velopment like the resort developments, luxury retirement communities, and high-security subdivisions with which they overlap. Their rapid spread over the last several years results from a number of socio-demographic trends, especially the expansion of the size of the upper-middle-class with rising disposable income, combined with a rising tide of immigration and the threats of terrorism in public places.

Gates range from elaborate two-story guardhouses manned twenty-four hours a day to rollback wrought iron gates to simple electronic arms. Entrances are usually built with one lane for guests and visitors and a second lane for residents, who may open the gates with an electronic card, a punched-in code, or a remote control. Some gates with round-the-clock security require all cars to pass the guard, issuing identification stickers for residents’ cars. Unmanned entrances have intercom systems, some with video monitors, for visitors asking for entrance clearance (fig- ure 1).

All these security mechanisms are intended to do more than just deter crime: they also insulate residents from the common annoyances of city life like solicitors and canvassers, mischievous teenagers, and strangers of any kind, malicious or not. The gates provide sheltered common space, open space not penetrable by outsid- ers. Especially to the residents of upper-end gated communities, who can already afford to live in very low crime environments, the privacy and convenience that controlled access provides is of greater importance than protection from crime.

Gated communities in the United States go directly back to the era of the robber

barons, when the very wealthy sealed themselves from the “hoi polloi.” One of the earliest was the community of Tuxedo Park, built in 1885 behind gates and barbed wire an hour by train from New York. Tuxedo Park was designed with wooded lake views, an “admirable entrance,” a community association, and a village outside the gates to house the servants and merchants to serve it (Stern 1981).

In the same period, private gated streets were built in St. Louis, Missouri, and other cities for the mansions of the rich. Later, during the twentieth century, more gated, fenced compounds were built by members of the East Coast and Hollywood aristocracies.

These early gated preserves were very different from the gated subdivisions of today. They were uncommon places for uncommon people. Now, however, the merely affluent, the top fifth of Americans, and even many of the middle class can also have barriers between themselves and the rest of us as a sign of arrival into a new separate—but never equal—American elite.

Gated communities remained rarities until the advent of the master planned retirement developments of the late 1960s and 1970s. Communities like Leisure World in Arizona, Maryland, and other states were the first places where average Americans could wall themselves off. Gates soon spread to resorts and country club communities, and then to middle-class suburban subdivisions. In the 1980s, upscale real estate speculation and the trend to conspicuous consumption saw the proliferation of gated communities built around golf courses, designed for exclu- sivity, prestige, and leisure. Gates became available in developments from mobile home parks to suburban single-family tracts to high-density townhouse develop- ments. Gated communities have increased in number and extent dramatically since the early 1980s, becoming ubiquitous in many areas of the country (figure 2). Today, new towns are routinely built with gated villages, and there are even entire incorporated cities that feature guarded entrances.

These developments are descendants not just of a tradition of elite enclaves but of decades of suburban design and public land use policy. Whyte (1968) in The Last Landscape warned that this pattern was antihuman and antinature. Gates are firmly within the suburban tradition of street patterns and zoning designed to re- duce the access of nonresidents and increase homogeneity. Gates enhance and harden the suburbanness of the suburbs, and they attempt to suburbanize the city. This suburbanization of the city is precisely what Whyte opposed in his essays on sprawl (LaFarge 2000).

From their earliest examples, the suburbs aimed to create a new version of the country estate of the landed gentry: a healthy, beautiful, protected preserve, far from the noise and bustle of the crowded cities. But demographic, social, and cul- tural changes permeate throughout society, and the suburbs are changing and di- versifying. Suburban no longer automatically means safe, beautiful, or ideal. As the suburbs age and as they become more diverse, they are encountering problems

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Figure 1 Access is restricted by electronic gates. (Photo courtesy Kathleen M. Lafferty/RMES.)

Figure 2 Another “waterfront” gated community under construction. (Photo courtesy Kathleen M. Lafferty/RMES.)

once thought of as exclusively “urban”: crime, vandalism, disinvestment, and blight. Gated communities seek to counter these trends by maintaining the ambi- ance of exclusivity and safety the suburbs once promised. They exist not just to wall out crime or traffic or strangers, but also to lock in economic position. It is hoped that greater control over the neighborhood will mean greater stability in property values.

Gated communities are elite not just because of what they include, but also because of what they exclude: the public, strangers, and “undesirables” (Whyte’s non–politically correct but gently ironic term). The result is privacy and control. Gated communities center on this ability to control the environment, in part be- cause home buyers believe it will help protect their property values. Stability in the neighborhood comes from similarity in the makeup of the residents and in the houses in the development, and that is expected to mean stability in property val- ues (interview with Curt Wellwood, Curt Wellwood Homes, Dallas, Texas, Novem- ber 29, 1994). This consequence is the direct antithesis of the public space that Whyte promoted as the best vehicle to reduce crime and improve community life. Whyte saw public space as an essential ingredient in creating the interactions that promote and preserve community.

Social Security Behind the Walls

Through their homeowner associations and the codes, covenants, and restrictions built into the deeds, the new privatized communities are also able to control and exclude a vast range of down-market markers. From the highest-end developments down to those that are most modestly middle class, gated communities regulate out any possibility of activities and objects considered lower class, such as the un- guarded open space, plazas, and parks that Whyte favored.

Status is important to most people, be they working class or affluent; the differ- ences lie in what status symbols are most highly valued and especially which are accessible. According to the American Housing Survey (AHS), among those house- holds that earn more than $161,481 a year, living in an exclusive neighborhood is considered a symbol of status or achievement by nearly half; among the very wealthy, who earn more than $400,000 a year, living in an exclusive neighborhood is important to nearly 60 percent (AHS 2002).

Those in the middle class—those just behind this large affluent class—are now more able to afford the symbols of status previously reserved for the very rich. The American middle class has expanded greatly since World War II. Household size has dropped across the board. Household net worth has more than doubled. This transformation is spectacular by any measure, and it has allowed a distinctively new set of economic behaviors to emerge. This new middle class has substantial buying power. The average disposable income is increasing from 1969 when only

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8.3 percent of families with children had high disposable incomes to 15.5 percent in 1996 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1997, 23–196). Owning a second home is also part of the new higher-income affluent lifestyle. In 1992, almost 35 percent of all middle class Americans considered having a vacation home an essential lifestyle feature, up 10 percent over the previous decade (“Four Income Families” 1995). While developers are finding it hard to build affordable homes for the average American, there is no dearth of market for resort properties. As a result of high levels of disposable income, moderately wealthy people in their early forties are able to afford very high status properties that they live in for only part of the year. And more and more often, both luxury developments and second home commu- nities are gated.

Gated communities also cater to two large, new submarkets. New, active, afflu- ent retirees make up the first class. Retirees are living longer and better than ever before. There are now more than twenty-five million retirees in the United States, and unlike the 1960s, most of these live independently. They are getting younger; the average retirement age is now only sixty. They are wealthier than in earlier de- cades as well. People over age sixty-five with incomes in excess of $40,000 climbed from only about 5 percent in 1970 to more than 15 percent in 1990, and those with incomes below $10,000 fell from 50 percent to less than 30 percent (Hull 1995).

“Flexecutives,” the new well-paid, status-conscious, and mobile corporate execu- tives, make up the second new submarket. Their numbers are increasing as tele- communications and new forms of corporate structure make smaller organizations the rule rather than the exception. The newest such developments are occurring outside major metropolitan areas. They are now in what were once relatively small towns and the outer edges of exurbia, and in places like Santa Fe, New Mexico, far from the crime and congestion of big-city regions. These communities must offer this new class of executives considerable charm and visual appeal with “unique architecture; culture; outdoor recreation opportunities; high quality, unusual retail facilities; and in particular restaurants—all in a small town setting” (Charles Lesser and Co. 1994). Many gated communities are designed especially for this elite group, providing the distinctive environment and exclusive image the buyers desire.

For developers too, gates are seen as an economic benefit. With their often elabo- rate guardhouses and entrance architecture, gates provide the crucial product dif- ferentiation and clear identity that is needed in crowded and competitive suburban new home markets. And, although there is no clear evidence that gates add a price premium, many builders report faster sales in gated communities, and quicker turnover means thousands in additional profits (Carlton 1990, 1:3).

The gate is part of the package of design and amenities that sell houses by selling a lifestyle image with which buyers wish to identify. As one developer of gated communities in Florida said: “Selling houses is showbiz. You go after the emotions. We don’t go out and show a gate in the ad. But we try to imply and do it subtly. In

our ad, we don’t even show houses. We show a yacht. We show an emotion” (inter- view with Ami Tanel, Avatar Development Corporation, December 12, 1994). In part, it is the emotional response to race and class that these subtle images— codes—help to convey.

What It All Means

A gated community, with its controlled entrance and walled perimeter, is the very image of elite space. A gate means exclusivity, the foundation of what it means to be in an elite group. Although gated communities have traditionally been an op- tion only for the economic elite, the very richest Americans, now they are part of the residential options of the merely affluent and even of the middle class, yet they retain the image of eliteness because they retain the function of exclusivity. The people inside gated communities may not be elite, but their developments share all the traditional markers of the communities of the elite. These communities place the Whyte notion of communal residential space on its head as his notion is trans- formed into a new mark of exclusivity.

The exclusionary ideal of gated communities arises from the status associated with social distance. Of course, social distance has long been a goal of our settle- ment patterns; after all, the suburbs were built on separation and segregation. The suburban pattern, which gates are meant to maintain and intensify, erected social and physical walls between communities, compartmentalizing residential space. That is not what Whyte intended. He favored the creation of space that pulled people together, not that created new wedges between them. As Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg say as if speaking for Whyte in Hollow City (2000, 75): “A city is a place where people have, as a rule less private space and fewer private amenities because they share public goods—public parks, libraries, streets, cafes, plazas, schools, transit—and in the course of sharing them become part of a com- munity, become citizens.”

Today, with a new set of problems pressing on our metropolitan areas, separa- tion is still the solution to which Americans turn. In the suburbs, gates are the logical extension of the original suburban drive. In the city, gates and barricades are sometimes called “cul-de-sac-ization,” a term that clearly reflects the design goal to create out of the existing urban grid a street pattern as close to suburbs, which Whyte would oppose. Gates and walls are an attempt to suburbanize our cities. Neighborhoods have always been able to exclude some potential residents through discrimination and housing costs. Now, gates and walls exclude not only “undesirable” new residents, but also casual passersby and the people from the neighborhood next door.

The exclusivity of these communities goes beyond questions of public access to their streets. They are yet another manifestation of the trend toward privatization

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of public services: the private provision of recreational facilities, open space and common space, security, infrastructure, even social services and schools. Gated communities are substituting for or augmenting public services with services pro- vided by the homeowners’ association. The same is true of all of the private-street subdivisions, which are now the dominant form of new residential development. In gated communities, however, this privatization is enhanced by the physical con- trol of access to the development.

The trend toward privatized government and communities is part of the more general trend of fragmentation, and the resulting loss of connection and social contact is weakening the bonds of mutual responsibility and the social contract. The problem is that in gated communities and other privatized enclaves, the local community with which many residents identify is the one within the gates only. Their homeowners’ association dues are like taxes; and the responsibility to their community, such as it is, ends at that gate. At a focus group with public officials in 1994, one city official in Plano, Texas, summed up his view of the attitude of the gated community residents in his town: “ ‘I took care of my responsibility, I’m safe in here, I’ve got my guard gate; I’ve paid my [homeowner association] dues, and I’m responsible for my streets. Therefore, I have no responsibility for the com- monweal, because you take care of your own.”

Residents of gated communities, like other people in cities and suburbs across the country, vary in the degree they personally feel the connections and duties of community within and outside their developments. The difference is that in gated communities—with their privatized streets, recreation, local governance, and security—residents have less need of the public realm outside their gates than those living in traditional open neighborhoods. If they choose to withdraw, there are fewer ties to break, less daily dependence on the greater community. In making this choice, we descend the scale of democracy and do harm to our society and our as- pirations as a nation. Holly Whyte would have been amazed and ashamed at this course of our democracy.

Note

1. Definitive numbers on gated communities are now available from the U.S. Census. According to the American Housing Survey (AHS) conducted by the U.S. Census in 2001, more than seven million Americans live in gated or controlled-access communities. The West has the largest number of gated communities (11 percent of the total), with 6.8 percent in the South, 3.1 percent in the Northeast, and only 2.1 percent in the Midwest (AHS 2002). From surveys conducted by the Community Association Institute, the organization that represents community associations, the average number of units in community associations is 240 (2,995,200 units in gated communities). From 2000 census data, average household size is 2.45 people. Renters are the largest number of persons living behind gates and barri- cades, accounting for 67.9 percent of all residents. Whites are 80 percent of the population living in walled or controlled-access communities. Blacks are 12.5 percent and Hispanics 12.5 percent (AHS 2002).

References

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Charles Lesser and Co. 1994. Flexecutives: Redefining the American dream. Advisory (Fall):1–8.

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Hull, J. 1995. The state of the nation. Time (30 January).

Jaffe, I. 1992. Gated communities controversy in Los Angeles. All Things Considered. National Public Radio, 11 August. Interview with a member of Citizens Against Gated Enclaves.

LaFarge, A. 2000. The essential William H. Whyte. New York: Fordham University Press.
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———. 1978. The social life of small urban places. Washington, DC: The Conservation Foundation.