A River Runs Through It

This summer, OpinionWorks of Annapolis conducted a poll for the Baltimore Sun on perceptions of crime. The study found that a mounting fear of crime was prompting many residents to change their daily routines and was affecting their relationships with the city. One woman reported that she had stopped sitting on her front stoop. Another man said that he would no longer go out after sunset.
Interestingly, though, most respondents had never actually experienced a crime firsthand. Steve Raabe, president of OpinionWorks, concluded that there was a “worry factor that’s 20 percent higher than the experience factor.” It seems that urban crime maintains a presence even in relatively safe communities in the form of heightened anxiety: Respondents’ sense that something could happen influenced them as powerfully as if they had been actual victims.

Residents of Baltimore, where violent crime is in fact high, are not the only ones to suffer such apprehension. Some of the safest places in the country are subdivided into gated communities, patrolled by private security companies, and wired into ADT. (A growing number of municipalities report that false house alarms account for a large percentage of wasted police time.)

Setha M. Low, a professor of environmental psychology at the City University of New York, has studied how perceptions stack up against the realities of crime, how anxiety impacts our communities, our personal environments, and our shared public spaces. Low has written extensively on gated communities and landscapes of fear. Her 2003 book, Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America, highlights years of interviews with residents living in these suburban fortresses. She continues to study why gated communities are the fastest-growing housing form in the U.S., and why, in a post-9/11 world, fear of crime is rife in the American home.

The Rise of the Gated Community

Home is often seen as a haven from everyday life. It anchors us and provides a place of comfort. It embodies the familiar and a wide variety of personal aspirations and values. The privacy and security of home, however, are a double-edged sword: They protect us and our possessions, but they also enslave us as we become more distrustful, add locks, and build higher fences. This paradox becomes especially magnified in the gated community.

Contemporary gated communities in the U.S. can be traced to year-round family estates established for the very rich in the 19th century, such as Llewellyn Park in Eagle Ridge, New Jersey, built during the 1850s, and Sea Gate in Brooklyn, which established its own private police force in 1899. Middle-class Americans first walled themselves off in planned retirement communities of the 1960s, such as Leisure World of Seal Beach, California, which now has some 9,000 residents, or nearly one-third of the entire city. Real estate speculation in the 1980s accelerated the development of gated communities centered by golf courses, designed for exclusivity, prestige, and leisure. By the early 1990s, almost every condominium development on Long Island of more than 50 units had a guardhouse. Currently, one-third of all new communities in Southern California are gated, and the percentage is similar around Phoenix, Arizona, the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and parts of Florida. In areas such as Tampa, gated communities account for four out of five home sales of $300,000 or more. From 1995 to 2001, the number of people living in gated or walled communities jumped from 4 million to 16 million—or 6 percent of all households in the U.S.

Differences in the social values of and motivations to build or inhabit gated communities divide them into three categories, according to findings from a 1997 national survey conducted by Edward Blakely and Mary Gail Synder. The “lifestyle” community, including retirement communities and golf and country club developments, is primarily about privatization of services. “Elite” communities—enclaves for the wealthy and “executive community” developments—are concerned with stability and homogeneity. The third, “security zone” communities, are typically neighborhoods retrofitted with gates or barricades, blocking street access to reduce crime and exclude the rest of society. They include the “city perch”—a defensive, often chain-link fencing of a threatened neighborhood in the center of the city—the “suburban perch”—the fencing of an existing inner suburban neighborhood surrounded by deteriorating conditions—and the “barricade perch”—where concrete barricades are used to partially close off the streets.

Most gated communities, however, follow the same basic pattern: a residential development surrounded by walls, fences, or earth banks covered with bushes and shrubs, with a secured entrance. Inaccessible land such as a nature reserve sometimes serves as protection, or in a few cases, a guarded bridge may be used. Security inside the development often consists of a neighborhood watch organization or professional security personnel who patrol on foot or by automobile. Gated communities restrict access not just to residents’ homes, but also to roads, parks, facilities, and open space contained within the enclosure. Many enhance their appeal with golf courses, tennis courts, fitness centers, swimming pools, lakes, or unspoiled landscape, while commercial or public facilities are rare.

The Los Angeles River is thousands of years old, and parts of its 32-mile run through the city have been sandwiched in concrete for almost 70 years. New plans to revitalize the river by improving access, building riverside parks, cleaning up the water, and recreating a more natural appearance will take decades to implement. The Los Angeles multimedia firm Plasmatic Concepts has condensed the ins and outs of the river’s history and possible new lease on life into a 27-minute documentary, straightforwardly titled The Los Angeles River. The aim, according to codirector Sarah Lorenzen, is to “make the river issues visible:” L.A.’s complex master plan for the river, comprised of incremental community-based projects, puts environmental concerns, development, and the needs of communities along the river’s banks at odds in many ways, and film can go a long way to clarify what is at stake in these tensions.

From the hundreds of people involved in the plan, the directors interviewed a representative sample of 11: community activists and politicians, environmentalists and planners, and a local historian. While some wax rhapsodic about the natural beauties of the river and its ecosystem, others worry about the consequences of its greening: the return of the floods that led to its canalization in the first place, or the potential displacement of lower-income residents and employment-providing industries, as the river banks attract residential development. An independent project, the film as a whole aims “to get a really wide perspective,” say Lorenzen, not to advocate a particular view. “This wasn’t meant to be for insiders who really know about the river, but as a primer for the general public—to get them interested in participating in the dialogue.”

Extensive public involvement is a central component of the master plan. To that end, the filmmakers released the documentary on the Internet and in a series of public screenings coinciding with the February 2007 completion of the master plan. “Film is more captivating than a two-hour community meeting that attracts people who are already involved,” says Lorenzen. Plasmatic Concepts hopes to develop the documentary video as a tool for understanding other large-scale, long-term urban projects in Los Angeles and beyond. In a course called on “Urbanism and Film” that she teaches at Cal Poly Pomona, Lorenzen has architecture students to make short films on urban issues so they learn to synthesize complex information into five visually appealing minutes. They are exploring film not only as a format for architectural research, but also for communication and public engagement an idea which echoes her own experience: Lorenzen found, in making The Los Angeles River, that many people who might not have otherwise gotten involved in the film were happy to be interviewed on camera—“Film gives you access to people.”