Behind Bars

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.

Making “Nice”; Making “Safe”

From a broader perspective, the gated community boom came in response to changes in the political economy of late-20th-century urban America: the increasing mobility of capital, marginalization of the labor force, and dismantling of the welfare state in the 1970s, accelerated by “Reaganomics” of the 1980s.

In his 1991 book The Politics of Rich and Poor, Kevin Phillips notes that the shift to the right during the Reagan years intensified an ideological focus on free market capitalism. Power, wealth, and income all tilted toward the richest portions of the population. While the income share of the upper 20 percent of Americans rose from 41.6 to 44 percent from 1980 to 1988, the average after-tax income of the lowest ten percent dropped 10.5 percent from 1977 to 1987, producing an increasingly bifurcated class system. These economic and political changes intensified inequalities of neighborhood resources and services, while escalating housing prices left more families homeless and without healthcare.

Globalization and the resultant economic restructuring further weakened existing social relations, and traditional ways of maintaining social order, such as the police and schools, were no longer seen as effective. The gated residential community became a socially acceptable solution for neighborhood residents who felt threatened by this breakdown in social control. The transformation of established neighborhoods into gated communities—a step towards building what author Mike Davis dubbed the “fortress city”—became an alternative strategy for regulating and patrolling the urban poor, comprised predominantly of Latino and black minorities. But while the protected area shields its privileged few occupants from the “dangerous” behavior of outsiders, it has the drawback of diminishing collective responsibility for the collective safety of society.

In a regional survey of 641 gated communities in the Phoenix area in 2000-2001 conducted by geography professor Klaus J. Frantz, residents said they moved to feel safer and because of their fear of crime. They take advantage of gating to stabilize their housing values, to guarantee service provision, and to control the physical and social quality of their neighborhood. “They feel that this is a way to guarantee that the community that they have bought ... will not change drastically in the course of time,” Frantz writes. My own ethnographic study of gated communities in New York City, suburban Long Island, San Antonio, and Mexico City found that residents moved for safety, security, community, and “niceness,” as well as wanting to live near people like themselves because of a fear of “others” and of crime. This attitude spills over into residents of middle-class and upper-middle-class neighborhoods who may not move to gated communities, but who cordon themselves off as a class when they build fences, cut off relationships with neighbors, and move out in response to problems and conflicts.

Legislating Separation

A legal framework giving residents the right to control their shared spaces grew up alongside the early history of the gated community. In 1928, lawyer and planner Charles Stern Ascher formalized the homeowners’ association (HOA), which relegated public control to a private entity. In legalese, a neighborhood governed by an HOA is called a common interest development, or “a community in which the residents own or control common areas or shared amenities,” according to author Dennis Judd in his book The Rise of the New Walled Cities.
Municipal government has further supported private enclaves through zoning laws, restrictive ordinances, quiet laws, and legislation against domestic and interpersonal violence, all of which have helped redefine behavioral norms. As Sally Merry notes in her 1993 article “Mending Walls and Building Fences: Constructing the Private Neighborhood,” these laws and social ordinances enforce middle-class rules of civility and, by policing non-conforming uses of the environment, further segregate family and neighborhood life.

The evolution of pod, enclave, and cul-de-sac suburban designs refined the ability of land use planners and designers to develop suburban subdivisions where people of different income groups would have little to no contact with one another. Regulated resident behavior, house type, and “taste culture” are more subtle means of control. Even landscape aesthetics function as a form of exclusion when developments adhere to stringent rules to make everything look consistent and “nice.” (The number of legal proceedings in California courts has grown as some residents attempt to deregulate their rigidly controlled environments, but litigants have not been successful.)

Common interest developments not only guarantee a bundle of goods including security, exclusiveness, and an extraordinary level of amenities (a promise “nestled at the center of all advertisements for the new walled cities,” according to Judd), but the high level of regulation may allow a more efficient—albeit more exclusive—provision of basic goods and services than municipal government. Chris Webster, a professor of urban planning at the Cardiff School of City and Regional Planning, has described these modern gated communities as “new spatially defined markets in which innovative neighborhood products are supplied by a new style of service producer.” Rather than being civic “taxpayers” who pay for public goods and services that are not always available, residents become “club members” who pay homeowners’ fees for private services shared only by their community.

Anxious Homes

Walls can provide a refuge from people who are deviant or unusual, but the vigilance necessary to patrol these borders actually heightens residents’ anxiety and sense of isolation, rather than making them feel safer. A growing middle-class status anxiety compounds these worries. Fear of downward mobility due to declining family incomes, shrinking job markets, and periodic economic recessions has increased concern that children will not be able to sustain a middle-class lifestyle. Assurances that walls and gates maintain home values and provide some kind of class or distinction are heard by prospective buyers as a partial solution to upholding their middle- or upper-middle-class position, as a way symbolically separating from other families who have fallen on hard times, families who share many of their values and aspirations, but who for some reason “did not make it.”

National hysteria about urban crime adds to the psychological lure of these places. News stories chronicle daily murders, rapes, drive-by shootings, drug busts, and child kidnappings—often with excessive and extended media coverage. Not surprisingly, then, despite an overall decline in violent crime since 1990, the fear of being victimized has increased since the mid-1960s. Recent concerns with terrorism have reinforced worries about domestic crime. Darrell M. West and Marion Orr of Brown University, for example, found that in Providence, Rhode Island, “The more people talked about 9/11, the more worried they became about becoming a victim.” Avoiding downtown, staying home, increasing home surveillance, hiring professional security guards, building home-based safe rooms, and stockpiling supplies in case of an attack have merged responses to terrorism and crime into common behavior.

Living in a gated community suppresses and masks the inherent anxieties and conflicting social values of modern urban and suburban life. It solves the dilemma of how to protect oneself and one’s children from danger, crime, and unknown others but still perpetuate open, friendly neighborhoods and comfortable homes—the stuff of nostalgia for idealized childhoods when neighbors left their doors unlocked. Architectural symbols such as gates and walls seem a rational defense against the moral inconsistencies of everyday life. Residents argue that walls help keep out criminals, and they justify their choice in terms of perceived consequences—“look at my friends who were randomly robbed living in a non-gated development.”

Gated residential communities, however, intensify social segregation, racism, and exclusionary land use practices, and raise a number of conflicting values. Blakely and Synder found in their study that only 8 percent of the residents surveyed characterized their community as “neighborly and tight-knit,” while another 28 percent indicated that their developments were “distant or private” in feeling. The sense of well-being comes at the price of maintaining private guards and gates as well as conforming to extensive HOA rules and regulations. Individual freedom and ease of access are limited to achieve greater privacy and social control for the community as a whole. Security enhancements contribute to the sense of a police state but ultimately don’t address citizens’ concerns about the vulnerability of the home or the state. In truth, there is no evidence that homes in gated communities maintain their value better than those in non-gated ones. Nor is there evidence that gated communities are safer.

The above essay was adapted in part from two reports written by Setha M. Low. One was originally published in Cybergeo: Revue Européenne de Géographie, No. 349, October, 2006, and the second was presented at Princeton University in 2007and is being published later this year in Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National Insecurity State edited by Michael Sorkin.