Is The Gate Closing On Gated Communities?
The luster seems to have come off of gated communities: not only is the market for them shrinking, but they are facing rates of crime and foreclosure no different from other forms of development.
"[G]ated communities are no less crime-prone than open ones, and Gopal Ahluwalia, senior vice president of research at the National Association of Home Builders, confirms this: There are studies indicating that there are no differences in the crime in gated communities and non-gated communities. The security guards often wave people on in, especially if they look like they're on a legitimate mission -- such as the faux moving truck that entered a Fort Meyers' gated community last spring and left with a houseful of furniture. Or the crime comes from within, as in the Hilton Head Plantation community in South Carolina where a rash of crime committed by resident teenagers has led to the imposition of a curfew."
"Most recently, America's gated communities have been blighted by foreclosures. Yes, even people who were able to put together the down payment on a half-million dollar house can be ambushed by Adjustable Rate Mortgages. Newsweek reports that foreclosures are devastating the gated community of Black Mountain Vista in Henderson NV, where "yellow patches [now] blot the spartan lawns and phone books lie on front porches, their covers bleached from weeks under the desert sun." Similarly, according to the Orlando Sentinel, "countless homeowners overwhelmed by their mortgages are taking off and leaving behind algae-filled swimming pools and knee-high weeds" in one local gated community."
"So, for people who sought, not just prosperity, but perfection, here's another sad end to the American dream, or at least their ethnically cleansed version thereof: boarded-up McMansions, plastic baggies scudding over overgrown lawns, and, in the Orlando case, a foreclosure-induced infestation of snakes. You can turn away the Mexicans, the African-Americans, the teenagers and other suspect groups, but there's no fence high enough to keep out the repo man."
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Enemy at the gates
I live in a gated apartment complex so the dynamics are different. It's not racially exclusive. I doubt gated communities encourage more residents fearful of "outsiders"; rather, fear of crime in general leads Americans to change their lives. The crime rate in the U.S. dropped for nearly 15 years and has only recently gone up but in polls people falsely believed crime was increasing over the years.
"There are studies indicating that there are no differences in the crime in gated communities and non-gated communities."
That's interesting but I wonder about the methodology. For example, putting iron bars on your windows should stop intruders going through the windows but I think statistics would show homes with barred windows had more crime than non-barred homes simply because there was more crime in the neighborhood to begin with. I don't like gated communities based on my own experience on having police cars turning on their sirens or lights because there's no gate guard and I have had go open the gate late at night. I had to go through a criminal background check to live there but that apparently doesn't stop unruly visitors or domestic violence cases.
"Before we turn all of America into a gated community, with a 700 mile steel fence running along the southern border, we should consider the mixed history of exclusionary walls. Ancient and medieval European towns huddled behind massive walls, only to face ever-more effective catapults, battering rams and other siege engines. More recently, the Berlin Wall, which the East German government described fondly as a protective "anti-fascism wall," fell to a rebellious citizenry. Israel, increasingly sealed behind its anti-Palestinian checkpoints and wall, faced an outbreak of neo-Nazi crime in September -- coming, strangely enough, from within."
The last I checked America doesn't have walled cities so it's doubtful criminals here need tanks to break in when they could simply go to a less secure neighborhood. The writer clearly doesn't know recent history well. The Berlin Wall was very effective in keeping East Germans and it wasn't to keep West Berliners out. The number of suicide bombers from the West Bank dropped dramatically with the Israeli fence so it's doing its intended purpose. Neo-Nazi Israelis aren't that numberous I'm guessing they certainly didn't arise because of the fence.
The Real Problem with Gated Communities
"The writer clearly doesn't know recent history well. The Berlin Wall was very effective in keeping East Germans and it wasn't to keep West Berliners out. "
Yes concertina wire, machine guns, and minefields are quite an effective barrier and a must if you're serious about keeping people in or out. The joke about "gated communities" is that the easily traversed walls and typically unmanned gates are illusory in terms of the protection that they are perceived to offer. However their social impact is very real and they reinforce the message in America that the public realm and civic spirit are dead and therefore not worth caring about. Really it's a reflection of how growing income equality is slowly turning us into a 3rd world country where the haves barricade and isolate themselves from the havenots.
Gates are an effect not a cause
"However their social impact is very real and they reinforce the message in America that the public realm and civic spirit are dead and therefore not worth caring about. Really it's a reflection of how growing income equality is slowly turning us into a 3rd world country where the haves barricade and isolate themselves from the havenots."
Gated communities are just an extension of the white flight, suburbanization, failing public schools, deindustrialization and more. To be more exact, growing income inequality may be not our highest goal. See the link below on the Gini coefficient. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
Income inequality has generally grown since 1968 (and 1968 wasn't too socially stable for the U.S.) which was long before widespread use of gated communities. Also, equality income can mean equality in poverty as well. Hungary and Ukraine have greater income equality than the U.S. but you probably wouldn't want to live there long-term. By the same token, China when it was more communist-oriented had more income equality but now it doesn't because its economy has been growing at 10% a year. Some Chinese benefited much more than others but most Chinese are better off.
I've heard it expressed this way- Would you rather make $50,000/yr if your neighbor made $100,000/yr or would rather make $25,000/yr if your neighbor only made $40,000/yr? It's a political decision as to how much income redistribution matters to individual voters.
Growing Income Inequality
"To be more exact, growing income inequality may be not our highest goal."
Growing inequality is not my highest goal, but it seemed to be the highest goal of the Reagan and two Bush administrations.
Apart from the typo, you are right to say that growing equality is harmful if it goes so far that it reduces the incentive to learn skills or make risky investments, making the economy less efficient.
But inequality in the US has gone far beyond what is needed for incentives and economic efficiency. We have the greatest inequality of any developed nation - and judging from the decline of the dollar, our economy is not more efficient than the other developed nations.
I think Bill Gates would have had plenty of incentive to invest in Microsoft in order to make $2 billion or $3 billion. He didn't need tens of billions of dollars to create that incentive.
"Would you rather make $50,000/yr if your neighbor made $100,000/yr or would rather make $25,000/yr if your neighbor only made $40,000/yr?"
You are assuming that greater inequality benefits everyone but benefits those at the top of the ladder more. In reality, the lowest quintile of Americans now earn less in real terms than they did in the 1970s, before Reagan deliberately adopted policies to increase inequality on the grounds that everyone would benefit from the trickle-down effect of faster growth.
Of course, greater inequality is caused primarily by larger economic changes, such as loss of manufacturing jobs to globalization, but we could reduce inequality dramatically with a more progressive tax system, including higher taxes on the very rich and a larger tax credit for families that earn low incomes.
For America's low and moderate income families, the real question raised by our tax system is: "Would you rather make $20,000/yr if your neighbor made $2,000,000/yr or would rather make $25,000/yr if your neighbor only made $1,500,000/yr?"
Charles Siegel
Check this out
One of my favorite "economists" or pseudo-economists, in this case, had something interesting to say on this subject. Also, according to the Gini coefficient, the US does not have the most income inequality. It appears that distinction belongs to Brazil. Read the article in the link below. I generally agree with him on all points here.
http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/economist/19750
Another Problem With Gated Communities
They also discourage walking. Because they have only one entrance (or a few at the most), they cannot be part of a walkable street grid.
Charles Siegel