April 28, 2005

• The only action I would like would be to lock the gate so they can't get out. Call me crazy but if you are afraid of people, then maybe you should live out where there AREN'T ANY PEOPLE! This is up there with communities that won't let you put lawn ornaments in your yard. "What about the property value???" I wonder what nosey asshole neighbors does to property value????
• jccalhoun: do you have a front door? do you keep it closed? * I'm not a big fan of gated communities, but I'm feeling devil's advocate-ish today.
• I don't really see the problem. They live there voluntarily - no one is forced into a gated community. As for the social ramifications, they don't want to deal with the outside world, great. It just means that the outside world doesn't have to deal with them, either. There are plenty of places to live that aren't gated, many of them are just as nice (in a different way). So basically, what's all the hubbub, bub?
• what a stupid idea
• But what is the gated community protecting itself from? What in the outside world repelled them into gated communities? Does a GC say something about the minds of those who live within? What about kids who grow up in these bubbled suburbias? How will their worldview differ from those outside?
• But what is the gated community commune protecting itself from? What in the outside world repelled them into gated communities communes? Does a GC commune say something about the minds of those who live within? What about kids who grow up in these bubbled suburbias? How will their worldview differ from those outside?
• Just part of the continuum. Some of us lock the bedroom door, some the house door, some the driveway gate, some the neighborhood gate, some of us close our borders..... We all have our boundaries..at some point most of us will say "back off, your standing too close" Why worry if someone has a different sense of personal space than you do...
• "your" of course meaning "you're" damn spell checker should know I meant the OTHER spelling!
• those elitist republican fucks put up a fence. fuck them, let's stand on ladder and look at their houses. well, almost; a bunch of shrubs are in the way so you have to look over those, and even then no one is going to notice this. but boy we are really making a statement. we're so rebellious and smarter than everyone. i'm sure lots of people will give a shit about this. i am going to listen to bob marley now while i get ready for the revolution.
• I was born and raised out in the country and we didn't lock our door. My parents still don't lock the door when they leave the house for the day. They didn't have to build a fence around their house to feel safe. I usually lock my door but only because I life in a college town with lots of poor college students. If I still lived in my patent's town I wouldn't lock the door. I don't close the door when I use the bathroom. People who live in "exclusive" communities are elitist fools. They can stay in their gates. I don't want them out in society. I hate people, but at least i'm honest about it. The only things gates do is make you look like an ass and exclude people. As long as you are inside a cage with other people you can't be safe. Of course if one of my friends ever bought an SUV I would laugh at them and make them feel like an ass everychance I could, so maybe I'm just cranky...
• Is this was passes for art these days? Harrassing people with more money than you have? Envy != art
• You know, I don't think I've ever seen a gated community that had an actual gate. What do you care where other people choose to live? Don't like gated communities - so don't live in them. No one says boo to a goose when people pay collossal bucks to live in a 1000 square foot shoebox on Manhattan - so why the hubbub when someone pays colossal bucks to live in a big ass McMansion with a rent-a-cop in a little shack at the end of the street? The whole world is filled with jealous busybodies.
• to rerail: I'm not sure that peeking over fences is art, exactly, regardless of the color of your ladder.
• Since I got accepted to NYU grad school but couldn't afford to go, I also think people who live in Manhattan are stupid too. I'm pretty sure I'm just cranky though.
• My problem with gated communities is that they privatize community space. It divides us into "haves" and "have nots". I'm really disappointed that so many people here seem to think they're not a bad thing. There are other flavors of ice cream other than vanilla.
• As far as "gated communities" go, they can't really keeop us out if we're determined to get in. And hey, it's so nice they'll all be in one place when the smart riots break out. "Why trash and loot your own neighborhood? Ride on out to Brentwood Circle!"
• I'm a mint chip man, myself- but some people like vanilla best. How are they privitizing community space? People buy the lots, it's their land, they own it and can do what they like. It's not like people are taking over Yosemite and slapping up these neighborhoods. How does that divide us? We're all individuals making choices for ourselves based on our resources and tastes. Some choose to live in these communities, and some don't. Why should one somehow inevitably conflict with the other?
• Do they use utilities provided through taxation? Are all the roads, sewers, etc. solely paid for by the communities?
• well, they pay taxes for all those governement services. I'm really disappointed that so many people here seem to think they're not a bad thing. i'm apathetic to your disappointment that i'm apathetic about those gated communities.
• I'm not sure that peeking over fences is art, exactly, regardless of the color of your ladder. I'm not sure I'd call this art either. What this project really represents is social activism. I suspect that when pressed, the authors would probably agree to this. If it is art, it's performance art, and the reactions people on both sides of the issue, not to mention the hedge, would constitute the objet d' art. How are they privitizing community space? People buy the lots, it's their land, they own it and can do what they like. True, choices regarding what we do on private property, and collectively managed private property wherein the owners agree to live in accordance with prescribed codes, covenants and restrictions is perfectly in accordance with our legal and normative values in this country. However, this is not the issue. This project seeks, I believe, to hold up a mirror to society and force a dialogue on the impulse to create these private enclaves. While the space in the community may never have been "public" to begin with, maintaining separate gated communities inhenrently denigrates the concept of public space its self. By withdrawing from the "commons" these people could be viewed as turning their backs on the social contract. At its extreme, this could be construed as a tendancy towards feudalism. While individuals have the right to do as they please on their own property, it seems dangerous when large numbers of them turn their backs on the society which has enabled them to become wealthy in the first place. If these individuals provide their own private equivalents of public commons, then the can't have any sense of ownership in those spaces and institutions. This ghettoization of the wealthy ultimately threatens the fabric of American society its self. The fact is that these communites reflect the values of the people who chose to live in them. Developers create these places because that is what the market wants. Having worked in both urban planning and real estate development, I can attest to the fact that the developers are basically value neutral, and simply provide what they understand their target market to want. Planners, on the other hand, have the job of representing the public good and establishing the perameters of what is acceptible to do with land in a community. Unfortunately, wile planners can put in place policies encouraging neo-urban development patterns, and developers can, and on occasion do, provide a community minded product, so long as a significant part of the population wishes to self segregate, they will find a way to do it. Lately, high-end "golf course communites" are the rage. I've worked on several of these projects over the past year, and as I see it, they are yet another manifestation of the desire to shelter one's self from society at large, surrounded in the trappings of an artifical paradise.
• An invitation to begin a dialogue... Mm - what would be a suitably subversive response? Building big blue platforms and staring straight back? Getting out the old hat and cane and mounting a 24/7 variety show? Mooning? Quietly moving the towers a mile up the road one night? A giant mirror?
• If people choose to live apart from society, then it is their choice, so long as they are not harming the rest of society. The argument over public space is seems ridiculous, really. The land was owned by someone or some thing, who then sold it to someone else, who then developed a gated community on it. The land was never public use land in the first place. My view is that gated communities only serve to harm themselves, if it even be called that, and the inhabitants have voluntarily chosen to take that risk. As for public spaces, what is a public space? Does a public space somehow lose it's "public-ness" just because it's access is only limited to those around it? I think not. It's still a public space for a given value of public. It's just not an everyone public space.
• It's just not an everyone public space This is why I fear for my country.
• Is this was passes for art these days? Harrassing people with more money than you have? They have gated communities in Brazil and Peru and Venezuela. not many in Denmark. Which road would you rather head down, America?
• Economic Apartheid.
• Would this be acceptable if it was a viewing tower overlooking a poor neighbourhood? Could I erect platforms looking over some slums, perhaps? How about selling tickets for people to peer in on the local gay area, or to point and stare at the single mothers? Everyone has a nesting instinct, and everyone has a privacy instinct. It's why curtains were invented. That some people can afford bigger nests and more drastic forms of curtains doesn't stop them being exactly the same thing. There's no difference between me waking up to find a platform outside of my ground floor bedroom, which has a window directly onto the street, and someone else finding one at the end of their driveway. It just shows the protagonists have no sense of correct social behaviour whatsoever. If the revolution means we all get to be assholes, I've just defected to The Man. As an aside, gated communities aren't always a hideout. They can be financially necessary. I used to live on a public, ungated, street in central London that nevertheless employed a private security guard. The neighbourhood association organised it for a small subscription. The result? A total reduction in car crime, burglary, muggings, and so on: all of it gone. That was great, but the best thing: the cost was recouped in much lower insurance charges. I'll bet that the cost of living in a gated community is waaaaay more than paid back by savings in insurance payments, especially for families with a shitload of stuff, three cars, and the like. It's not hiding from the poor, it's hiding from the Insurance Salesman.
• While there are some decent arguments for not despising these communities, they really rub me the wrong way. I feel there should be another gate right outside the first one, where people coming out are questioned about their business. DIMMN, you don't need to build a viewing tower to overlook a poor neighborhood (or any other). You can actually take a stroll right through it. That's the point of all this, after all.
• As I said earlier, a relative of mine lives in a (locked, guarded) gated cul-de-sac wiithin a larger (locked, guarded) gated community. Does he feel the need to be protected from the larger gated community, or is this just a way to separate the haves from the have mores? (Get away, you kind of rich people! Us really rich people think you smell funny!) Gated communities often contain publicly funded park space and always include publicly funded roads. My city tax dollars help pay for those, and I should have equal access to them. I have nothing against people who live in these communities; I'm sure they moved there for what they feel are valid reasons. I just don't think some people have thought about the implications of gated communities.
• I think a big part of the problem is local TV news. Nobody is going to watch a talking head say 99.9999% of everybody went about their business today and nothing out of the ordinary happened. In most markets nothing is really going on that people would feel compelled to tune in for, but the mattress king has already bought advertising so somebody needs to make a big deal of something. Shootings and car chases are cinematic so they get covered and people end up believing the world is much less safe than it really is. There's also a grain of legit concern there too. I live near an area that harbors several homeless guys that regularly go rooting thru my trash. I mostly feel pity for them so I don't hassle them, but if I had children hanging out in my backyard I might not be so laissez-faire. I eye the latino teens that gather down the block and throw gang signs at passing cars with a fair amount of suspicion too. The Chicago police are too busy writing parking tickets to spend time on these preceived minor threats so I can see why people would opt to handle the issue themselves by throwing up a wall and declaring their area private. If the property owning public felt the social contract assured their security, they might feel less need to isolate themselves.
• Gated Communities for the Poor
• If the revolution means we all get to be assholes, I've just defected to The Man. Ironically, it is just the sort of ostentatious separatism epitomized by gated communities that encourages revolution, or conflict of some sort. Space Coyote nailed it with his comparison to Venezuela vs. Denmark. The social contract only works if we maintain a sense of shared ownership in the organs of society. This includes interacting in public space.
• I don't even see it being about public spase. Say you live in a neighborhood and someone buys the house nextdoor and then puts up a ten foot tall concerte wall all around his house and a gate on the driveway. Everyone would think the owner was loony and hate the people living there. How is putting a fence around a whole bunch of houses any different? I also don't know why anyone would live in a housing developement anyway. But I've already made it clear I'm cranky and hate people.
• i live in the woods and hate city life, so i don't care one way or the other about gated communities. i just thought that art project was really stupid.
• People live housing developments because from their perspective, it is an economically rational decision. This usually involves a calculation of minimizing risk. Once people have childeren they are forced to consider things like 'if my child goes for a walk around the neighborhood, who will she encounter?' I've heard this from lots of people who like city life, but would rather be safe than sorry when it comes to their childeren. Also, in the 'burbs, you can usually count on the schools being at least minimally adequate, and you can get a lot more house for your $$$.
• The social contract only works if we maintain a sense of shared ownership in the organs of society. This includes interacting in public space. But most people don't want to share their backyard with alley shoppers or find themselves in the middle of 2 PR gangs 'interacting' in the public space. While I think the general threat to individuals is overblown, there are elements in society that violate the social contract in such a way that encourages the physical/social isolation of those who can afford the option. Until they recently fenced off the underpass area, there were so many homeless guys that had set up camp that I, a healthy 6'2" male was uncomfortable walking thru on foot. I doubted that they were dangerous to the point that I wasn't willing to call the police to roust them, but I wasn't going to take any chances. Being poor doesn't necessarily make you evil, but it can make you desperate. In the last 15 years or so, there have been a number of Chicago northside developments that, while not literally gated off, are constructed in such a way as to discourage thru traffic. I generally dislike the idea, but I can't blame them for adopting it. The people who move into those areas uphold some part of the social contract by paying significant taxes (my rough estimate is approx $6-8k/yr) which has generally improved the quality of life in a part of town that pretty much sucked bilge all thru the 70's and early 80's. If what they are asking for in return is a little sense of security, they are welcome to it.
• jccalhoun: But I've already made it clear I'm cranky and hate people. It's true. It's why we're friends.
• mmmuttly -- "Being poor doesn't necessarily make you evil" I am a fan of turns of interesting turns of phrases and language in general. I do not put the above quote here out of context to make any point or to make any inference about mmmuttly. I put it here simply because -- when read by itself -- I find it to be funny.
• I object to gated communities on any number of levels, most succinctly summed up by spacecoyote. I will also add that I lived in one, briefly, as a teenager, and dude, do you know how hard it is to throw a parents-out-of-town-kegger when all your friends have to come in and out through that stupid security gate? Think of the children!
• It is indeed a tough call where to draw the line on privacy vs. socially offensive isolationism. No single gated community is intrinsically bad, but I suspect there is a certain threshold, above which you start to see serious effects on the society. When enough of a place's citizens live in secured compounds, your society will start looking like an apartheid state. The impulse to hide behind gates is evidence of a larger problem. Why else would those with the ability to leave traditional urban spaces suddenly choose to do so (remember this is a relatively recennt phenomenon)? As I suggested earlier, simply trying to legislate these types of communities out of existance is not a viable solution.
• Being poor rich doesn't necessarily make you evil
• I can think of several reasons why a family might move into a gated community that have nothing to do with security. We seem to be assuming that the most attractive aspect of the gated community to the buyer is the gate, but that could easily be incidental! people often seek to live in the nicest neighborhood they can afford, and perhaps those properties simply happen to exist in a gated community...? Then there's measures of privacy; esprit d'affluence; the impetus to upward mobility exhibited by acquisition; the situating of one's home near those people with whom one identifies most with; the reduction of traffic, both human and automotive, contributing to the enjoyment of the outdoors; a bucolic atmosphere; external qualititative aspects like schools, tax rates, proximity of services, job prospects, and others - all these items and more could sway a person to choose a home location that only incidentally might exist in a gated community. Personally, I question the veracity of the idea that most - of even many - people choose to live in a gated community for security reasons. I think the impetus is far closer to the sort of impetus that prompts one to buy a Rolex rather than a Timex - to demonstrate that one can and the social status gained by doing so.
• Agreed, Fes, Re: Conspicuous Consumption. What I was speaking to in regards to safety was large housing developments in general - the generic acres variety. The (percieved) security is intrinsic to the community's out of town location. The gate is for bling. The communities in the original link, are the exception to the rule. While I haven't spent much time in LA, I think those addresses are in the city proper.
• I'm pretty sure being rich makes you evil. ...or is it being evil that makes you rich???
• Here's to evil! *raises champagne glass*
• Here's to champagne! *raises evil glass*
• The older I get the more I think Caligula knew the right way to treat the rich and stuck-up.
• Screw their wives? ;) Here's an analysis (pdf) of the phenomenon in the UK, which concludes that "gated communities further extend contemporary segregatory tendencies in the city and that policy responses are required which curtail the creation of havens of social withdrawal." Personally, I think the residents should award one of the platforms the "Gated Communities prize for Outsider Art", and auction it off.
• Whether gated communities are good or bad or evil or indifferent is beside the point. Building a platform to see into one is just rude. It's not public space: it has a gate. If your local government is spending its tax revenue on the land inside, the government is the problem. (All the gated communties I know are private roads, supported by the owners, so I'm not even sure of the veracity of this claim either.)
• If there are public roads and sidewalks inside a gated community, I want the right to walk on them. I'm a pedestrian - going around the long way is a big deal. If I had a big ol' gated community between me and the local grocery store, I would be seriously pissed. It is a disturbing trend - say what you like about people and their property, it just isn't healthy for society for well to do people to only see other well to do people. I've met some extremely well to do people who are KOOKS - they have no concept of what life is like for people who don't like on a huge estate. I remember one of them saying how she thought everyone had the option of early retirement if they wanted it, and that her son had really roughed it because he had lived for a short in a small apartment in London when working in the City. (At the time she was telling me this, I was living in a dorm room the size of her bathroom, and my mum had just moved three people into an apartment the size of her kitchen and dining room). She also kept telling us (two grad students who could barely afford the train tickets to visit) that we really should buy a car, it was much more efficient. And this woman was the local magistrate, passing sentances on people who were mostly extremely poor, without ever even comprehending what it was like to be middle class, let alone poor. Gated communities will only breed more of this kind of ignorance. Too many homeless people around? Maybe you should start advocating for homeless shelters and subsidized housing. Too much crime? Eyes on the street is an excellent way to reduce crime, as is having more mixed incomes, so you don't have extreme ghettos. You can never make large cities as safe as rural areas, but there are safer ways to design them. I lived my whole life in Toronto, before moving to New Haven, Connecticut - I feel very safe in both places, and have never had one bit of robbery other than bike theft (once - I had a stupid coil lock). My dad was mugged once, I think, in the 80s. And we didn't live in a nice neighbourhood at all. I ran all over the neighbourhood, and knew not to pick up needles and not to interupt drugs deals; it probably still wasn't a very good environment, which is why I'm a grad student today. But there people around, and neighbourhood watch programs, and you knew enough neighbours in the apartment building who were safe to go to if your parents weren't home. My friend grew up in the heart of downtown Toronto (Charles and Yonge) - the only thing I remember her telling me that her mother worried about was that she would get sucked in by the Scientologists around the corner near Bloor and Yonge. She was forbidden to walk past there. I'm actually jealous of all my friends who grew up in downtown Toronto - they were hanging out at the museum or in coffee shops when kids in the suburban areas were stuck at home, or off in the bushes smoking and drinking. There's a reason that small towns, not big cities, have soaring teenage pregnancy rates. (I was the stuck at home type, which explains the jealousy).