Metropolitaian Moats
The Gated Menace of "Private Cities"
Neighborhoods
are the building blocks of a metropolitan area. But neighborhoods
are not identical units, such as bricks; quite dissimilar, they range
along a continuum from opulent and ornate to run-down and dilapidated.
The ethnicity of residents often delineates a neighborhood's borders.
These enclaves sit side by side, static, while their residents--continually
crossing borders from home to work to school to the grocery store--serve
as mediators among them. But what happens when the communities involved
decide that they find that interaction distasteful?
Take
Sun City, Arizona. This retirement community of 50,000 boasts well-groomed
lawns and picture-perfect houses in coordinated colors. Its residents
are, for the most part, senior citizens, so nary a bothersome child
is at hand to disrupt the serenity--or require schooling at taxpayers'
expense. Sun City is a prime example of a "private city"--one demarcated
by property owners, rather than the government. Though private cities
generally are not separate municipalities, their residents wall themselves
off all the same.
Rosenthal
professor of law Gerald Frug, a specialist in local-government law,
worries that private cities are moving America toward a starkly segregated,
isolationist society. Though towns cannot legally exclude undesirables,
American law today allows any community to banish the poor with ease.
"All you have to do is build houses of a certain kind, and you've
fixed an income level," says Frug. "If you don't have that, you can't
get in. Walls can be physical--or not." In his book City Making:
Building Communities without Building Walls (Princeton University
Press), Frug draws a grim picture of the compartmentalized America
that awaits us if the fragmenting trends continue.
Gated
communities, Frug says, are a type of private city. Because one developer
creates the entire community, new residents often have to sign a contract
before moving in. Above and beyond the indirectly enforced minimum
income, residents may also live under restrictions that govern what
color they paint their houses, where they park their cars, and what
type of bushes they plant in the front yard. That's not all. Often
residents must pay "assessments" to the community--different from
property taxes, but spent on things like sanitation and security guards.
In
addition to voting in civic elections, residents of a gated community
vote in its homeowners' association. There, instead of allocating
one vote per person, the rule is one vote per home owned, regardless
of family size. So gated communities, in essence, operate under their
own laws, collect their own taxes, and hold their own elections--at
least, that's how their residents see it. Hence, some are seeking
tax relief from their surrounding municipalities--asking to receive
tax credits, for example, for assessments paid to the private property-owners'
association. The idea, Frug says, is that "we pay for ourselves, and
forget everyone else."
To
give in to these requests, he argues, would be a fatal misstep on
government's part. The exemption would only increase the incentive
for the wealthy to seek refuge behind gates, since they would no longer
have to help pay for those less fortunate than themselves. If gated
communities can wall themselves off any place they choose, it becomes
only too easy to partition a once-interwoven city into discrete camps
of haves and have-nots.
According
to Frug, urban sprawl lies at the heart of the problem: if moving
out of the central city becomes a desirable escape, those left in
the city will have no incentive to revitalize it--making it even less
desirable. Highways are also to blame, since they displace public
transportation, an important opportunity for interaction across neighborhood
lines. "In a subway, you are in a group of people you didn't choose,"
Frug explains. "It's a public moment."
Historically,
there is a long tradition of what Frug calls "privatized forms of
public cities"--places like Beverly Hills, which is incorporated separately
from Los Angeles, or Piedmont, California, a municipality within Oakland
that is "a very prosperous white dot in a black sea." But the modern
drive toward gates and walls could create "an America in which each
region is like a series of separate countries," Frug says, noting
that it is ordinarily nations, not cities, that protect their borders.
In such a partitioned dystopia, Frug suggests, people would drive
each day "from a gated community to an office park, which is also
private, to the mall, which is also private, without ever having to
enter a public space."
The
chief danger of a city fragmented into homogeneous parts, says Frug,
is that it engenders fear of "the other"--and the fewer people one
encounters, the larger the pool of "others" grows.
