# Gated Communities and the Demise of Civic Culture **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 15, 2000, 5:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gated-communities-and-the-demise-of-civic-culture/25642 "2000-07-15T05:09:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![heyjoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/a587f6/32.png) [@heyjoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/heyjoe)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2000, 2:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gated-communities-and-the-demise-of-civic-culture/25642/21 "2000-07-16T02:26:34Z")
how are gated communities that different from apartments or condominiums? think about it: people live in exclusive areas (i can’t get into a lot of apartment buildings without getting buzzed in), there is sometimes private security, they have their own pool, workout center, their roads are cleared when it snows…basically, it’s a gated community with houses built on top of each other instead of side by side. why don’t you have a problem with apartments? maybe i’m missing the point. feel free to flame the hell out of me if you feel like it 🙂 chris ---
**Author:** ![Odesio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/odesio/32/20003_2.png) [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2000, 3:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gated-communities-and-the-demise-of-civic-culture/25642/22 "2000-07-16T03:30:08Z")
> [@](#): > > \*\* > I’m not saying it’s not their _right_, Marc. I’m saying it’s dangerous, because these people may no longer feel their welfare or their best interests tied to the welfare or best interests of their community, or state, or country. See my sig. Specifically, they could do a short-term cost-benefit analysis (“I’ll be forced to pay more in taxes if this bond passes, and I don’t use the public services enough for those taxes to be worth it.”) \*\* So you don’t like the way they vote and that makes them dangerous. Not only do I not think there is a signifigant problem I think you’re blowing it way out of proportion. > [@](#): > > \*\* > which will cost them in the long run, as the community services outside their walls deteriorate through lack of funding. Far too libertarian for me, in a “fee-for-service, let’s-think-only-of-our-immediate-self-interest, there’s-no-such-thing-as-the-good-of-the-community” kind of way. \*\* Shame on them for selfishly voting in their own self-interest. > [@](#): > > \*\* > Nice because it’s clean, and safe, and upscale. I agree with you. It’s a nice place to live in all the ways that most of society _isn’t_. So should the characterization be revised? How’s “people move into gated communities to get away from the negative parts of society?” \*\* Why the negative attitude? I don’t understand why you feel the need to characterize their motivation as being based on fear. Couldn’t they be motived in a positive way? Such as, “This is a great place to raise my kids and have a home.” > [@](#): > > \*\* > Anyway, I’m not begrudging them their right to live where they want, with whom they want. \*\* You don’t begrudge them their right only their decisions you don’t like. > [@](#): > > \*\* > What’s at issue is the level of detachment that’s being exhibited, as far as the state of the community as a whole. People who live in the Broken Sound community in Boca Raton still live in Boca Raton, even if their contact with the less-affluent is minimal. They still reap the benefits of being citizens of that city (and that state, and this country). But when all the rich, white people move behind their walls and say, “We’ve got our own policemen now,” I think I have a right to be a little concerned. \*\* Why be concerned? Their vote carries no more weight then you. You’re concerned because they don’t vote the way you think is correct. If a bond doesn’t pass there’s a good chance that people outside the gated community didn’t want it either. > [@](#): > > \*\* > The funding of schools, though, is subject to the approval of the voters in the district. If, say, 51 percent of a district utilizes private schools, and 49 percent public schools, a tax bond to ease overcrowded classes or add much-needed teachers could well fail, leaving nearly half that district completely screwed. \*\* That’s a democracy at work. I don’t see why you’d have a problem with that? > [@](#): > > \*\* > a minority of voters can make decisions in which their potential personal benefit is nil, their potential personal cost is minimal, and the potential benefit and cost to the community at large is huge…yet because they’ve walled themselves in, the outcome of those decisions are disproportionate. > \*\* Everyone has a voice. And the decision does affect them because it involves **their** money being spent. They have every right to have as much a voice as you do. Marc ---
**Author:** ![labdude](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/5fc32e/32.png) [@labdude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/labdude)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2000, 4:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gated-communities-and-the-demise-of-civic-culture/25642/23 "2000-07-16T04:36:12Z")
> [@](#): > > What worries me a lot more than gated communities is the abandonment of public education. There is a small degree of self-interest involved here, but I think it is outweighed by a much greater desire to not help anyone. \*\* Many people have pointed out that gated communitites won’t support tax issues like school or police. Do we know for a fact that this is true? Any stats? Assuming that it is true, is there any city/county in america where the gated communites are 51% of the population. I would guess that they are less than 5% and probably less that 1%. So you can’t blame taxes not passing on the gated communities if they are only a small percentage of the voters. I think there are sound points to be made about a lack of civic culture and a lack of public resources in the USA, but I don’t see gated communites as the problem. For example, lets say congress passed a law banning gated communites. The next day bulldozers come and tear down the walls and gates. What difference would it make in the polotics of American life?? Not much, I think. Would these people be more likely to vote for school taxes now? No. ---
**Author:** ![rackensack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e5b9ba/32.png) [@rackensack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rackensack)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2000, 9:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gated-communities-and-the-demise-of-civic-culture/25642/24 "2000-07-16T09:08:00Z")
The decline of the traditional civic culture in America has, no doubt, lots of causes, many of them mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Having been raised for much of my childhood in very small towns, I notice the effects of this constantly, living as I now do in a suburb of Atlanta. I notice it also as a member of the board of our neighborhood association (a voluntary one, FWIW) in the difficulty we often have getting homeowners in our neighborhood involved in activities and in issues that affect us. Science writer Matt Ridley makes a pretty good case, in his book _The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation_, for the idea that self-interest is indeed the cornerstone of all human behavior, but that people are in fact reasonably good at recognizing the need to cooperate – so long as their motivation to do so isn’t pre-empted by the expectation that someone else (such as the government) will do it instead, and so long as their interest (in the sense of their “ownership”) in the mechanisms for doing so is preserved. Among the evidence he musters to support this contention are numerous experiments and observed phenomenon that demonstrate the counter-intuitive fact that the likelihood of an individual assisting another individual in obvious need of help declines as the number of people who see the need increases, assuming the potential helpers are aware of each others presence. The reason thirty-nine people saw Kitty Genovese being attacked and did nothing is, according to the evidence Ridley presents, that there were thirty-nine of them and not one or two. He also cites numerous instances from a variety of cultures of successful collective ownership and management of resources (fisheries, grazing lands, water rights, etc.) that functioned for centuries, only to collapse once their functions were assumed by government and the individuals lost any proprietary interest. He effectively debunks the notion that these “tribal” arrangements succeeded because of some innate environmental sensibility on the part of the peoples involved, and establishes that they succeeded because of the ownership interest of the individuals involved and failed once that was removed. While I’m not sure I’m willing to go quite so far as Ridley down the libertarian road, the argument he presents does go a long way toward explaining many of the things we see happening in our culture: those who can afford to do so create new communities for themselves in which they **do** have a proprietary interest, with services and amenities for which they’re willing to pay because they have an ownership interest in them. They send their kids to private schools where their financial stake gives them a somewhat greater say in how the school is run. They expend their resources and efforts on people and institutions they “own” (their children, their home and their gated neighborhood, the schools where they send their kids, etc.) Meanwhile, those who own no property, who are likely to be fairly new to the community and who are likely to leave it in the near future, make up a greater percentage of those whose kids are in the public school system, a greater percentage of those who depend on the government to provide and maintain services and infrastructure. They have no ongoing stake, however, in the continued viability of these services and facilities, and thus don’t consider it in their interest to do anything to preserve or enhance them, expecting that the government will somehow do so instead. Having said all that, I still think gated communities represent an apparently successful attempt on the part of developers to sell people something that they can’t really deliver. They play on the fears people have for the safety of themselves and their families, while doing little or nothing to actually increase their security. Having moved behind the gates, they believe they have something that can only really be achieved by living in a community where people are genuinely connected to each other and are willing to invest in each other’s welfare, while in fact they’re only isolating themselves from each other even more. Perhaps it’s human nature, but people seem much more willing to try to buy security and community and pleasant surroundings than to actually make the effort to create them where they are. Hence the flight of so many Atlantans to the far reaches of the outlying suburbs, only to have to pull up stakes and move again as the problems they’d rather run from than tackle inexorably follow them outward. ---
**Author:** ![Gadarene](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47c2d/32.png) [@Gadarene](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gadarene)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2000, 12:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gated-communities-and-the-demise-of-civic-culture/25642/25 "2000-07-17T00:35:40Z")
Rackensack, I just wanted to say that that was an exceptionally well-written post. Thanks. ---
**Author:** ![SterlingNorth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8dc957/32.png) [@SterlingNorth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SterlingNorth)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2000, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gated-communities-and-the-demise-of-civic-culture/25642/26 "2000-07-17T15:48:53Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by heyjoe \* > how are gated communities that different from apartments or condominiums? think about it: people live in exclusive areas (i can’t get into a lot of apartment buildings without getting buzzed in), there is sometimes private security, they have their own pool, workout center, their roads are cleared when it snows…basically, it’s a gated community with houses built on top of each other instead of side by side. why don’t you have a problem with apartments? maybe i’m missing the point. feel free to flame the hell out of me if you feel like it 🙂 > > chris Well, apartments are more equivilent to homes in general: some are gated, some are open. Many apartments are ‘alternative’ housing for those whom can’t get together enough resources to get a house. Therfore apartment dwellers, particularly in urban-older suburban areas tend to be poorer. I’m thinking of the area near Bailey’s Crossroads called ‘Culmore.’ I’m guessing that the condo is just the apartment equiv. to gated communities. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Zambezi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7cd45c/32.png) [@Mr.Zambezi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Zambezi)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2000, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gated-communities-and-the-demise-of-civic-culture/25642/27 "2000-07-17T16:01:11Z")
> [@](#): > > Having said all that, I still think gated communities represent an apparently successful attempt on the part of developers to sell people something that they can’t really deliver. They play on the fears people have for the safety of themselves and their families, while doing little or nothing to actually increase their security Gated community and covenant controlled communities play on people’s fear. It is a classic case of “evey one is jerk except for me and you…and I am not really sure about you.” While everyone is pretty sure that theey are safe and that tehy have good taste, they are afraid that none else is or does. The result I see is not just the death of community, but the loss of individualism. IN Denver, there are very few neighborhoods where one can shooce the color of one’s own house. The committee has to tell you what color to paint it. The scary thing is how accustomed citizens are getting to buy safet at the price of their freedom. People tend to want some form of government to control their lives. Scary. ---
**Author:** ![matt\_mcl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ab992/32.png) [@matt\_mcl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/matt_mcl)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2000, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gated-communities-and-the-demise-of-civic-culture/25642/28 "2000-07-17T16:16:15Z")
It’s worse than “some form of government”, Mr. Z. In the case of gated communities, they want a _specifically undemocratic government_ - the corporation that controls the community. ---
**Author:** ![Major\_Feelgud](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/3be4f8/32.png) [@Major\_Feelgud](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Major_Feelgud)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2000, 4:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gated-communities-and-the-demise-of-civic-culture/25642/29 "2000-07-17T16:28:49Z")
I want to gate off my drive and prevent people coming in to knock on my door to try and sell stuff to me. I didn’t feel that way until recently I turned away a guy who was just asking for money. When I refused him, he turned away and said “Fucker” under his breath. To the OP, since you like being part of the community and want to fulfil your civic duties, why don’t you give me your address and I’ll send him your way. Let me live how I want to live. You don’t tell me how I live and I won’t tell you how you live. That’s democracy. Democracy is a sham. For those who think of Greek democracy as something to look up to, study Greek history for 10 years, then come back and post a reply. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gated-communities-and-the-demise-of-civic-culture/25642.md?page=1)