I found your problem. 
Sorry, Rysler, but can you please clarify?
I guess that depends on who actually paid for the roads, sewers/water, phone and electricity hook ups. Around here developers generally only pay a fraction of initial infrastructure costs. Not sure how different that is for gated communities that intend to not let the general public use their streets.
Rocketdriver, in what forum are you raising this motion? Under what authority will you basically make public roads private?
How much are townhomes in Durham that you can own five of them and not think you are in the upper percentiles of wealthy people in the country?
It is actually slowly getting better.
Boy, you guys have problems.
A. The only people using the roads in this neighborhood are the residents. We paid for them. They exist only to serve the homes.
B. You have a twisted view of what wealthy is. The homes in Durham cost me on average $130K. If you spent 50 years saving you would have enough to buy five, and that’s all that’s about. I’m clearly not wealthy.
I just want myself, my tenants and my neighbors to be safe from the constant burglaries here. I realize there is a major unemployment problem in the country and it is NOT getting better.
You don’t need an economics degree to know that if you don’t have a job you don’t have money to spend.One out of four families in the South are homeless, the housing industry, despite government propaganda that cherry picks the data, continues to decline. Foreclosures have slowed, not because of a housing recovery, but because wealthy investors have bought up a large percentage of them. The stock market is in a bubble again, only because people have no where else to put their money with bank rates near zero and inflation running near 4%.
Our industrial base as a viable entity no longer exists. Over time and under pressure from the American Association of Manufacturers, American industry was shipped to Asian countries. What remains of our consumer-driven economy? Over 90% of America’s current jobs are service jobs. It only takes 2% of the workforce to run the mechanized agricultural industry, and the other 8% assemble Boeing airplanes, some poorly made cars and parts, a few high-tech medical instruments, and some pharmaceuticals.
Our trade imbalance has GROWN, not shrunk since the depression began in 2008.
Unemployment, which is always referred to by the BLS U3 method of determination, is pegged at around 7.5% after its unprecedented time above 8%. What few people in America understand when fed that statistic is that the BLS has SIX ways of measuring unemployment:
U1 Percentage of labor force unemployed 15 weeks or longer.
U2: Percentage of labor force who lost jobs or completed temporary work.
U3: Official unemployment rate: people are without jobs and they have actively looked for work within the past four weeks.
U4: U3 + “discouraged workers,” or those who have stopped looking for work because current economic conditions make them believe that no work is available for them.
U5: U4 + other “marginally attached workers”, or “loosely attached workers”, or those who “would like” and are able to work, but have not looked for work recently.
U6: U5 + Part-time workers who want to work full-time, but cannot due to economic reasons.
U3, which we are routinely fed, sits at just under 8% depending on which person from the BLS interprets it on a given day. U6, a more honest number, is 13.9%
Shadow Stats uses the uniform government economic data method, which was abandoned in 1994 because it was beginning to show the effects of outsourcing jobs to Asia. The current Shadow Stats unemployment number is a whopping 24.4%, which is in line with most of Europe, where they are honest about the problems there.
If we are ever to recover we need legislation to stop imports and pressure to rebuild American industry so people can get jobs again.
How big would it have to be to qualify as a “gated community” and not simply be a condo?
Round here, it’s pretty common to have 1000+ unit condo developments spread out over 10 or more 16-20 floor towers. Is that a gated community?
Did you pay for them? Are you sure? You guys also been paying all upkeep? Most places the city does that. Most strange.
If I lived at the end of a cul-de-sac, can I gate off the end of the road? I paid for it and am the only one using it.
It is not uncommon around here for subdivisions to have private roads that were built by the developer and maintained by the HOA. Where I live, the roads were initially were owned by the community (but not gated) but then transferred to the county. Now, the county takes care of maintaining the roads (and plowing them, etc); but the HOA can no longer regulate parking (and the response time for repairs is much longer). It’s worth the reduction in fees, but it’s not unheard of for the communities to own and maintain roads.
This idea that gating yourselves and fencing yourself in makes you elitist is ABSURD. It’s simply practical, just like the secure high rise apartment buildings. No one seems to object to that kind of security, yet you guys think I’m being elitist? Get a life!
One of the developments has a road in, looping around and back out again. We pay HOA fees, the city pays for the road upkeep. To fence it in and put a gate on it would mean upping the HOA fees to pay for the road. A lot cheaper than the security we have to pay for.
The second one has an entrance on both ends, but there are several routes around it and there is virtually no through traffic since it is longer to go through than the previous existing routes. Same with the HOA fees there, would have to be raised.
These are both 300 town home developments. They are about a quarter mile square.
ALL we’re interested in is stopping the breaking and entering and stealing. These are all working people who are gone during the day. Most of the burglaries are in the day, for that reason. Right now we have off duty police patrolling, but the thieves just time their in and outs. There are security systems, but the thieves know how to smash them so they don’t ring for more than a few seconds, and the neighbors are usually gone as well, and by the time the police arrive they’ve grabbed stuff and are gone. And they leave damage behind.
This idea that gating yourselves makes you elitist is ABSURD. It’s simply practical.
OK. Like I said, most times around here developers end up only paying a portion of infrastructure costs. Did switching to your new arrangement affect your property taxes?
eta: And could your HOA demand a reverse of that transfer if you decided you wanted to be gated?
No. But it dramatically reduced the HOA fees. I would assume it works similarly to public education. If I pay for my own school (i.e., private education), my educational expenses increase, but I don’t get a corresponding reduction in my taxes in light of the relief I’ve provided the school system. I’m not sure how the initial payments worked, but at the end of construction the HOA owned the roads (in the way that if I built a road on private property I would own it), but then (after a period of time) it was deeded to the county.
Probably not. I could imagine a transfer that provides some sort of right to buy them back, but I don’t know if the county would go for that. (And the appeal of getting the roads back wouldn’t really be gating them. It would be the ability to regulate parking and to exclude salesmen from the community. You can’t do that on public highways).
If your idea is to stop crime I have some bad news for you. Unless you are planning on putting in a moat that has sharks with freaking lasers on their heads. The one gated community in the town I work in has some of the highest crime rates in town. And it only has one entrance in or out. You can either drive through as a guest or just walk there. And some of the criminals live there. All the gate does is slow down police response to crime.
That’s a good point. Is there data to show that gated communities are safer from anything other than door to door salesmen? Instinctively I would think it’s harder to steal a TV without a car nearby, but I don’t know.
Only idiots steal TVs. Especially with gold prices the way they are. Break in, go straight to the master bedroom, take jewelry and cash and get out. That’s 99% of burglaries. Electronics are bulky and easier to trace.
Well bad news for the criminals because gold prices have actually plummeted this year. 
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07418825.2012.760644
thought that might add to the discussion
Thank you very much for posting that.
That’s pretty much what the cops here say. They say anything else taken besides money and jewelry and they figure they’re looking for drug addicts.