Housing Opportunities for Minorities in Rental Gated Communities: Balancing Diversity and Community Acceptance

Author: Karen A. Danielsen-Lang

Dissertation School: Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University

Pages: 69

Publication Date: 2006

Availability:
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Access Number: 5007

Abstract:

The current literature on gated communities has a "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" bias to it. The common assumption, in the United States, is that most gated communities were occupied by non-minority and affluent homeowners. It came as a shock to researchers that many gated community residents live in rental units. In fact, Sanchez, Lang, and Dhavale (2005) find that "Contrary to the notion that primarily affluent homeowners lives in gated communities, the results of the AHS survey shows that renters are nearly 2.5 times more likely to live in walled or fenced communities." These renters are also much less affluent and are more likely to be Black or Latino than homeowner gated communities.

Rental gated communities may seem a rather narrow topic. But this study examines this phenomenon not as an end in itself but as a focus of a much bigger social process. Durkheim's book Suicide, for instance, was less about suicide than about the larger process of integration and social order. Likewise, this study uses gated rental communities as a window into bigger issues such as racial integration, neighborhood change, and middle-class acceptance of affordable housing (Durkheim, 1951). Gated rental communities may be more important to examine for understanding general urban processes than homeowner gated communities. Why? The social implications of gated homeowner communities are relative, manifest, and limited. Most researchers look at homeowner gated communities in terms of exclusion. But the gates are really a secondary issue to their more important characteristic: the homeowner association. Strip away the gate in an owned gated community and the more important socially excluding mechanism of privatization remains.

Gated rental communities reveal more about community and neighborhood change. Gates may represent a complex matrix of social processes such as managing diverse social environments (Briggs, 2002; Giglia, 2003; Lemanski, 2006; Billig and Churchman, 2003; Caldeira, 2000) or to lower homeowner resistance to multifamily and affordable housing (Lemanski, 2006), while at the same time allows minority groups access to homes that they might otherwise not able to occupy (South and Crowder, 1998). They may serve as integrating building types and races on a small scale but simultaneously increasing the social distance between building types and people (Billig and Churchman, 2003; Fischer, 2003). This may be what integration looks like in an urbanizing, diverse, and heterogeneous country. Chile, Brazil, Israel, and Mexico have had a similar experience using gates in relatively homogeneous population (in terms of ethnicity not class) to decrease the physical distance between rich and poor in urban area and to increase the social distance between those same populations. Ironically, Orange County, California, is trending the same way as these less developed countries (Maher, 2004).

But are minorities in particular in multifamily gated communities because there are more opportunities for decent housing or is that the only housing available to them in an urbanizing environment? Researchers have found that there has been as a fairly significant decrease in segregation over the last 10 years. The decline in segregation has been found most often in the areas where rental gated communities are most prevalent. I theorize that there is a correlation between the incidence of gated rental communities and lower indices of dissimilarity. Some housing opportunities are limited because of credit defects or workforce housing issues or a "lack of choice" (Aalbers, 2003). South and Crowder (1998) find that minorities have significantly more housing choice, availability, and opportunity in places where there are new housing markets as opposed to more entrenched parts of the Northeast.

An accurate portrait of who lives behind gates and why they choose these places is important to the public policy debate over housing opportunity. Addressing why some renters chose gated communities over non-gated alternatives speaks to the larger meaning of gated communities. Should planners and policymakers concern themselves that the rise of gated communities signals a fundamental shift in the nature of neighborhood life?

Wealthy Americans have employed a number of devices to control housing practices in the past, particularly restrictive covenants, large lot, minimum house size, and minimum frontage zoning (Higly, 1995). Unlike real estate covenants of the past, gated community restrictions are legal and are rarely challenged for being discriminatory and worked just as effectively for mid- and downscale developments as upscale ones. While the rich have many tools to exclude, the less affluent seem to have but one: gated communities. For that reason alone it is worth better understanding why rental gated communities exist.

This proposal begins by exploring some of the fundamental characteristics of rental gated communities mostly in an American context but with cross-cultural examples where appropriate.

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