Gated communities as predators of public resources: the outcomes of fading boundaries between private management and public authorities in southern California

Walled and gated residential neighborhoods have become a common feature within US metropolitan areas. As a standardized form of urban product, these neighborhoods represent a form of urbanism where public spaces are being privatized. In the most recently urbanized areas, they represent an increasing part of the new homes market and they have thus become a symbol of contemporary metropolitan fragmentation and social segregation. They not only enclose space but they also actively select residents through restrictive covenants as well as through life style marketing and price. Because they are managed as private corporations, there is perhaps an injevitable tendency to seek political and fiscal independence through a process of municipal incorporation. This has led to a project of partition - strengthened by and strengthening existing partitioning movements - and to the prospect of increased social segregation. The study reported in this chapter discusses the consequences of fading boundaries between public and private management when a gated community engages in municipal incorporation. The sprawl of gated communities is not to be understood as secession from public authority, but as a public-private partnership. It is a local game where the gated community provides benefits to the public authority, in return for which, the Property Owners Association is granted autonomous local governance. The spillover effects of this method of ordering new urban space is to increase segregation. This is particularly so when gated communities are incorporated since the municipal institution is instrumental in securing public funds and property for the privilege of a gated enclave