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A significant number of Americans now live in housing that is marked by walls and in many instances by gates. While an increasing amount is written on these enclaves, relatively little research has been done on the developments themselves, the Home Owner Associations (HOAs) that run them, or their residents. This paper draws on the American Housing Survey and the Phoenix Area Social Survey to present demographic information on the housing and to indicate some of the attitudes of these homeowners. The data are used to question some popular conceptions concerning both gated communities and common interest neighborhoods, especially those relating to issues of fear and security, and to the functioning of the HOA. It is argued that it is important to continue the process of empirical research as these phenomena diffuse globally and are the focus of speculation, comment and policy development.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation's Biocomplexity in the Environment program (Grant No. SES‐0216281) and the Central Arizona – Phoenix Long‐Term Ecological Research Project (Grant No. DEB 9714833). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF. An initial version of this paper was prepared for the second annual International Conference on Social Sciences, Honolulu, June, 2003, and other versions have been presented in Glasgow (IGU 2004) and Salt Lake City (UAA 2005). Support from the Office of Sponsored Projects at Arizona State University is gratefully acknowledged, as are comments from two referees.
Notes
1. This quotation is taken from Democracy in America, originally published in 1835.
2. Consider the case of Buckeye, on the fringe of the metropolitan area. This municipality has annexed 200 square miles and now has a planning area of 600 square miles, although it contains a current population of less than 10,000 people (excluding prison inmates). It has approved 22 master planned communities with a predicted 100,000 homes. This does not include the 35,000 acre Douglas Ranch, which alone will contain up to 80,000 homes (Ingley 2004).
3. Estimates are from the Community Associations Institute. While this paper has questioned the balance displayed in some academic commentaries on common interest developments, no attention is given here to the industry perspective, which tends to provide uncritical and optimistic views of how community values can be created by management and leadership: see some papers in Overton (1999) for example, or the trade journal Common Ground.
4. Gated communities and HOAs are not interchangeable designations. Many HOAs do not have security systems; as Sanchez and Lang indicate, many defended spaces are rentals (and the figure that they report, namely that nearly two thirds of enclaves contain gates, is based on a total across all tenures of 4 million and 7 million households, respectively). However, the enclaves most criticized by commentators such as Davis are gated communities possessing HOAs.
5. It will be noted that the figures collected by Sanchez and Lang, indicating 6% of households, are a lower estimate than those collected by the Community Associations Institute. Again, this can be traced back to the fact that many HOAs are not in enclaves.
6. These findings are also different from those discussed in other countries such as the UK (e.g. Blandy et al. 2003). Again, the sheer scale of the phenomenon in the USA is likely to mean that social privilege is no longer a clear attribute of enclaves in many metropolitan areas.