Gated Communities and Slums
Jun 22, 2007 09:33 Filed in: Economics
I recently went to a birthday party at the clubhouse of a gated community near Jackson. Carefully secluded (I missed the entrance and had to turn around), the community first presents itself to a visitor as an upscale planned development behind electronically-controlled iron gates with an unoccupied brick guardhouse. The gates close at 10 in the evening. Once inside, the visitor drives upon what seems like endless winding streets past immaculately-manicured lawns and 3,000+ square-feet dwellings with expensive, late-model automobiles parked in double or triple garages. There are no sidewalks.
When was a kid in the '50s, gated communities were unknown in Jackson and the very idea of building a suburban McMansion 30 or 45 minutes out of town in a walled enclosure was not only unthinkable, but would have been regarded as contemptible. Why would anyone other than a farmer or a hermit choose to isolate himself (or especially herself) from the life of the city, the very word from which the term "civilization" is derived?
The answer stares us in the face. We have convinced ourselves that we are helpless in the face of economic laws that dictate constantly increasing inequality. They cannot be resisted, because, like a Calvinistic deity that foreordained from the beginning of creation who is to be damned and who is to be saved by some unknowable divine decision-making process, we believe that the almighty market has declared there must be winners and losers and the best a person can do is to try to be a winner by whatever means are available, and the devil take the hindmost.
From the time of the New Deal until the conservative counter-revolution in the '70s and '80s, most Americans saw through this market theology as so much plutocratic claptrap. They would not had changed their minds, either, had the right-wing forces, through their bogus think-tanks and their increasing control over a rapidly consolidating mass media, not, in effect, edited reality, so that news that did not support the conservative agenda simply ceased to exist in the public mind. The dominance of television news, to which superficiality comes naturally, made the task far easier than it would have been in print media alone.
Aside from the almost incontrovertible fact that these remote, gated communities will not survive in an energy-scarce world, there are other policy considerations that make these communities highly undesirable:
1. They are energy-intensive in many ways: obviously the long commute, either to work or shop requires a lot of gasoline. Walking anywhere is simply out of the question. In addition, these homes are large, single family dwellings that must be heated and cooled. Sizable lawns must be fertilized and watered. Because they are usually located away from lower-income areas, their "help" must drive to work, often over long distances. I read recently that workers in Aspen, Colorado have to commute 50-60 miles because they cannot afford housing any closer to their jobs. None of this is going to work when oil becomes $150/bbl or $250/bbl. These communities will become foreclosure cites when that happens.
2. It is bad for society when the rich and powerful are able to isolate themselves from even the middle class. In the case of Jackson, it is obvious that the leadership vacuum is harming not only the city itself, but the entire metropolitan area. A large piece of Jackson's leadership has moved into gated communities in Madison and Rankin counties, and even though it continues to conduct business and exert influence over city policy, it is mostly insulated from the effects of those policies upon the citizens of Jackson. When the rich and powerful must live amongst the hoi polloi and rub elbows with one and all, they tend to be more aware of this relationship and consequently more concerned for the general welfare.
3. Taxes. It has always been a mystery to me why people who benefit the most from the wealth generated by the community and who are most able to afford paying taxes are the most resistant to giving back their fair share to the community. The entire history of English property law from the Norman conquest until the modern era can largely be explained as the efforts of the nobility to avoid paying feudal land taxes to the Crown. The Republican Party since 1980 often seems to have had no other significant economic policies than cutting taxes for the wealthy and lowering wages for everyone else through union-busting. Gated communities are invariably built in areas with low property taxes. They therefore represent a reduction of the urban tax base and an increase in the suburban (or more likely, exurban) tax base. In order to provide municipal services to a population that cannot afford their own private security guards and to pay for the infrastructure that modern cities must have, cities must raise taxes, which increasingly drives out more of the well-to-do. It's a vicious circle.
Because of a leadership vacuum--especially a vacuum of talented leadership that experiences what it's like to actually live in a Jackson neighborhood--the city is faced with a scarcity from which all other scarcities spring: a scarcity of imagination.
Clearly, there exists a crying need for new ideas about how to make cities work. Increasingly higher energy prices will force most exurbanites and many suburbanites to move closer to their work, thus raising the cost of housing in the city and putting pressure on the poor to find affordable housing in a rapidly-gentrifying city. Will the poor then gravitate to the suburbs, where there is no public transportation worth speaking of and, because of low-density development, where public transportation will be prohibitively expensive? The prospects do not look good.
Committees and blue-ribbon commissions have met and made recommendations world without end, and nothing happens. Societies die when they lose their imagination, when they cannot change because change is blocked by the forces that have grown fat on the status quo and would lose their privileged position if what is needed to be done were done.
Have we reached that point in our society?
We will probably know the answer to that question in the next few years.
Open Democracy: A Tale of Two Towns
When was a kid in the '50s, gated communities were unknown in Jackson and the very idea of building a suburban McMansion 30 or 45 minutes out of town in a walled enclosure was not only unthinkable, but would have been regarded as contemptible. Why would anyone other than a farmer or a hermit choose to isolate himself (or especially herself) from the life of the city, the very word from which the term "civilization" is derived?
The answer stares us in the face. We have convinced ourselves that we are helpless in the face of economic laws that dictate constantly increasing inequality. They cannot be resisted, because, like a Calvinistic deity that foreordained from the beginning of creation who is to be damned and who is to be saved by some unknowable divine decision-making process, we believe that the almighty market has declared there must be winners and losers and the best a person can do is to try to be a winner by whatever means are available, and the devil take the hindmost.
From the time of the New Deal until the conservative counter-revolution in the '70s and '80s, most Americans saw through this market theology as so much plutocratic claptrap. They would not had changed their minds, either, had the right-wing forces, through their bogus think-tanks and their increasing control over a rapidly consolidating mass media, not, in effect, edited reality, so that news that did not support the conservative agenda simply ceased to exist in the public mind. The dominance of television news, to which superficiality comes naturally, made the task far easier than it would have been in print media alone.
Aside from the almost incontrovertible fact that these remote, gated communities will not survive in an energy-scarce world, there are other policy considerations that make these communities highly undesirable:
1. They are energy-intensive in many ways: obviously the long commute, either to work or shop requires a lot of gasoline. Walking anywhere is simply out of the question. In addition, these homes are large, single family dwellings that must be heated and cooled. Sizable lawns must be fertilized and watered. Because they are usually located away from lower-income areas, their "help" must drive to work, often over long distances. I read recently that workers in Aspen, Colorado have to commute 50-60 miles because they cannot afford housing any closer to their jobs. None of this is going to work when oil becomes $150/bbl or $250/bbl. These communities will become foreclosure cites when that happens.
2. It is bad for society when the rich and powerful are able to isolate themselves from even the middle class. In the case of Jackson, it is obvious that the leadership vacuum is harming not only the city itself, but the entire metropolitan area. A large piece of Jackson's leadership has moved into gated communities in Madison and Rankin counties, and even though it continues to conduct business and exert influence over city policy, it is mostly insulated from the effects of those policies upon the citizens of Jackson. When the rich and powerful must live amongst the hoi polloi and rub elbows with one and all, they tend to be more aware of this relationship and consequently more concerned for the general welfare.
3. Taxes. It has always been a mystery to me why people who benefit the most from the wealth generated by the community and who are most able to afford paying taxes are the most resistant to giving back their fair share to the community. The entire history of English property law from the Norman conquest until the modern era can largely be explained as the efforts of the nobility to avoid paying feudal land taxes to the Crown. The Republican Party since 1980 often seems to have had no other significant economic policies than cutting taxes for the wealthy and lowering wages for everyone else through union-busting. Gated communities are invariably built in areas with low property taxes. They therefore represent a reduction of the urban tax base and an increase in the suburban (or more likely, exurban) tax base. In order to provide municipal services to a population that cannot afford their own private security guards and to pay for the infrastructure that modern cities must have, cities must raise taxes, which increasingly drives out more of the well-to-do. It's a vicious circle.
Because of a leadership vacuum--especially a vacuum of talented leadership that experiences what it's like to actually live in a Jackson neighborhood--the city is faced with a scarcity from which all other scarcities spring: a scarcity of imagination.
Clearly, there exists a crying need for new ideas about how to make cities work. Increasingly higher energy prices will force most exurbanites and many suburbanites to move closer to their work, thus raising the cost of housing in the city and putting pressure on the poor to find affordable housing in a rapidly-gentrifying city. Will the poor then gravitate to the suburbs, where there is no public transportation worth speaking of and, because of low-density development, where public transportation will be prohibitively expensive? The prospects do not look good.
Committees and blue-ribbon commissions have met and made recommendations world without end, and nothing happens. Societies die when they lose their imagination, when they cannot change because change is blocked by the forces that have grown fat on the status quo and would lose their privileged position if what is needed to be done were done.
Have we reached that point in our society?
We will probably know the answer to that question in the next few years.
Open Democracy: A Tale of Two Towns
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