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Mini-Citadels
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Prev: The Neighbors are Watching Up: Contents Next: Parallel Universes
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6. Mini-Citadels and Geroncrats
When I first began to study gated communities in Southern California
in the mid-1980s, it was a trend largely confined to very wealthy
neighborhoods or new developments on the distant metropolitan frontier
(e.g., the areas Burgess described as the "restricted residential
district" or the "commuter zone"). Since the Spring 1992 rebellion,
however, dozens of ordinary residential neighborhoods in Los Angeles
have demanded the right to gate themselves off from the rest of the
city. As one newspaper put it, "The 1980s had their boom in
mini-malls; the 1990s may bring a bull market in mini-citadels."
Although crime and safety are the ostensible issues, increased equity
may be the deeper motive. Son.e realtors have estimated that
"gatedness" can raise home values by as much as 40% over ten years. As
communities -- including black middle-class areas like Windsor Village
and Baldwin Hills Estates -- race to reap this windfall, Burgess's
"Residential Zone IV" begins to look like a fortified honeycomb, with
each residential neighborhood now encased in its own walled cell. In
most cases the local homeowners' associations also contract "armed
response" private policing from one of the several multi-national
security firms that specialize in residential security. Obviously this
only further widens the "security differential" between the inner city
and the suburbs.
"Empty-nest" households are especially passionate advocates of
restricted-access neighborhoods, and there is an important sense in
which Los Angeles is not merely being polarized between rich and poor,
but more specifically between the young poor and the old rich.
Furthermore, the 1990 Census showed that metropolitan Los Angeles has
the greatest discrepancy in the nation between household size and home
size. On the Westside and Hollywood Hills, where "mansionization" has
been in vogue, older, smaller Anglo households occupy ever bigger
homes, while in the rest of the city large Latino families are being
crammed into diminishing floor-space.
California as a whole is an incipient gerontocracy. and any
post-Blade-Runner dystopia must take account of the explosive fusion
of class, ethnic and generational contradictions. Three of the state's
leading demographers have recently given us a preview of what the
near-future may hold. In their "worst-case scenario," civil war breaks
out in the year ~030 after the ruling class of aged, Anglo
Baby-boomers, living in "security-patrolled villages" and confiscating
the majority of tax revenues to support their geriatric services,
imposes an Iron Heel on a huge under-class of young Latinos who live
in "unlit, unpaved barrios."
Strikes broke out in assembly plants, security walls were set afire
and toppled, the sale of guns, and their price, soared in the
elderly areas. The younger Latinos painted the elderly as parasites,
who had enjoyed all the benefits of society when those benefits were
free and now blithely continued to tax the workers to maintain their
style of living. The elderly painted the younger Latinos as
foreigners who were soaking up benefits that should go to the
elderly, as non-Americans who were threatening to dilute American
culture, as crime-ridden, disease-ridden, and lawless. Each side
prepared for a last assault on the other.
At the end of summer 1992, the California legislature took a giant
step toward the realization of this scenario when it savagely cut the
budget for schools and social services. The Democrats capitulated to
the intransigence of Republican Governor Pete Wilson, who repeatedly
emphasized that the underlying issue "is not the current recession, it
is demographics." Wilson, of course, was calculating that aging Anglo
voters (still an electoral majority) were not willing to support the
traditional high standards of California public education now that the
schools were full of Latino and Asian children. The budget vote, thus,
effectively ratified two, unequal tiers of citizenship and
entitlement.
_________________________________________________________________
Prev: The Neighbors are Watching Up: Contents Next: Parallel Universes