I want you to picture something, a specific feeling.
You're driving maybe through a city you don't
know that well, it's loud, traffic's a mess,
you know, the usual chaos. And then you turn
a corner and it all just stops. The noise fades,
the road is suddenly perfect, the lawns are like
surgically manicured, and right there stretching
across the road is a barrier. A boom gate. A
boom gate, maybe a little guard booth with a
guy in a uniform who just kind of stares you
down. It's such an immediate visceral shift,
isn't it? Yeah. You know instantly you've crossed
some kind of invisible line. Exactly. And that
line, that barrier, that's what we are going
to obsess over today. We are doing a deep dive
into the gated community. And I don't just mean,
you know, the Del Bercovista retirement village
from Seinfeld. Right. We are talking about a
truly global phenomenon, one that is, I think,
fundamentally reshaping how we live together,
or maybe more accurately, how we are choosing
to live apart. It really is a fundamental shift
in, well, in the social contract. I mean, for
centuries, the idea was the open city. The streets
were public space. They belonged to everyone.
Yeah. But this, this is the enclave model where
the street itself becomes a private product,
something you buy. And that's really the core
question we need to get at today, isn't it? Is
this product actually worth the price? Is that
gate a sanctuary that keeps all the chaos out?
Or is it more of a fortress that just locks the
anxiety in? Well, looking at the research we've
pulled together, the answer is it's incredibly
complicated. Complicated is putting it mildly,
I think. Yeah. I mean, we're going to see that
in some places, these gates are purely status
symbols. In others, they're straight up survival
mechanisms. And in some really surprising data
sets we're going to get to later, they might
actually be traps. OK, before we go down that
rabbit hole, and I definitely want to talk about
the trap aspect, we need to be precise because
I feel like I use the term gated community for
like any apartment building with a fence. Right.
And that's a common thing. But the source material
is pretty strict here. So what officially counts?
So to be really accurate, we aren't just talking
about a building with a locked front door, a
true gated community. or a walled community,
as it's sometimes called, has to meet a few specific
criteria. First, obviously, it's a residential
area. Second, it has to have strictly controlled
entrances. And that's for everyone. Pedestrians,
bicycles, and especially automobiles. So no cutting
through the neighborhood to avoid that traffic
light. Absolutely not. And that's the third and
probably most critical feature, the closed perimeter.
We're talking about actual walls or fences that
completely encircle the development. And crucially,
the streets inside are almost always private
property. Ah, so they aren't maintained by the
city. No, they're maintained by the residents
through their fees. The homeowners association,
the HOA, owns the asphalt. Which brings us to
the anatomy of these places, because once you
get past that guard, once you're inside the wall,
it's not just a bunch of houses, right? It's
a whole ecosystem. Well, that really depends
on how much you're paying. And this is where
the anatomy of an enclave gets really fascinating.
If you're in a smaller, maybe a lower fee community,
the big amenity might just be a patch of grass
they call a park. And, you know, that feeling
of exclusivity. Just the gate itself is the amenity.
Pretty much. Yeah. But when you scale up, it
becomes civilization in miniature. It's a bubble.
I was looking at the list of amenities and some
of these high end developments and it reads like
a billionaire's fever dream. I mean, swimming
pools and tennis courts. OK, sure. But bowling
alleys, bowling alleys, marinas for your yacht.
Full -service spas. I've seen architectural plans
that include on -site fine dining restaurants
that are exclusively for residents. You can't
even get a reservation unless you live there.
Wow. And the newest trend is co -working spaces.
That makes so much sense. If you're working from
home now, why would you ever need to leave the
fortress? That's the entire sales pitch. Self
-sufficiency. Now, there is a little nuance here.
If you live in a high -rise condominium, a sort
of vertical gated community, you'll almost always
have a cool and a gym. Because you can't build
one in your apartment. Exactly. But in those
huge, sprawling, single -family home communities,
you might not see a communal pool. Because the
assumption is that if you can afford a house
there, you can afford to build your own backyard
oasis. So what are the common amenities there?
It's more about social signaling, the massive
clubhouse, the golf course, the things that say
community but are really about status. Okay,
so we've got the what. But I really want to understand
the why. Why do we build these things? I have
to assume it's not just because we all secretly
love to bowl in private. No, it's much deeper
than that. The economic models, they really break
down into four main categories. And this helps
us understand the motivation behind the wall.
First, you've got lifestyle. Think of those huge
retirement communities in Florida or Arizona.
Or golf resorts. You're not just buying a house.
You're buying a prepackaged bundle of activities
and like -minded neighbors. Right. You're paying
a premium to be around other people who also
want to play bridge at 2 in the afternoon. Exactly.
The second model is prestige. This is where the
gate is basically a velvet rope at a nightclub.
It isn't really about safety. It's about signaling.
It's about saying, I've arrived and you, well,
you have not. The real estate agent isn't selling
a home. They're selling an ego boost with a two
-car garage. Precisely. The third, and this is
the one most people think of, is physical security.
This is the fear -based model. The gate, the
guards, the camera, it's all explicitly there
to control traffic and theoretically stop crime.
We'll put a pin in, theoretically. It's a very
big pin. And finally, you have purpose -designed
communities. These are often built for expatriate
workers. The most famous examples are the oil
industry compounds in the Middle East. They're
designed to create a little home away from home
bubble for foreigners. There's a distinction
in the notes here that really, really caught
my eye. And that's the difference between a gated
community and a closed city. Because honestly,
to me, they sound like the same thing, a place
I can't get into. They sound similar, but legally
and economically, they are worlds apart. A closed
city. Think of those secret nuclear research
towns in the old Soviet Union, or maybe a large
military base. That's public exclusion. Public
exclusion. Yeah, the guard at that gate is a
government employee. They're paid by tax dollars.
The exclusion is a state function. Okay, got
it. A gated community is private exclusion. The
guard is a private security employee, paid by
the residents' fees. The roads are private property.
And this has some really weird real -world consequences,
especially for, like, public infrastructure.
You're talking about the bus stop issue. I am.
It's such a perfect illustration. In a normal
city, a bus route can evolve to serve the population.
But a public bus cannot legally enter a private
gated community without an easement. A formal
legal right -of -way. Which the residents would
never grant. They rarely do. They don't want
the noise. They don't want the fumes. And frankly,
they don't want the type of people who ride the
bus coming into their enclave. So the bus just
stops right outside the main gate. Right across
the street from the guardhouse. And it creates
this incredibly stark visual every morning. You
have the domestic workers, the gardeners, the
nannies, the construction crews. They all get
dropped off on the public road and have to walk
through the checkpoint on foot. While the residents
glide past in their luxury cars. It's a daily
ritual of separation. And it also, funnily enough,
messes with their utility bills, which I found
kind of hilarious. You'd think these affluent
communities would have all this leverage, but
they often get fleeced. How does that work? It's
all about bargaining power and legal status.
Because the community is a private entity, Like
a corporation, they often can't rely on the same
government regulations that protect individual
public residential zones from price hikes. They're
treated like a business. More or less. They lack
the legal quorum or the standing to negotiate
those legally fixed public tariffs. So the utility
company can charge them a higher commercial rate.
So you pay a premium for the house, you pay a
premium for the HOA fees to maintain the gate,
and then you pay a premium for the electricity
to actually run the gate that keeps everyone
else out. It's the hidden cost of admission for
that sweet, sweet seclusion. All right, let's
pack our bags. We have defined the beast. Now
it's time to see where it lives. We are kicking
off our global tour. And I think most people,
myself included, assume this whole story starts
in the suburbs of America. It's the origin story,
for sure. At least for the modern version. Though,
you know, the very earliest gated communities
in the U .S. actually go back to the 1850s. Really?
Yeah. A place called Llewellyn Park in New Jersey
is often cited as the first. But those were like
country estates for the robber barons, the ultra
wealthy industrialists. Not for the average person.
No. The explosion, the real democratization of
the gate. That's a 20th century story. It's a
post -war story. And specifically the Sun Belt
boom. Exactly. Florida, Arizona. Southern California,
Texas, it's really just a function of land availability.
It's incredibly hard to gate off a pre -existing
grid of streets in Manhattan or Boston. The city's
already there. Right. But if you're a developer
and you've just bought a thousand acres of empty
desert or swampland, you can throw a wall around
the whole thing before you even pour the first
foundation. It's built into the design from day
one. There's a massive number here in the source.
By 2009, over 11 million households in the US
were living in gated communities. That is not
a niche market. That's a significant slice of
the population. It's huge. But we need to bust
a myth here. We have this image that these are
all bastions of affluence, all mansions. The
lifestyles of the rich and famous idea. It's
just not true. And this is a really crucial point.
Ed Blakely, who is basically the godfather of
academic research on this topic, he makes a key
distinction. He separates them into prestige
communities and security zones. Okay, what's
the difference? Prestige communities are the
ones you're thinking of. The country club set.
But security zones are often much more modest.
The research shows that gated communities actually
contain a huge mix of socioeconomic classes.
There are plenty of middle class, even lower
middle class gated developments with townhouses
or apartments. So it's not always about wealth
preservation. Sometimes it's just about the appearance
of security for anyone who can scrape together
the monthly HOA fees. That's it. Exactly. It's
a product sold to the middle class as anxieties.
And this, of course, leads us directly into the
really difficult conversation about segregation.
Yeah. The main critique is that these communities
balkanize society. They break us up into these
little homogenous tribes based on income. But
you found a study that challenges that or at
least nuances it a bit. Well, it has a layer
of complexity. It was a 2015 study in the journal
Rubin Studies, and it argued that while gated
communities absolutely entrenched social segregation.
that is, class separation, they didn't necessarily
worsen racial segregation in the U .S. Okay,
my brain just did a little flip. Why? How is
that possible? Sadly, it's because the neighborhoods
were already so segregated to begin with. The
demographic patterns of the surrounding streets
were already racially distinct due to decades
of other policies and practices. So the wall
just physically solidified a boundary that society
had already drawn. That's a perfect way to put
it. The wall didn't create the racial divide.
It just poured concrete over it. That is almost
more depressing. Okay, let's move south. Because
if the U .S. story is about lifestyle and anxiety,
the story in Latin America seems to be about
something much, much more raw. Inequality. That
is the one -word answer. That is the engine driving
the boom down there. When you look at a country
like Mexico, for example, the income gap is just
staggering. You have the global, ultra -rich
living, sometimes literally shoulder -to -shoulder
with extreme grinding poverty. And when the state
can't or won't guarantee your personal safety,
the market steps in and sells it to you. And
we see that on a scale that is hard to comprehend
in a place called Interlomas, which is in the
greater Mexico City area. It's considered the
largest concentration of gated communities in
the entire world. How big are we talking? About
140 square kilometers. Yeah. It's not a neighborhood.
It's a privatized city -state. So they must have
their own everything? They do. The large developments
have their own schools, their own private water
treatment plants, their own power grids, their
own private fire departments and ambulance services.
They have completely and utterly opted out of
the public infrastructure of Mexico. But what
I found so fascinating about the situation in
Mexico is that it's not just the super rich doing
this. You mentioned these legal gray areas. Yeah,
this is the rogue gating phenomenon. It's incredible.
In many working class or middle class neighborhoods,
the residents feel completely abandoned by the
police. So they just they take over the public
street. They just do it themselves. They just
do it. They'll illegally erect steel barriers,
put up chains with a padlock and maybe hire a
local guy to sit on a plastic chair all night
and watch the entrance. And the city government
just lets them. The city government largely tolerates
it. They know the police force is stretched too
thin and often too corrupt to provide real security.
Yeah. So they essentially allow the residents
to privatize and secure their own block, even
if it completely violates urban planning laws.
That feels like a total breakdown of the social
contract. The government is basically saying,
we can't protect you, so good luck, do whatever
you want. It's urbanism as a survival strategy.
And we see a much more formalized version of
this in Brazil with the condominium fechado.
The closed condominium. Right. This really took
off during the military dictatorship in the 1970s.
You had this perfect storm of factors. A massive
rural exodus into the cities was causing overcrowding
and strain on services. Crime rates were spiking.
Crime rates were spiking. And you had a new booning
car culture among the middle and upper classes.
So the wealthy did what the wealthy often do.
They fled. They left the chaotic city centers
for these new, secure, master -planned suburbs.
And the archetype for this is Alphaville, right?
Yes, just outside Sao Paulo. The name itself,
Alphaville, I mean, it sounds like something
out of a dystopian novel. It sounds like a place
where they clone people and everyone wears white
jumpsuits. It's not far off in spirit. It was
marketed as a perfect city, high walls, electrified
fences, private security patrols, absolute control.
It became the template, the ultimate status symbol
for the upper class in Brazil. It says, I have
successfully escaped the chaos of Brazil. And
in Argentina, they have a different name for
them. They call them countries. Yeah, which is
short for country clubs. But again, the social
dynamic there is really intense. Living in a
country is an undeniable sign of wealth. But
for a lot of the rest of society, it's seen as
incredibly snobbish. There's a real stigma attached
to the nouveau riches who are seen as hiding
from the real Argentina behind their walls. There's
a term the sociologists use here that I found
really powerful. They call them violent environments.
Can you explain that? Because usually we think
of the slum as the violent environment and the
gated community as the peaceful one. That's the
paradox. The sociologist isn't talking about
physical violence, you know, gunshots inside
the gate. They're talking about the violence
of the architecture itself. The architecture
is violent. Yes. When you build a massive 10
-foot concrete wall topped with razor wire that
cuts right through the urban fabric, when you
create a hard physical border that implicitly
says you on the outside are a threat, you are
not worthy to enter here. That is a form of social
violence. It enacts a brutal separation between
the elite and the periphery. It's an aggressive
act of urban planning. It is. It's an architectural
declaration of distrust. And we see that playing
out across the region from Nordelta in Argentina,
which is so big it has its own hospitals, to
new developments in Uruguay, where remote work
is now making them more accessible to the middle
class. Before we jump across the ocean, we have
to talk about the great outlier. Canada. Ah,
Canada. Why are you so different? Canada is so
fascinating in this context because hard gating,
the actual locked gates across roads, is extremely
rare, almost nonexistent in major cities. Is
that just a cultural thing? Like it's too impolite?
That's part of it, for sure. But it's also largely
a legal and logistical issue. Municipal planning
laws in places like Toronto and Vancouver often
outright ban locked gates on public access roads
because of emergency vehicle access. Right. Fire
trucks and ambulances need to be able to get
through without waiting for a code. So public
safety regulations actually prevent the security
measure. Instead, what you see in Canada is implicit
gating. Passive -aggressive gating. That is the
perfect term for it. Essentially, yes. Think
of the town of Mount Royal in Montreal. It's
a very affluent area. And it's separated from
the much more working -class park extension neighborhood
by a long decorative fence along a major boulevard.
But it's not locked. No lock. No guard. You can
just walk around it. But it creates a powerful
psychological barrier. It subtly signals this
is a different kind of place. You don't really
belong here without physically stopping you.
Which is almost more effective in a way. It relies
on people internalizing the rule and policing
themselves. It's exclusion with a polite Canadian
accent. OK, let's go to part two of our tour.
We're heading to Asia, Africa and Europe. And
we have to start this leg in Kakistan because
the scale of what's happening there just it just
blew my mind. We have to talk about Bariatown.
If you think the American Sunbelt developments
are big, Bariatown is a behemoth. It's not just
one place. It's a series of massive, privately
owned cities. The developer is the largest private
real estate entity in all of Asia. What are we
talking, asset -wise? The last valuation I saw
put their assets at around $30 billion, with
a B. That's the GDP of a small country. And it
operates like one. It's a state within a state.
Inside Bariatown, they are currently building
the largest cricket stadium in Pakistan. They've
already built the Grand Jamia Mosque, which is
the third largest mosque in the entire world.
But the real luxury there, the real selling point,
it isn't the cricket stadium, is it? It's the
infrastructure. That's the ultimate status symbol.
Pakistan is a country struggles with severe chronic
energy shortages. Load shedding, rolling blackouts
are a part of daily life for millions. Bariya
Town has its own power generation plants, its
own private electrical grid. When the rest of
Lahore, Karachi goes dark, Bariya Town stays
lit. That is such a powerful, almost medieval
image. The castle staying lit while the countryside
is in darkness. It's not just security from crime.
It's immunity from state failure. It is a completely
customized reality. Yeah. And we see a different
but equally powerful kind of customized reality
in China. The tale of two Chinas, basically.
Exactly. On one extreme, you have the ultra luxury
compounds for the new elite. Places like Clifford
Estates in Guangzhou. We're talking 247 guards,
but also facial recognition systems just to get
in your own driveway. Very high tech, very exclusive.
And on the other extreme. On the other end, you
have something much darker. You have the sealed
villages specifically for migrant workers. In
places like Beijing's Daxing District, the government
itself has built walls and gates around entire
neighborhoods that house the rural migrants who
come to the city for work. Wait, so this isn't
rich people walling themselves in. This is the
government actively walling poor people in. That's
precisely what it is. The official party line,
the rationale they give, is crime reduction.
They put out statistics saying it drops crime
rates by 73 percent. But critics have a different
take. Of course. Critics argue it has very little
to do with crime and everything to do with social
control. It's about tracking a transient population,
segregating them from the real citizens, and
making sure they can be monitored and managed.
That is a chilling inversion of the entire concept.
The gate stops being a symbol of freedom from
the outside world and becomes a tool of containment.
It completely blurs the line between a community
and a camp. Let's shift to the Middle East. Saudi
Arabia has a long history of this, largely because
of the oil industry, right? Yes. The Western
compound is a staple of life there for expatriates.
Originally back in the 70s and 80s, it was really
just about providing a cultural bubble, a place
where an American or British oil engineer's family
could live by familiar Western norms. Where they
could have a swimming pool, women could drive
inside the walls, that sort of thing. Exactly.
But then history happened. The late 90s and early
2000s. A wave of targeted terrorist attacks against
Westerners in the kingdom completely changed
the nature of these places. The gates went from
being decorative entryways to full -blown military
fortifications. What did that look like? We're
talking concrete blast walls, multiple checkpoints,
marksmen on the roofs of buildings, and in some
cases, Saudi National Guard armored vehicles
permanently stationed at the entrance. That's
not a community. That's a bunker. It's a fortress
lifestyle. It reflects a very specific, very
high stakes threat model that you just don't
see in most other parts of the world. Now, for
a moment of almost unintentional comedy, let's
go to Indonesia. You flag this as the public
rule paradox. I find this absolutely fascinating.
So in Indonesia, developers build these lavish,
exclusive gated communities. But there is a national
regulation that says any social facilities inside
a residential development. Parks, sports grounds,
community halls, even mosques must eventually
be handed over to the local government for public
use. Wait, wait. So you buy a million dollar
house in an exclusive gated community for the
privacy. But the law says any random person from
the outside has to be allowed in to use your
tennis court. Technically, yes. The gate is there,
but the legal requirement punches these invisible
holes in it. It creates this constant simmering
tension between the residents, who think they
bought a private club, and the local public,
who legally have a right to access the space.
I can only imagine the neighborhood Facebook
group drama that causes, who are these people
in the swimming pool? It totally undermines the
entire value proposition of the gate. It's a
mess. Okay, let's move on to Africa. And South
Africa is probably the most cited, most studied
case of this phenomenon outside the United States.
It is absolutely central to the academic literature
on this. After the end of apartheid in 1994,
the number of security villages, or complexes
as they're called there, just, it's absolutely
mushroomed. Mushroomed implies they popped up
practically overnight. In many places they did.
And the driver was just visceral, palpable fear.
Fear of the country's very high rates of violent
crime, for sure, but also a very specific fear
related to property rights. The fear of squatters.
Exactly. Developers and homeowners are terrified
of land invasions or squatters occupying a property
because the legal eviction process can be incredibly
difficult and can take years. So the wall goes
up first. The wall is a preemptive legal defense.
You wall off the empty land before you even build
the house to establish ownership and make sure
no one else can claim it. And the proximity there
is just so stark. You have these first world
islands of incredible wealth surrounded by a
sea of severe urban poverty. That's what the
urbanist Vanessa Watson calls the African urban
fantasy. And you see it in Nigeria, too, with
these massive estates like Gorimpa. It's an attempt
by developers to build a new Dubai or a new London
inside a city like Lagos or Cairo that is still
struggling with the most basic infrastructure.
And it just widens the gap. It limits class interaction
to almost hero. The only time the rich and the
poor meet is when the poor are serving the rich
inside the walls. Finally, let's swing by Europe.
Why is it the odd one out in all of this? It
really is the great exception. Hard, physical
gating is just very, very rare in most of continental
Europe. There's a much stronger tradition of
urban planning, a sense of the right to the city.
The idea of a private individual blocking off
a public street is culturally and often legally
offensive in Paris or Rome or Berlin. But the
U .K. is dipping a toe in the water. A little
bit. But it's interesting to look at the marketing.
In the U .S., they sell you community. You know,
come join our neighborhood, have a BBQ with the
Joneses. Right. In the U .K., when you see these
small, gated developments, usually for Premier
League footballers or young city bankers, they
don't sell community. They sell asset protection.
It's an investment strategy. It is. The pitch
is, buy this flat, it won't get burgled, so your
resale value will remain high. It's a much colder,
more financialized transaction. And we can't
end our tour without at least mentioning Russia.
The ultimate oligarchy. The source material brings
up OZERO, which was the cooperative formed around
Vladimir Putin's dacha back in the 90s. I feel
like calling Putin's compound a gated community
is a bit like calling the Pentagon an office
building. It's certainly in a league of its own,
but it operates on the exact same core principle.
Total, absolute separation from the laws and
realities that govern everyone else. So we've
toured the entire world. We have seen the high
-tech walls in China, the blast shields in Saudi
Arabia, the passive -aggressive fences in Canada.
Now we have to ask the big question. The one
that actually matters to the millions of people
living in these places. Do the fences even work?
And this is where we get to the paradox of security.
And honestly, this is where the story gets really,
really disturbing. Okay, so the proponents, the
guys selling the condos, they have a very clear
and simple theory. It's called defensible space.
Right, this comes from the architect Oscar Newman.
And the idea is, on its face, very logical. If
you restrict access to a space, you reduce the
number of people in. If you reduce the number
of people, you can recognize strangers instantly.
If you can recognize strangers, they can't commit
crimes without being noticed. It sounds like
pure common sense. Fewer people, less crime.
It does. But then you have the counter -argument
from the legendary urbanist Jane Jacobs. She
argued for the exact opposite. She championed
the idea of eyes on the street. More people is
safer. Precisely. She said that safety doesn't
come from walls and guards. It comes from people.
It comes from the shopkeeper sweeping his stoop,
the grandmother looking out her window, the constant
random flow of pedestrians walking by. They are
the natural surveillance system of a healthy
city. So if you build a wall and you eliminate
all that random pedestrian traffic. You remove
the ice. You create a sterile dead zone. And
if a criminal does manage to get inside, there's
nobody there to see them. And the actual data,
the hard numbers, they seem to support Jane Jacobs,
don't they? Tell me about that study from South
Africa. This is the one that should be on a billboard
outside every new development. It's a study by
Britske, Landman, and Cohn from 2014. They looked
at burglary rates in the city of Twine, which
includes Pretoria. Now remember, the number one
reason people buy into these complexes in South
Africa is to avoid burglary. It's the entire
sales pitch. It's the entire reason for their
existence. The study found that the density of
burglaries was four times higher inside and immediately
around the gated communities compared to the
rest of the city. Four times higher. That is
a catastrophic, unbelievable failure of the product.
It's shocking. It's a finding that is so counterintuitive
that you have to read it twice. So why? How is
that even possible? Well, let's sit like a criminal
for a minute. If you are a professional burglar
and you're going to risk going to prison, where
do you go to work? Do you go to a poor neighborhood
where there's very little to steal and a lot
of people sitting on their porches watching everything?
Or do you go to the place that has explicitly
advertised itself as a warehouse of concentrated
wealth where everyone leaves for work at the
same time and which is surrounded by a nice high
wall to hide you from the street? It's a honeypot.
The wall is a billboard that says good stuff
inside. It's a target rich environment. And once
you breach that perimeter, and there are many
ways to do it, you can bribe a guard, you can
follow a resident's car in, you can just cut
the fence in a poorly lit area. Once you are
inside, the walls and the lack of public traffic
start to work for you. Because nobody from the
outside can see what you're doing. Exactly. You
are hidden in plain sight. Police patrol cars
can't just randomly drive by on their beat. They
need permission to enter private property. you
have effectively created a private hunting ground
for yourself. That is absolutely terrifying.
You pay all this money to lock yourself in with
the very threat you are trying to escape? And
that's not even considering the insider threat.
These communities rely on... Armies of low paid
service workers, guards, gardeners, cleaners,
domestic help. They have intimate knowledge of
the resident schedules, the security gaps, the
blind spots and the camera coverage. And when
you have that level of inequality right there,
a wall is just a minor inconvenience. It's not
a real barrier. It's just a challenge. So not
only does the gate often fail to stop crime,
but it has this wider corrosive social cost.
The researcher Saitha Lowe talks about its negative
effect on net social capital. What does that
mean? It's the idea that when the affluent and
the influential withdraw from the public sphere,
that public sphere begins to collapse from neglect.
If the wealthy don't use the public park, they
don't vote for the taxes to fund the public park.
If their kids are in private schools inside the
walls, they don't care if the public schools
are falling apart. If they have private security,
they don't care if the police force is underfunded
and ineffective. So the city outside the wall
gets worse and more dangerous, which makes the
people inside the wall even more afraid. So they
demand higher walls and more guards. It's a death
spiral. It's a vicious cycle of fear and withdrawal.
And it depletes the social capital, that basic
layer of trust and interconnection between citizens
that actually keeps the city safe and vibrant
in the first place. This anxiety, this idea that
the perfect safe community is actually a trap.
It's not just in the academic data. It is all
over our culture. We are obsessed with the idea
of the rot behind the perfect facade. Pop culture
absolutely loves to tear down the gated community.
It's a favorite trope for exploring hypocrisy
and hidden darkness. Let's start with the zombies.
You have to start with The Walking Dead. A classic
and perfect example. In the comics and later
in the show, Rick Grimes' group finds this perfect
looking gated condominium development. It's got
walls. It's got fences. It should be the safest
place on Earth. But it's not. It turns into an
absolute death trap. First, because it's already
infested. But more philosophically, because the
gate makes you soft. It creates a false sense
of security. You stop paying attention. You stop
being vigilant. And that's when you get bitten.
Then you have the whole genre of social satire.
The Stepford Wives is the ultimate text here.
The idyllic community where everything is perfect
because the women are robots. Or you get the
Truman Show vibe. There's an old Twilight Zone
episode called Evergreen that the source mentioned.
Oh, I don't know that one. It is so creepy. It's
this perfect manicure -gated community. But when
teenagers get rebellious or don't fit the mold,
they're taken to a special factory and turned
into fertilizer for the immaculate green lawns.
That is not subtle. No, but it speaks directly
to that deep fear of conformity. The fear that
in order to live in these perfect places, you
have to kill a part of your soul. You have to
become fertilizer for the system. Even SpongeBob
SquarePants got in on this. Squidville. It's
a brilliant episode. Squidward finally escapes
SpongeBob and Patrick and moves to a gated community
populated only by other squids who are just like
him. It's his paradise. For about a day. He plays
his clarinet, he rides his bike, he enjoys the
peace. But then... The days start to blur together.
The crushing uniformity and boredom drive him
insane. He starts playing with a reef blower
just to feel something, anything different. Even
Squidward needs a little chaos in his life. We
all do. Humans crave variety, spontaneity. The
gated community by its very nature offers uniformity.
And ultimately... That's boring. There's also
a powerful class commentary in film. Parasite
is the one everyone knows now, but the notes
mention a Mexican film, Lozona. Yeah, Lozona
came out years before Parasite, but it hits on
a lot of the same themes. A group of poor kids
from the slum next door break into a wealthy,
gated community. It results in a death, and the
residents decide to handle it themselves, turning
it into a private lynch mob. Wow. It's brutal.
It shows the raw violence that is simmering just
beneath the surface of that polite, exclusionary
lifestyle. And sometimes real life mimics art
in the most bizarre way. I love the Back to the
Future story. The Hilldale paradox. It's perfect.
So for anyone who doesn't remember, in Back to
the Future Part 2, Marty McFly goes to the future,
to 2015, and his future self lives in a subdivision
called Hilldale, which has become this run -down,
dangerous place. Right. But the real -world location
where they filmed those scenes, the development
kind of Arbor Oaks in El Monte, California. was
actually a very nice, open, middle -class neighborhood.
But because of the movie, fans started flocking
there. Tourists, people trying to find the McFly
house. They were constantly driving through.
So what did the real -life residents of Arbor
Oaks do to stop the unwanted traffic? They gated
it. They built a wall on the gate to keep the
fans out. The fictional story about the future
of their neighborhood literally caused them to
build the future. The movie was satirizing. That
is the perfect, beautiful encapsulation of this
entire phenomenon. It's always a reaction. It's
a reaction to a threat, whether it's real or
perceived. It always is. So let's try to bring
this all home. We have traveled from the $30
billion private states of Pakistan to the fearful
security villages of South Africa. We've seen
that the world is in many ways chopping itself
up into these little fortified islands of affluence
and anxiety. And we've seen again and again.
That the promise of the gate, the promise of
safety, of community, of peace is very often
a mirage. It just makes me wonder if the hard
data from places like South Africa shows that
burglary rates might actually be higher. And
if psychologists tell us it can make us more
anxious and fearful. And if urbanists say it
ruins the social fabric of the city. What are
we really buying? I think you've hit the nail
on the head. We're buying the performance of
safety. We're buying a feeling. It's security
theater. We pay for the fancy gate and the guard
in the crisp uniform to wave at us so we can
pretend for the few minutes we're driving down
our private street that this scary, unpredictable
world isn't out there. We're buying the ability
to turn a blind eye. That's it. You're paying
a premium for the luxury of not having to look
at the problems of the wider society. But as
the walls get higher and the gates get stronger,
you have to ask yourself a really fundamental
question. Are we keeping the world out or are
we just locking ourselves in? Something to chew
on the next time you punch that four -digit code
into a keypad. Or wait for that striped arm to
slowly lift. Thanks for joining us on this tour
behind the walls. We will see you on the next
deep dive. Stay curious.