COLUMN ONE : REGIONAL REPORT : Turf Wars Escalate in Southland : Residents are increasingly building walls around their lives and lifestyles. The most visible examples are the gated housing tracts sprouting in the area.

The turf near the east end of Mar Vista Street is well protected from strangers.

Access to the road and to a neighborhood of more than 50 homes is blocked by a young man dressed from head to toe in blue. Blue chinos. Blue polo shirt. Blue baseball cap.

“You can’t go in there,” he says, warily eyeing a motorist who had come to a halt outside a set of iron gates and asked to drive in.

Why not?

“Because these people don’t want outsiders.”

The man in blue is neither a Crip nor a cop. He is a private security guard. And the neighborhood he is watching over--Friendly Hills Estates--is a well-to-do, single-family-home development in Whittier, a city founded by Quakers, who are also known as Friends. It is miles and lifestyles removed from the gang-ridden streets of the inner city.

Across Southern California, gated communities are sprouting up like mini-malls. In Orange County, the Palm Springs area and the San Fernando Valley, almost one of every three new housing developments is closed off to the public, according to one survey.

Such communities, social scientists say, are but the most visible example of the figurative and literal walls that many Southland residents are building around their lives and lifestyles.

Southern California may be the immigrant capital of the nation, they say, but it is less a melting pot than a conglomeration of distinct clusters. Be it for physical, fiscal or psychic comfort, territoriality is increasingly the way the game is played.

“We’re living in a society in which people are trying desperately to differentiate themselves from others and differentiate their communities from the urban sprawl that surrounds them,” said UC Irvine social ecology professor Mark Baldassare. “Those that can afford to are buying into gated communities, and those who can’t are creating their own invisible walls and borders from others.”

“We see it increasing, and I’d describe it as sort of turf wars.”

The wars take on many manifestations.

In tightknit beach communities, wave-riders puncture the tires on outsiders’ cars to scare them away from “their” surf.

In inner-city neighborhoods, street gangs--more than 800 in Los Angeles County alone, by law enforcement count--use anything from fists to Uzis to enforce control over their turf.

In middle- and upper-class communities, homeowners associations employ political muscle, along with zoning regulations and lawsuits, to ensure that low-income and senior citizen housing, day-care centers, health facilities and mortuaries stay out of their areas.

While wall-building can impart a sense of security or belonging, it also restricts freedom of movement in a democratic society, critics say. In other parts of the nation, it is rare that entire cities--such as Rolling Hills and Hidden Hills in Los Angeles County--are entirely blocked from public access.

Social scientists say the emphasis on exclusion reinforces distinctions based on culture, ethnicity and lifestyle. When the only time people encounter someone “different” is outside the security of their walls, they say, prejudices fester.

“There’s always somebody to say: ‘You’re lower down and we’re keeping you out,’ ” said Columbia University Prof. Herbert J. Gans. His works include “The Levittowners,” a classic study of life in a post-World War II suburban tract development.

The implications of territoriality are particularly troubling when it comes to solving the regional problems that threaten to choke the rapidly imploding Southland, Baldassare contends.

“Over time, as we’re coming across problems that are more regional in nature--such as air quality, transportation, water and growth management--we’re dealing with a population that’s becoming more locally oriented and more oriented to isolating themselves from the problems of the region as a whole.”

Wall-building is hardly unique to Southern California. It has been part of the human experience since biblical times, when physical barriers protected Jerusalem and Jericho, at least temporarily, from invading armies.

As the United States grew, ethnic enclaves such as Little Italy in New York and Irish-dominated South Boston sprang up to provide emotional security for immigrant groups.

In the Southland, experts say, the use of exclusion as an economic statement is being refined to new heights. The walls are both emotional and concrete.

“We are in a region that has gained 3 million people in the last decade,” Baldassare said. Older cities in the East and Midwest came to terms with their immigrant influxes neighborhood by neighborhood. In Los Angeles, he said, “we’re sitting here watching this process evolve.”

The gated community that separates the rich from the rest was introduced in Los Angeles County more than 50 years ago, when A. E. Hanson developed the horsey hideaway of Rolling Hills on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Eventually, Rolling Hills and Hidden Hills, a second Hanson development in the San Fernando Valley, were incorporated as cities, open only to residents and their guests.

In recent years, the phenomenon has mushroomed.

According to Market Profiles/Residential Trends, a Costa Mesa real estate research consulting firm, 83 of 248 recent building projects in Orange County have included gates and in some cases walls. The percentages are even higher in the San Fernando Valley and Palm Springs area, the firm said.

“It doesn’t cost much,” said Gans. “It’s a cheap status distinction.”

Gates and guards can also be a moneymaker; real estate experts estimate that they add as much as 15% to the value of a property over time.

“When people are looking at similar properties, one within gates and one without, they’d usually choose the one within,” said Ellen Poll, president of the Los Angeles Board of Realtors. “As that begins to be a pattern, you see a greater degree of appreciation.”

Gates are also viewed as a symbol of physical security. Yet, questions abound about just how secure such communities are.

In Los Angeles’ Hancock Park, California Secretary of State March Fong Eu was attacked in her house five years ago by an intruder who apparently scaled a gate that has stood for decades to block access to the prestigious Fremont Place neighborhood.

Walls are also not adequate to prevent financial high jinks.

At the Laguna Hills Leisure World complex, which boasts 250 security guards in addition to walls, swindlers con residents with alarming frequency. Of the 269 reports to the Orange County Adult Protective Services division about abuse of the elderly in the complex since 1986, 25% have involved fraud or other economic crimes.

Senior citizens pioneered their own exclusivity several decades ago in large-scale housing communities such as the Leisure Worlds of Laguna Hills and Seal Beach. In such retirement communities as Leisure World, occupancy is limited to those 55 and older. The newly developed Air Force Village West in Riverside goes one step further. Houses and apartments in the privately run, walled complex are reserved for retired military officers, 60 and older, and their spouses.

Even the state Supreme Court has gotten into the exclusivity act, upholding in 1989 the right of mobile home parks to keep out children and young adults.

In some Southland neighborhoods, barriers are not made of iron or concrete, yet they are nearly as strong.

Urban theorist Mike Davis, in his book “City of Quartz,” contends that Los Angeles is a fortress with invisible walls, and he cites the redevelopment of downtown’s Bunker Hill as a prime example.

Rather than integrating the profusion of corporate skyscrapers with the vibrant, ethnic-oriented Broadway shopping district, urban planners situated the white-collar complex on a hill above it all.

“In other cities,” Davis wrote, “developers might have attempted to articulate the new skyscape and the old, exploiting the latter’s extraordinary inventory of theaters and historic buildings to create a gentrified history . . . as a support to middle-class residential colonization.

“But Los Angeles’ redevelopers viewed property values in the old Broadway core as irreversibly eroded by the area’s very centrality to public transport, and especially by its heavy use by black and Mexican poor.”

Elsewhere in the Southland, neighborhood and business associations frequently rush to the courts or to zoning board meetings to keep the “wrong” people and businesses out.

While seniors may have their exclusionary neighborhoods, they are not always the “right” people in others. A senior citizens’ low-income apartment complex planned for one of the more chic stretches of Ventura Boulevard was the target of one such effort last summer.

The neighborhood was “just not appropriate for seniors,” a Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. representative told the Los Angeles City Council. In a shopping area of trendy businesses, he reasoned, “there’s almost nothing nearby for seniors to spend their money on.”

In 1988, an emotional battle erupted over putting a hospice for AIDS patients in a residential Hollywood neighborhood.

Speaking before the Los Angeles Board of Zoning Appeals, a distraught resident opposed to the hospice cried: “I came here to live. I didn’t come here to accept someone’s death from some other neighborhood.”

Even the dead can be the targets of exclusion.

In Manhattan Beach two years ago, homeowners sought to keep a mortuary out of a commercially zoned property, in part because of claims about the emotional stress on residents who would have to look at the funeral home each day.

In rare instances, exclusivity is welcomed even by those who are kept out.

Take the case of Hollister Ranch, a gated coastal community north of Santa Barbara featuring some of the state’s best surfing spots.

“A lot of (beach) places have been ruined by opening them--public access makes it a zoo,” said Chris Malloy, 19, an employee at Channel Islands Surfboards in Santa Barbara. “Being closed off makes it special to the people willing to put their butts on the line and go for it.”

Too often, however, exclusivity can beget violence.

In neighborhoods such as Lunada Bay on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, surfers regularly intimidate outsiders by throwing rocks at them or vandalizing their vehicles. The legend of these wave-riding vigilantes is so fixed that T-shirts sold in South Bay surf shops include the words “Locals Only” next to Lunada Bay.

The most highly publicized and ugly examples of turf wars are practiced by the Southland’s notorious street gangs.

Each year, hundreds of innocent bystanders--ranging from tots to grandmothers--are caught in the deadly cross-fire as rival gang members shoot at each other over neighborhood turf, drug selling territories or age-old feuds.

“Everyone wants personal space,” said Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Mike Genelin, head of his office’s hard-core gang unit. “It’s a question of how far you can extend it and do it without infringing on everyone else’s space and values.

“Criminal street gangs don’t respect others’ space, and respond in a very aggressive, hostile, criminal way to what they perceive as an infringement of their space. And they seek to expand their space in an aggressive, socially unacceptable manner.”

Yet, except for the relative nonviolence, the territorial instinct exhibited by youths in crime-infested housing projects is not all that different from that displayed by high-powered residents of the Southland’s ritziest neighborhoods, according to some experts.

“A lot of communities don’t need to protect their turf in illegal ways,” said UC Berkeley sociology professor Claude Fischer. “In many suburban communities, the police act that way for residents.

“If someone comes into town driving a car (and) doesn’t look appropriate, they get followed by a police car,” Fischer said. “No one has to say anything or confront anybody. But what police do is they look for people who quote, unquote, ‘Don’t belong.’ ”