Walled Neighborhoods Spread, but Their Effects on Crime Are Unclear

Concealed from the rush-hour nightmare of Kendall Drive in suburban Miami are entire communities of neat homes and manicured lawns hidden behind walls 8 feet high.

Gates guard the entrances to these tranquil neighborhoods, which have names such as Hunters Green and Coral Lakes. Residents feel safe from outside intruders.

Keeping out the riffraff, they say, also gives a boost to property values.

“It gives you a very good sense of security,” says Albert Reker, who lives in a gated development called Kings Court just south of Miami. “We feel the wall is a deterrent and we’ve had very few problems with crime.”

The same desire to fight crime, reduce traffic and preserve property values is motivating some residents of older neighborhoods to push for street barricades and, in some cases, more expensive gates and guards.

“It is the disintegration of the city,” says Robert McCarter, dean of the University of Florida College of Architecture. “One group protects itself against the other.”

Although there has been little research on whether gated communities deter crime, the walls are growing in popularity.

In California, an estimated 500,000 people live in gated communities, with more on the way, according to the Community Assn. Institute, an industry group in Alexandria, Va.

And in San Antonio, Texas, a city survey earlier this year found that one in three new homes were being built in gated communities.

But some residents and urban planners think the walls make poor neighbors and destroy communities. The walls and gates falsely lead residents to think they can insulate themselves from the crime of burgeoning cities, one expert says.

Rob Felix, who manages a residential community association near still finds problems with them.

Tucson, says that after managing gated and non-gated communities he’s decided the gates do little to deter crime, unless other measures such as neighborhood watches are adopted.

One community Felix managed in Bellingham, Wash., actually found crime decreased when it removed its gates.

“With the gates there, individuals thought there was something there to steal,” Felix says.

A supporter of gated communities, Dee McGee of San Antonio, still finds problems with them.

“They don’t build walls high enough to keep out an enterprising criminal,” McGee says. “One of the problems I have with gates is people leave their keys in their car or leave their garage doors open. And then when crime happens they will blame the community association.”

In addition, gates do nothing to protect residents from crime committed by other residents of the gated community.

Nonetheless, Lennar Corp., Florida’s largest home builder, has found gated communities in high demand in the Sunshine State, says Allan Pekor, a company vice president.

The barricades and walls have grown so popular in Dade County, which includes Miami, that planning officials stopped taking applications from neighborhood groups so they could come up with a policy.

The demand is coming from people fleeing the congestion and crime of the cities for the suburbs.

But many residents of older neighborhoods say they are taking a stand for a way of life that they can’t find outside the city. Maria Velez is one of them.

Her neighborhood in Coral Gables, Fla., may have been suburban 40 years ago, but today it stands amid urban sprawl.

In recent years, many of Velez’s neighbors have opted to fight traffic and crime with street barricades and gates, similar to those common in suburbia. But to Velez and other residents, who formed the anti-barricade Citizens for Open and Safe Streets, the barriers are ruining the community.

“What you’re creating are enclaves--a kind of fiefdom,” Velez says.

Miami Shores, one of Miami’s oldest suburbs and one of the first cities in South Florida to begin barricading public streets, is emblematic of the mixed results.

The city saw a drop in crime in the first few years after it began barricading itself from surrounding areas in 1987. Miami Shores Police Chief Michael Zoovas says he doesn’t know how much of the decrease can be attributed to the barricades.

“We’ve added a citizen patrol,” he says. “We’ve improved law enforcement. We feel that these all have had an impact.”

But since then, crime has rebounded to just below the levels nine years ago, city records show.

Dade County officials have drafted plans to offer alternatives to barricades and gates.

Mohammed Hasan of Dade’s Public Works Department says the county became involved because barricades affect the neighborhoods beyond those where they are built.

Those living on blocks where walls and gates are erected usually see a drop in traffic, but those on adjoining blocks, where the traffic is funneled, see the opposite.

Dade officials plan to make it more difficult for neighborhoods to barricade themselves, offering other options such as traffic circles and replacing pavement with bricks as a way of slowing traffic. The belief is that reducing the number of cut-through drivers often has an impact on crime.

But county officials won’t do much about the suburban developers who build planned communities, where the walls often go up before the first homes are built.

For home buyers such as Albert Reker, the extra $100 to $200 a month for maintenance and security is a small price for peace of mind. Reker moved into Kings Court after Hurricane Andrew destroyed his former home four years ago.

Tanya Pope, who manages Reker’s community association in Kendall, says she understands that gated communities aren’t for everyone. Those residents of older neighborhoods who want to block public streets should move to suburban areas built for that purpose, she says.

“You can’t turn a pig into a horse,” Pope says. “People who select to live in a community are paying for a service. They know what they want.”